It's incidental (for me) that this article should be posted today. Only two days ago, in a philosophy class on environmental ethics, I was told by the professor that my answer to a discussion prompt on "ecofeminism," which cited the development of the washing machine as facilitating the women's rights movement, would be disagreed with by feminists and that it reflected my worldview that it was women's "essential role in life to do laundry." The counterargument was that World War 2 had been responsible for women entering the workforce and not household electrical appliances. My rebuttal that this may not explain global demographic data from developing countries has thus far gone unanswered.
Apologies for the personal anecdote, but needless to say I'm still a bit offended at having been called a bigot. Particularly when Ana Swanson, a "reporter for Wonkblog specializing in business, economics, data visualization and China" would probably not have been similarly told that by writing this article she believes housework is women's essential role in life. It seems some would require extensive quantitative evidence for this claim to avoid stepping on any toes, though, and I wonder if Hans Rosling, Ha-Joon Chang, Max Roser and the others making it have quantified to what extent appliances were an influence compared to other factors.
> worldview that it was women's "essential role in life to do laundry.
Of course that view would be wrong. But that doesn't negate the fact that laundray was usually done by women, was an important job to do, and was hugely time consuming. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with spending your life doing house work, it is just bad that women were denied other oppurunities.
Modern tech means that you can live alone and have a clean house, clean clothes, and regular meals without needing a servant.
The fact that you are calling common house appliances "modern tech" made me smile, but essentially you are right, anything that came about in the last 100 years can be called modern.
As for whether it caused more women to work, I can imagine that it really did facilitate the transition. It would take much longer if women had to negotiate housework with their husbands first. Instead, it happened the other way around, women came out to work first, while doing household chores at the same time, and in time men transitioned to helpful spouses later.
>and in time men transitioned to helpful spouses later.
And that was only possible because of the development of the 40 hour work week. Most men weren't home enough to be very helpful around the house until then.
Not sure about that. I would say it became more common for men to help with the housework from the 70's onward, and we had 40 hour weeks way before that. Do you think that the men who worked for Ford in the 1920s and 1930s, started helping with the housework after they implemented 40 hour work week? No, it think it's more likely that women had to prove themselves capable money earners first.
No, I'm not saying that the 40 hour work week was sufficient to bring out that change, just necessary. I'm just pointing out that a confluence of many things led to the result of women working/not dong all the housework, not just 1.
This highlights the importance of using data when arguing, even in seemingly "soft" social sciences.
On every day of the 20th century, a definite number of people washed clothes, and the gender of each person was (for the most part) definitely determinable. Likewise for people doing work for a paycheck.
Now, it might be difficult (or impossible) to get that exact data. So you'll have to make do with what you can get. But this is what occupies quite a lot of the time of professional historians and social scientists: getting the best data they can. In some cases it might mean personally combing through the paper archives in dozens of museums, corporate archives, or libraries. Or following chains of relationships, like a detective, to find the one retiree who might have held on to some of those records that everyone thought got tossed out 40 years ago.
I offer this not to imply that you, as an undergrad, should do all these things. My point is to illustrate the hard work and tenacity that's necessary to actually know things.
Quite often here on HN (in fact, even in this thread), I see sentiments to the effect of "well anyone can just make up what they want" when it comes to these sorts of gender/society issues. While it's true that anyone can hold an opinion, it's also true that there are often ways to better inform our own opinions.
Personally I'm starting to believe in a limited form of something I heard called 'technological determinism' - that it's the technology that shapes society. Your washing machine would be an example. Another would be seeing civil rights movement as enabled by the printing press.
Have you read Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media? Written in the 60s, explaining world phenomena from the perspective of "media" (which he uses to mean something very similar to "technology" - roads and the printing press both qualify) and accurately predicts the effect of the internet on society. Dense, but very worth reading if you're interested in macro societal change.
Civilization is formed by technology that provides great access to energy.
As James Burk described in the final episode of Connections:
This was the first great trigger of change: the plow. It appeared
maybe 7000 years ago, and when it did it gave people the chance to
grow enough grain not just to survive, but to provide a surplus to
support craftsmen. That triggered the beginnings of civilization.
With enough food, the population expanded every year. Small viliges
sprang up, and they too grew larger with the population. In the
spreading fields around the villages, the technique grew of irrigating
the land from the nearby river. As the grain supply increased, it had
to be stored. The potter's wheel solved that problem. Who it belong t
demanded the development of writing, and building these irrigation
ditches taught people the skills of engineering and mathematics, that
gave them in turn architecture.
The need to predict floods for irrigation brought realization that
the flood was annual. That gave them a calendar their government could
use to enforce law through a police force and an army who needed
weapon makers to protect the wealth of the country from invasion.
A country that was now an empire... all because of the plow.
The various aristocracies of the past built their standard of living by exploiting the work of others, usually shaped by the available technology. To build a pyramid required a very large number of slaves. To wage war against the neighboring feudal lord required a large number of serfs providing food and practicing the longbow.
In the west, we like to think that we grew out of feudalism into a modern representative democracy for various reasons usually relating to ideology or politics. In reality, we prospered because we quickly took advantage of the energy provided by technology and salve labor. Learning how to take advantage of the greater energy density of coal and oil was much more efficient at providing energy than slave labor.
