Women's Liberation: The Lost Years

Women, as we know, have gained enormous power since the dark days before the 70's when they were mere chattel in men's homes. But the funny thing is that so many of the cool inventions of the 20th century had the intended and practical effect of liberating women from their indentured servitude in their pre-liberation days. Perhaps most important was the washing machine, which liberated women from the most seriously taxing of household chores. In succession, women's housework drudgery was also greatly relieved by the vacuum cleaner, the clothes dryer and the dishwasher.

So by the end of the 1960's, these wondrous inventions were pretty much in place throughout America (as well as a few others of note, such as gas/electric ranges and electric mixers). So then what happened? It was decided by someone that now that women had all this spare time on their hands, it was now pointless to pay their husbands so much money to work when we could put their wives to work as well...or something. But whoever decided what, the era of liberating inventions to automate housework was over. Since then, it seems the useful appliances that have become popular have been to the benefit of men - like hand-held leaf blowers, snow blowers and riding mowers so men could dedicate more of their weekends watching ubiquitous sports programming on their flat-screens - another male-targeted invention.

We still read about how, despite working out of the home as many hours and their husbands, wives still bear the brunt of housework and rather resent it. So why has industry stopped listening? Why have there been no revolutionary appliances in the last 40 years? (I refuse to count the food processor (used by what - 1 in 20 women) and drip-coffee maker.)

Sure, there have been marginal improvements, but the chore of washing clothes hasn't changed since 1969: you take a pile of dirty clothes, bring them to the washroom; separate as necessary; place a load in the washer; measure out and add the detergent; turn the dial (or press the button - whoopee) to the right setting and turn on the machine. Return when done, load into the dryer, load a fresh load into the washer and fold the dried clothes out of the dryer; repeat until the separate loads are done.

There are a number of repetitive manual steps in there that could be easily automated with today's technology. Separating fabrics by color should be a trivial engineering challenge; by fabric, a little tougher but certainly doable, and surely could be performed by an automated process with no greater error rate than the manual process entails.

The robotic vacuum cleaners are cool, but surely we can have better robotics than that - ones with probes and such to get into nooks and crannies. A robot that could actually learn its way around the house with some coaching seems well within our engineering capabilities. But industry would actually have to believe that the commercial value in relieving women of housework is greater than teenage boys' demands for ever more challenging video games.

But of course many women have solved the problem with a much more direct approach: cleaning ladies. But this is not progress - the Romans did this 2,000 years ago. This is a step backward. Society does not progress by gathering more servants, it progresses by eliminating more work. But we of course are not progressing - our economy grows by less-and-less increments each year. Had we continued our technological growth at the rate of the first half of the twentieth century, we'd have many more wondrous appliances in our homes. But our slow growth would no doubt be even worse if not for the miracle of Moore's Law, which has given us some truly awesome gains in entertainment and communications, but not much else to brag about.