The washing machine liberated women. That was the thesis of an article from the Vatican's local

newspaper some years back. And they'd gotten a bit of hot water for it. They'd gotten a bit of

hot, soapy, rapidly spinning water, mainly because the Vatican had a bit of an agenda behind their

thesis, right? Obviously, coming from a strict

Christian angle, it came off as a lame counter-argument against contraceptives. I won't detail

how you can use your imagination. I won't rehash it. It's not interesting. But I bring it up

because they were right. They overstated their thesis, yeah, and they shouldn't have

used it as a counter-controceptive argument, of course, but the basic idea, the tagline that

washing machines and other chore-assisting appliances had a liberating effect is absolutely

100% true. There's good research on it.

There's a couple papers cited in the bibliography.

I'll summarize them here.

Before the washing machine, in the year 1900,

the average American woman spent 58 hours every week doing chores.

I'll say that again, for those of you who need to reprocess that,

58 hours of chores a week. That's not eight hours a day, five days a week, like most of you put in at your paid jobs. That's eight hours a day every single day of your life and you got to squeeze in an extra

couple hours a week when you can. And your salary for that labor is zero dollars an hour. By 1975,

after most household streamlining machines were in circulation, that number, hours of chores per week, had plummeted to 18.

More recent surveys have shown most women do about 15 hours of chores a week.

That's still a lot more than most guys.

I'm not saying it's fair.

It's not.

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