The Machine That Really Saved Monday

In 1958, an advertisement for a washing machine promised the buyer something very simple: a free afternoon, every week. Over the next twenty years the machines arrived in almost every home. The free afternoon never really did.

The strange part is that the machines work. A fridge keeps food cool for a week. An oven with a timer cooks while nobody watches it. A vacuum cleaner cleans a room in the time it takes a kettle to boil. Each one does its job faster than a pair of hands can. Yet study after study through the last century found the same result: the hours spent on housework fell far less than anyone had expected, and in many homes they hardly fell at all.

The reason is that the machines changed what counted as clean. When washing a shirt meant an hour of boiling water, a shirt was worn for a week. When it meant ten minutes of attention, it was worn for a day. Carpets were beaten twice a year; then the vacuum cleaner came, and they were cleaned every Saturday. A freezer and a fridge meant fresh food could be kept, so a family began to expect a cooked meal in the evening rather than yesterday's cold plate. Every machine quietly raised the standard it had been bought to meet. That is why the dishwasher and the microwave save minutes and give back none of them.

One machine is different, and it is worth being clear about which. Before the washing machine, Monday was wash day, and wash day was the whole day: carrying water, heating it, lifting heavy wet cloth out of a tub, turning it, drying it, and then hours standing over it with a hot iron. It was the hardest physical work in the house, it fell on the same person every week, and it ate one day in seven of an entire generation's life.

So the useful question about any new machine is not whether it is faster. It is whether it removes the worst job in the house, or only the most frequent one. A dishwasher takes away twenty minutes you would have quite liked to have. The washing machine took away Monday. The advertisement was wrong about the afternoon; it was right about the day.