Did the Washing Machine Really Reduce Housework?

In 2010, Swedish statistician Hans Rosling recalled, in a talk, the day his mother first brought home a washing machine. She sat him down in front of it and said, “Now the machine is going to do the work, so I’m going to the library.” Rosling called that moment the greatest gift the industrial revolution ever gave humanity.^[1] A few years later, economist Ha-Joon Chang reached almost the same conclusion by an entirely different route. In his book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, he argued that “the washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has.”^[2] Both men sang the machine’s praises — yet historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan, in her 1983 book More Work for Mother, pushed back, arguing that the appliance never actually reduced the time women spent on housework.^[3] Why does the same machine provoke such starkly different verdicts?

Hand-washing: a full day’s labor

Before the washing machine, doing the laundry was a job that swallowed an entire day. It started with water. Households without running water had to haul it from a river or well, and a single wash could require tens of liters. Heating that water meant burning wood or coal under a large kettle — a process that alone could take hours.^[4]

To lift grime out of fabric, people used lye — an alkaline solution made by pouring water over wood ash, which broke down oily dirt through much the same chemistry as soap. That chemistry, and the history of soapmaking itself, is covered separately in The History of Soap, so this article stays focused on the labor of laundry itself. Fabric was scrubbed on a washboard or beaten with a paddle, then rinsed, then wrung out by hand. Before spin dryers existed, the standard method was for two people to stand facing each other and twist a wet cloth between them. Fetching water, heating it, scrubbing, rinsing, wringing, and hanging clothes to dry — the whole cycle took a full day before a single garment was dry again. For a woman who did this weekly for an entire large family, laundry effectively claimed one whole day out of every week.^[4]

Rather than trekking to a river, many European towns built communal wash-houses, or lavoirs — stone-built facilities fed by a stream or spring where women gathered to wash clothes together while trading news and company.^[5] But the labor there was no lighter. It meant kneeling for hours with your hands in cold water, scrubbing fabric against stone.

Laundry was also a trade in its own right. Washerwomen who did other people’s laundry for pay were almost always women, and often women from the lower classes. In the United States, after the abolition of slavery, many Black women supported themselves as washerwomen — one of the few paths to an independent income available to them.^[6] Laundries founded by Chinese immigrants likewise became a distinctive industry in the 19th-century American West, shaped by that community’s particular racial position in society.^[7] Look closely at the history of laundry labor, and it reflects, almost point for point, a social structure layered with class, race, and gender.

19th-century hand-cranked machines: plenty of patents, few winners

As the industrial revolution mechanized the factory floor, inventors also turned their attention to laundry at home. In 1851, American inventor James King patented a drum-style washing machine turned by a hand crank: clothes went into a drum, and cranking the handle tumbled them through water to loosen the dirt.^[8] In 1858, Hamilton Smith advanced the design further with a patent for a rotary washing machine.

By the late 19th century, thousands of washing-machine patents had been filed in the United States alone. Ideas ranged from rocking wooden tubs to hand-cranked paddles that churned the water to gear-driven rotating discs. Yet very few of these designs ever became commercially successful. The reason was straightforward: the power source was still the human arm.^[8] These machines may have beaten scrubbing by hand, but turning a heavy wooden tub for hours was still serious physical labor. For a machine to truly take over the work, it needed a power source other than a person — and that source, electricity, would not become widely available for several more decades. The discovery of electricity and its spread into homes through power grids is covered in depth in The History of Electricity.

The electric motor — and a dangerous machine

In 1908, the Hurley Machine Company of Chicago put an electric washing machine called the “Thor” on the market. It’s long been credited to the company’s engineer, Alva J. Fisher, and celebrated as “the first electric washing machine.” But that story has a hole in it: Fisher didn’t actually receive his patent until 1910 — two years after the Thor went on sale — and by then, at least five competing electric washers were already on the market.^[9] Historians now argue it’s more accurate to say several inventors were independently electrifying the washing machine around the same time, rather than crediting Fisher as its sole inventor.^[9]

By today’s standards, early electric washing machines were remarkably dangerous. The belts and gears that carried the motor’s power to the drum were left exposed, so hands, hair, and sleeves getting caught in the machine while loading or unloading clothes were far from rare accidents.^[10] Electric shocks were also common — in the damp environment of a laundry room, poorly insulated wiring turned into an immediate hazard. Over the following decades of the early 20th century, manufacturers gradually addressed the problem by introducing protective covers and automatic shutoff mechanisms.

The arrival of full automation

Even after the electric motor took over turning the drum, a person still had to drain and refill the water and flip switches by hand as the machine moved between washing, rinsing, and spinning. What fundamentally changed this was the world’s first fully automatic washing machine, introduced by Bendix in 1937.^[11] The Bendix machine was a front-loading drum with a round door; once a user set the timer and temperature dial, it handled filling, washing, rinsing, and spinning from start to finish without any further intervention. Contemporary advertising billed it as “thrilling news for every woman,” promising “new leisure, freedom from drudgery.”^[11] Within a few years of its launch, Bendix sold over 330,000 units — a genuine commercial success.

