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The electric washing machine may be the single most liberating household technology ever invented. Before it arrived, millions of people—mostly women—spent enormous portions of their lives bent over washtubs and washboards. Join Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore how laundry technology transformed work, family life, public health, and modern society itself.
Except for fire and stone tools, clothing may be our species’ oldest technology—it was invented 170,000 years ago or more. The first humans to don clothing soon made a discovery: worn too often, their garments would become infested with lice. Soon followed another invention: laundry.
That laundry was presumably done by banging animal skins on rocks, more or less as people do with rugs today. Soap did not become part of the process for tens of thousands of years. Indeed, the first recipe for soap in the historical record dates only to ancient Babylonia, where big commercial laundries served all the main cities.
Over the centuries, clothing became the province of an extraordinary industry of toil—one that was blown apart in 1907, when the first electric washing machine appeared. In a few decades, it upended the domestic life of half the human species. A way of life that had endured for centuries was so thoroughly and rapidly ended that most of us today have no idea it existed.
Forget the flying car. We’re going to the laundromat!
Subjects discussed include:
- Charles’s Mumbai Laundry Epiphany
- Vermin Evolution
- No More Open Pores!
- Undercover Laundry Reporter Elizabeth Banks
- Not-so-trad Tradwives
- Rural Electrification
- 1900 U.S. Census Categories
- Charles’s Attempt to Use a Washboard
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References, further reading, and credits:
Lice, human hairlessness, and the origin of clothing: Ian Gilligan, Climate, Clothing, and Agriculture in Prehistory, 2018. (Gilligan bases his fine account on, among other things, these two scholarly articles.)
Prize-winning student essay on Lenin’s battle against vermin: Prisca Allio, The Louse Manifesto, 2018.
Soap: Ferris Jabr, Why Soap Works, Yale School of Medicine, 2020.
Research article on Babylonian laundry: Nathan, Wasserman. Treating Garments in the Old Babylonian Period: “At the Cleaners” in a Comparative View, Iraq, 2013.
Elizabeth Banks’ laundry career: Elizabeth L. Banks, Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in London, 1894, pp 153-208.
Correction: In discussing journalists like Banks, Virginia says 18th and early 19th century when she means 19th and early 20th century.
Famous economics paper evaluating the washing machine as liberatory technology: Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri, and Mehmet Yorukoglu, Engines of Liberation, The Review of Economic Studies, 2005.
Cleaning in general: Virginia Smith, Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity, 2007.
Virginia’s history of textiles: Virginia Postrel, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, 2020.