This Day in Labor History: August 9, 1910. The electric washing machine is invented. A day late, but who cares, let's use this as a moment to talk about the history of unpaid domestic labor in the home, one of the most underrated issues in American labor history. 
I am going to base all of this on Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s 1983 book More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technologies from the Open Hearth to the Microwave.
Housework is the first form of labor humans are exposed to and through most of western history, it is the sector of work to which women have been delegated. The key transformation was the arrival of the Industrial Revolution to the home in the late 19th century.
Women always did productive labor, often unpaid, but in the earlier period that included canning, sewing, and other tasks that might bring income into the household.
Women continued to produce domestic tasks in an industrialized household, but now the consumption of that work stayed solely within the home. The labor became entirely reproductive.
Despite the bold promises of industrial technology entering the household, the ultimate effects were complex. New technologies were sold as freeing women from generations of the boring drudgery that was household labor.
There was a long history of trying to do this—many of the 19th century transcendental communities experimented in communal household labor precisely to free women to do more interesting things. When these went nowhere, the middle class hired people to do it for them.
Technology again promised middle-class women a life of leisure. But while new tools may have made work easier, but it also meant that women had to do that work more often.
The vacuum cleaner meant women cleaned their floors far more often than their mothers. The washing machine made cleaning clothes far easier. It also raised standards of cleanliness, meaning that women had to do laundry more often.
Multiply this task by all the other tasks a woman now had to do to meet newly elevated middle-class standards of housework and you are talking a lot of work.
The washing machine itself came about as part of a larger process transforming the American home: electricity.
In 1907, only 8% of American homes were wired for electricity, a number that jumped to almost 35% by 1920. With electricity, companies began developing a wide array of new appliances to sell to the modernized home.
Electric fans, sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines flooded the market. Soon electric stoves and refrigerators would follow. Taken together, these would revolutionize household labor.
The work of women had increasingly separated from that of men in the 19th century (although this was often more true in aspiration than reality for the working class) with the rise of the doctrine of separate spheres and the creation of the modern factory.
These appliances let to a decline in hired domestic labor. Middle-class women often hired a laundress to do work. The electric machine meant the expense of hired help was not necessary. In 1900, there 1 was servant for every 15 households. By 1950, that dropped to 1 for every 42.
But it also meant that the middle-class woman actually did the laundry herself now, and usually several times a week. The woman of the household did just as much work as before, but now without the help.
Add to this the movement of children away from workto schools and the rise of a youth culture, and with each passing year, women became more like the sole worker in a factory of never-ending meals, laundry, diaper-changes, vacuuming, floor washing, window washing, dusting, etc.
Technologies did not inevitably lead us down this road. They could have eliminated much reproductive labor through these technologies, a road not taken. Commercial laundries could have taken this work out of the home entirely. Instead, everyone owned a washer.
The creation of the modern automatic machine in the late 1930s was key. While many at the time and today looked at washing machines as a good investment because of the cost of doing laundry, that only makes sense if you calculate women’s time as worth nothing.
Given the significant labor of doing laundry yourself, especially if you have a family, valuing your time even at the minimum wage may make commercial laundries a sensible option. Yet most people either have their own laundry machines or do it themselves at laundromats.
Now, for some women, the rise of an electric washing machine was truly emancipatory. That was for rural women, for whom simply getting electricity meant no more water hauling. That world of laundry was incredibly brutal and physical labor. So it all depends on context.
In any case, we really can't give a complete labor history if we don't talk about unpaid women's work in the home. Unfortunately, labor activists and labor scholars have almost exclusively focused on paid work out of the home, which leaves organizing gaps.
So let's all spend more time thinking about and organizing around labor within the family!
Back tomorrow to discuss the Watertown Arsenal strike of 1911, when Frederick Winslow Taylor's stopwatches were applied to workers, which they very much did not tolerate.
