Thread by @bopinion

You’ve probably never thought of your washing machine as a feminist icon. Nor does the sewing machine scream emancipation.

But, when viewed through the lens of women’s experiences, these machines become the “Engines of Liberation” bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

Inventions often derided as job-killers in the history books have given women:

⏰More control over their time
👩🏼‍🔬More freedom to choose their occupations
💵Earning power bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

To digest cereal grains like wheat, humans first have to remove their husks and turn them into flour. That means many hours of pounding and grinding.

The water-powered grist mill changed that bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

Grist mills spread through Europe in the Middle Ages, freeing up women’s time for other tasks, like spinning.

That enabled the wool-based trade that set off a commercial revolution, leading to new prosperous centers like London, and Florence bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

Just as time-consuming as grinding grain, spinning remained the bottleneck in textile production.

Before the spinning mill was invented, supplying a single weaver took at least 20 spinners bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

In a workforce of 4 million Britons, a million women were likely to be working as spinners by the mid-18th century.

Their wages were pitiful, for the simple reason that it took so many hours to produce a useful amount of yarn bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

The spinning machines that set off the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s changed that calculus.

Suddenly yarn that required days to spin could be had in hours, or even minutes. Women were able to get paid work in the mills bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

Invented in the 1840s, the steam-powered rotary printing press:

⏩Increased printing speeds tenfold
📉Lowered the cost of high-volume printing
🗞Vastly expanded the market for books, magazines and newspapers — and the writers to fill them bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

Fiction writers like the Brontë sisters and Louisa May Alcott, as well as many now-forgotten popular authors, could now make an independent living.

With “Jane Eyre,” Charlotte Brontë earned 25 times her salary in the hated job of governess bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

Working with a hand needle, a good seamstress took about 14 hours to make a shirt.

With a sewing machine, she could do the same job in an hour bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

It was an early example of “the robots are taking our jobs.”

In an 1888 essay titled “Labor-Saving Machines as an Evil,” Ohio journalist Samuel Rockwell Reed calculated that a single machine “deprives 25 children and five widows of bread” bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

The claim was actually satirical. Instead of impoverishing women, the sewing machine made seamstresses more productive, leading to a big ready-to-wear industry.

It offered generations of mostly female workers across the world the first step out of poverty bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

Before the washing machine’s arrival, laundry was such a laborious task that even poorly paid shop girls hired someone else to do it.

A 38-pound load of laundry took four hours, with another four or five for ironing bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

Using electrical appliances, the washing took just 41 minutes and the ironing an hour and 45 minutes.

The number of steps in the washing process was cut almost 90% bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

A 19th-century laundress would have envied her 1940s counterpart, but even by the mid-20th century, washing, drying and ironing still took plenty of time and attention.

The invention of nylon in 1934, and eventually other synthetic fibers, changed that bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

Synthetic fibers fostered a fundamental fashion shift that continues to today’s yoga pants. More than looks, these fibers created:

➡️Curtains that could be drip dried
➡️Uniforms that never need ironing
➡️Sweaters that could be washed without shrinking bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

When large numbers of American women entered the workforce in the 1970s, they did so wearing easy-care polyester pantsuits.

Today’s women — and men — are free to use their time in more productive and fulfilling ways than on laundry bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W

Looking back on the endless labors of our foremothers reminds us that it’s easy to create jobs by making work harder and slower.

But you create wealth — and freedom — by making it faster and easier bloom.bg/3r0Ua1W