Every time society learns a better way to exploit energy, society quickly reshapes itself to take advantage of the energy. Modern society now depends on a large amount of energy, and we had better learn some way of sustaining those levels or we will learn the hard way that this ability of society to reshape itself works both ways. Without modern levels of energy that technology provides us, we will lose our freedom to specialize on topics not directly linked to survival.
> To build a pyramid required a very large number of slaves.
Minor nitpick - I think this was finally confirmed by historians that pyramids weren't built by slaves, but by paid contractors. But then again, the lives of slaves in the past were closer to the lives of employees today; American slavery was a historical abberation. Also I personally believe that if you have to work to earn for bread and home, you are a slave. What will break this slavery is - you've guessed it - more cheap energy!
I agree with you and with Burk here; this is the pattern I'm increasingly begin to notice. Social issues are indeed secondary to technological and are enabled by them. This also means that energy issues are the most important topic the public refuses to talk about - most of the things that usually take up the slots on TV will sort themselves out. I hear people in my country discussing the issues of immigration, in between bickering about schooling and taxes, and I can't stop thinking that we could do so much more for those problems if we just shut up for a moment about them and finally ACKed the construction of that goddamned nuclear power plant.
That is not technological determinism. Technological determinism would suggest that this happens WITHOUT OUR SOCIAL WORLDS BEING ABLE TO INTERVENE. I don't subscribe to this.
I'm not really sure there's a lot of evidence that either you or your professor are correct.
I don't believe there's much evidence that there was a permanent jump in the female labour force due to WWII.
Equally, I'm not sure that there is much correlation between workforce increase and the ownership of washing machines (and yes, I know that correlation != causation but not much correlation != causation either).
The hypothesis I've seen that seems to follow the evidence is for the number of women attending higher education but, my guess, is that there were a lot of competing factors rather than one outlier.
And no, it doesn't make you a bigot for proposing that any more than it makes your prof a warmonger for proposing that WWII was a good thing for women.
Welcome to modern universities, where anything that could possibly be misconstrued is and title 9 inquisitions are a thing. Even mentioning a gender could trigger someone, so you best be careful!
That's not true, we hear about the misconstruals but when someone listens charitably that never makes the news. This otherwise innocuous property of news reporting has led you to believe that a rare thing is common.
Give me a break. Insane people are in positions of tented authority at universities and colleges and are allowed to run amok.
In a supposedly open discussion about a book that we were reading (the autobiography of a former gang member and rapist gone good) I said something that perturbed the professor.
That resulted in a big tirade of screaming at me, where I was assigned responsibility for the slaughter of her family in a war and rape of her ancestor by the US Cavalry. I responded that my ancestors were peasants on the other side of the world and had nothing to do with treatment of the Plains Indians, and I was kicked out of the class and given an F.
Ultimately it was overturned by an appeals process, but similar incidents happened in mandatory classes like that in my school, and the administration was unwilling to take any action behind the individual cases.
The fact that the misconstruals are institutionally backed means they are not one-off events. Title 9 is an entire punishment system designed around eliminating due process and fairness to punish anyone who offends someone. It's a systematic disease.
Your professor certainly has a good point. As a normative principle, there is something not quite right about the idea that the women's rights movement had to wait for technology to reduce the burden of the role they were unfairly relegated to in the first place.
>As a normative principle, there is something not quite right about the idea that the women's rights movement had to wait for technology to reduce the burden of the role they were unfairly relegated to in the first place.
There is a major difference between explaining what happened and saying that is what should have happened.
Slavery should not have ever happened, but any discussion of why slavery has become far less popular among people should not be shot down by someone yelling "But slavery shouldn't have happened to begin with!"
Sure, but your explanation for what happened might be predicated on an assumption about "how things should be."
To make a more extreme version of OP's point: "the women's rights movement couldn't happen until household technology evolved to reduce the burden of housework." That's only true if you assume that women can't reduce the burden of housework simply by refusing to do it.
You also can't say it had to wait for technology because it is possible that aliens could've come along in the early 1800s and enlightened us all. Granted, that seems unreasonable, but is it that much more unreasonable that a nation (if not world) wide same time rejection of a common social norm back when most people were not interconnected?
If you post your complete submission and their response I would be happy to help you decide whether you were being a bigot, but without that it's really hard to tell if you were mis-labeled, or if you just didn't understand the point they were making.
> to say I'm still a bit offended at having been called a bigot.
Why? Why would you be offended by this, and what will it take for you to learn to not be offended by it? Do you understand this part of your own psychology?
Your suggestion does not really do much towards furthering mutual understanding between people of differing opinions. Instead, it would appear that throwing that sort of invective into the mix would serve only to reinforce each group's previously held beliefs. The answer isn't always to "talk back and hit harder."
To use a cheesy analogy: what you're suggesting sounds a lot like a bass player and a drummer playing as loud as they can, both with noise cancelling headphones on -- playing and talking past one another. Music, and discussions, work better when two players or participants hear, understand and work with one another. Brute force isn't the way to do that.
Apologies for the personal anecdote, but needless to say I'm still a bit offended at having been called a bigot. Particularly when Ana Swanson, a "reporter for Wonkblog specializing in business, economics, data visualization and China" would probably not have been similarly told that by writing this article she believes housework is women's essential role in life. It seems some would require extensive quantitative evidence for this claim to avoid stepping on any toes, though, and I wonder if Hans Rosling, Ha-Joon Chang, Max Roser and the others making it have quantified to what extent appliances were an influence compared to other factors.