Spinning also changed fundamentally. Instead of wringing clothes by hand or feeding them through a pair of rollers, Bendix introduced spin-drying: spinning the drum at high speed and using centrifugal force to force the water out. That method became the standard for every automatic washing machine that followed.

One machine wasn’t enough: the infrastructure it needed

Inventing the washing machine didn’t mean it showed up in every home overnight. For it to actually work, three things had to come together first: household electric wiring, a reliable water supply, and enough income to buy one.

Even in the United States, electricity didn’t reach most rural areas beyond the cities until after the 1930s, and most of Europe didn’t get stable household electricity and running water until after World War II. In other words, the washing machine was never an invention that transformed home life on its own — it only became meaningful once it was backed by the vast infrastructure of power grids and water and sewage systems. Because of this, adoption varied enormously by country and by class. While middle-class urban households already owned automatic washing machines by the 1950s, rural areas without electricity were still washing everything by hand.

Why the US chose top-loading and Europe chose front-loading

Anyone shopping for a washing machine today runs into a regional divide. American machines are usually top-loading agitator models; European machines are almost always front-loading drums. That difference isn’t a matter of design taste — it’s the product of each region’s housing and plumbing conditions.

In much of Europe, and especially Britain, many homes supplied hot water through low-pressure plumbing. A top-loading machine took a long time just to fill with water, while a front-loading drum could carry its own internal heater, drawing in cold water and heating it to the desired temperature itself.^[12] On top of that, many European homes installed their washing machine in a narrow gap under the kitchen counter — a space a top-loading machine, which needs to open upward, simply couldn’t fit into.^[12] The United States and Australia, by contrast, commonly had houses with dedicated laundry rooms and relatively strong hot-water pressure, which let top-loaders take hold without difficulty. Front-loaders are far more water-efficient, but the trade-off runs the other way on time: European wash cycles typically run over an hour longer, a consequence of the practice of heating water to nearly 90 degrees Celsius (about 194°F).^[12] The same invention, in other words, split into entirely different forms depending on the housing and plumbing it had to fit into.

Did it really reduce labor? Cowan versus Chang

Now, back to the question we started with. Did the washing machine really reduce housework?

Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s answer leans toward no. Tracking American women’s housework hours in her 1983 book, she found that even by the mid-20th century, once household appliances had become commonplace, women were spending roughly as much time on housework as they had before industrialization.^[3] Cowan points to two reasons. First, before the washing machine, a good deal of the laundry burden had been shared with male family members or hired washerwomen — someone other than the woman of the house herself. Once the machine arrived, that labor became concentrated onto one person: the housewife.^[3] Second, as laundry got easier, standards of cleanliness rose to match. Where people once washed clothes once a week, changing into a fresh outfit every single day became the norm. Laundry simply happened more often — and the time that was saved got poured right back into doing more of it. That’s the core of Cowan’s argument.

Ha-Joon Chang sees it differently. He argues that even if washing machines and other household appliances didn’t fully liberate women from domestic labor, they fundamentally reduced its physical intensity. Freed from the heavy toil of hauling, boiling, and wringing water, women could redirect that time and energy toward participating in the labor market — a shift he credits with helping drive the sharp rise in women’s labor force participation in the latter half of the 20th century.^[2] By his reckoning, the ripple effects of household appliances reshaped the structure of the global economy even more profoundly than the information-and-communications revolution of the internet.

The two arguments aren’t as opposed as they first appear. Cowan measured time; Chang measured labor intensity and labor-market participation. The total number of hours spent on laundry may not have dropped much — but the nature of that labor clearly changed, from a day spent hauling water and scrubbing by hand to a matter of pressing a switch and going off to do something else while waiting. Depending on how you define “less labor,” the very same machine ends up earning opposite verdicts.

This debate also has a familiar American counterpart: the coin laundromat. Before a washing machine became a standard fixture in the ordinary apartment, self-service laundries — the first opened as a “washateria” in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1934 — let renters and lower-income households wash their clothes without ever owning a machine of their own.^[13] The model spread quickly through the US, UK, and Australia over the following decades, and it exposes the same fault line Cowan and Chang argue over: cheaper access to a washing machine didn’t automatically mean less work, since it still meant hauling a full laundry bag across town, waiting around on-site, and paying by the load. Coin laundromats remain a familiar sight on city streets from London to Sydney to New York today — a reminder that this machine’s history was never confined to what happened inside a private home.

What the history of the washing machine ultimately leaves us with is this question: what does it actually mean for technology to eliminate labor? Is it about less time spent? Or is it about the body being spared? The washing machine never gave a complete answer to either — but for more than a century now, it has been the machine that kept the question alive.