Will the new laundry robots actually save work?
In the past, domestic machinery has only shifted labor around (mostly for women)
by Hanne Tidnam
The holy grail of household convenience may be one step closer.
“Did you know that the typical person spends 750 days of their life doing laundry, of which 375 days is folding!” So claims the new Foldimate, the latest development in the quest to solve the age-old problem of folding clothes, set to launch in 2017. And the Laundroid put out a teaser last year as the “world’s first automatic laundry folding machine” (said to have taken ten years — and counting — to develop). Both machines claim to revolutionize the mundane chore by folding our clothes for us.
Who wouldn’t love to have that burden mechanized? The company behind Laundroid says that the average household spends around 18,000 hours in a lifetime on laundry chores, about half of which is spent separating and folding — one of the last household drudgeries to be done entirely by hand. The idea of being liberated from 9,000 hours of laundry folding certainly is alluring — not in the least for the “nearly 17K registrations and more than 700 paid reservations in less than 5 days!” as Foldimate’s Facebook announcement giddily touts.
This kind of promise hearkens back to the entire industry of household appliances, sold from the first with a rhetoric of liberating women from many hours of household labor. Early “washing mills,” made hand-turned drums, which were said to “wash as much linen as six or eight of the ablest washerwomen, without the use of lees [lye], and with only one third of the fire and soap.”
In 1790, Edward Beetham was granted a patent for a portable (!) washing mill. An anonymous acquaintance boasted, “Before [my wife] had your mill, she employed three women full eighteen hours; by means of your mill the whole is performed much better in seven hours, by one servant, and a girl to turn the Mill, aged 11 years.”
The washing machine wouldn’t truly enter domestic space for most households until the 1920s, when the first electric washing machines became available to the average consumer. “Possession of an electric washing machine meant that a ‘decent’ housewife could do her wash at home,’” writes Ruth Cowan in More Work for Mother. “Think of that!” proclaims an ad for Thor Jr. in 1915, one of the first home washing machines: “Only two cents pays for the electricity for an hour to operate this ‘Thor Jr.’ Only two cents to save the wear and tear that a washboard puts on clothes — to save hours and hours of time — to save a woman wash day drudgery.”
By 1929, 39% of all households with electricity had washing machines. By the end of World War II, the washing machine was an essential part of most households. “To thousands, maybe millions of homemakers,” Mary Roche wrote in The New York Times in 1945, “the most striking evidence that peace is really here is the sight of a gleaming, snowy, new washing machine churning away at a hypothetical week’s wash.”
The 1950s saw the apex of consumerism dedicated to these “liberating” appliances. In this 1952 Whirlpool washer ad, a chipper young female student loads the washer: “Boy, here’s real emancipation from old fashioned chores! Just set a dial and walk away. That’s the kind of emancipation any woman can understand.”
And yet, the washing machine may not have been the miraculous time saver it has always claimed to be. Before machines, most families sent laundry out. “By the end of the the 1920s, nearly two-thirds of households in cities of less than 50,000 persons sent laundry to commercial laundries or to laundresses outside the home,” writes Ronald Tobey in Technology as Freedom and “43.4% of all families earning less than $900 a year sent laundry out… By encouraging women to do laundry in the home themselves instead of having servants do it or sending it out to commercial laundries,” Tobey points out, “ownership of the home washer dramatically increased the effort, time, and onerousness of laundry duty.”
With all its boisterous claims, the unicorn of the laundry folding machine is clearly also a long way off from taking that particular chore off our hands. The Laundroid is the size of a small refrigerator, and slooooow, taking about five to 10 minutes to fold a shirt and three to six hours to handle 40 garments. The Foldimate, though smaller, is just as limited, requiring you to clip and attach each individual shirt in a specific way, managing only 10–15 at a time, and unable to handle “large items like linen or small items like underwear or socks.”
The tools may change, and the work required by those tools, but what tends not to change is the net amount of work. “When the twentieth century opened,” Ruth Cowan writes, “the vast majority of American women spent most of their waking hours feeding, clothing, cleaning and sustaining themselves and their families; eighty years later…the vast majority of American women are still spending many of their waking hours feeding, clothing, cleaning and sustaining themselves and their families, albeit with markedly different tools.”
