Washing machines: threat or menace?

[james_davis_nicoll]

[It] began to occur to me that the tech I was using was incredibly gendered. In the "male" sphere, of professional operations, offices, corporations, pop culture, businesses, the available technology was extremely high-level, better than anywhere I'd yet lived. In the "female" sphere, the home, domestic duties, daily chores, cleaning, heating, anything inside the walls of a house, it was on a level my grandmother would find familiar.

I had similar thoughts a while ago, which led to this.

Engines of Liberation by Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri and Mehmet Yorukoglu1

I forgot the question I was going to ask: given the effect devices like washing machines arguably have on the ability of women to do stuff that isn't maintaining a household, why is the people currently waging war on women's reproductive rights have not gone after dish washers, vaccuum cleaners and washer/driers?

Comments

[0jack]

Because household appliances reduce your woman's ability to beg off being sexually available because she is too tired. Also, it's a little depressing to watch the sag in her step as she fulfills your every whim after a day of using a wringer and her hands do get a little ugly from the dishes. Besides, those are marketable skills, washing and scrubbing and such. Best keep her where she belongs—perky, pregnant, and property.

[wordweaverlynn]

Yes. But don't give them any ideas.

[kraig]

Two possibilities:
1) most of them aren't around the house enough to notice or care.

2) none of them can keep a woman in a long-term relationship with them, so they haven't noticed or cared, and/or they have to do that work themselves.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Oscar Wilde: INVENTOR leads to the Sacred Band of Thebesification of Western engineering: discuss.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Vide More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Basic Books (1983).

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

Because those people might *gasp!* be forced through circumstance to actually perform those chores themselves.

[martinl-00.livejournal.com]

"why is the people currently waging war on women's reproductive rights have not gone after dish washers, vaccuum cleaners and washer/driers?"

Lack of vision. At least, until you tipped them off.

GJ James.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I dunno. Our society expects housewives to do more than clean house nowadays. Time is needed to cart kids all over the place, go out and run errands, etc. There is no reason for companies to eschew time-saving household tech when US families want and need time savers... though Charlie in the comments makes good points about corporations being basically idiots when it comes to this kind of thing.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

A friend of my grandmother's designed her own kitchen. Not having the counters at a height comfortable for a six foot tall engineer was one of her goals.

I think it's related to how the exgf would prefer not to drive around with an airbag in her car that was designed to save tall men and snap the necks of short women.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

I would like "safety" switches on power tools and other items coded male which are not actually "you must have hands of a certain arbitrary size to use this item".

I would also like a pony with a speckled nose.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Pretty much every "eye-level grill" I've ever encountered on a cooker (ObLeftPondian : stove) assumes I've had my feet amputated at some point in my life. Either that or the design engineers decided that such grills are only of use to short people. Now where in the world is there a large clade of differently-heightened folks who are thought likely to spend a lot of their (short) lives standing in front of a cooker? Hmmm...

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I'm just under 5 feet tall; I have no concept of what "comfortable height" for anything is.

I couldn't find anything recent about airbag fatalities. All the articles saying they are dangerous to short people were 15-ish years old; newer articles from 2007 said they kill short AND tall people. Clearly, they are both a threat and a menace.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

I thought airbags were designed for men who were 5'10" or something like that. I tend to think of tall for men as being 6'2" or more. I am not saying I am correct in my thinking.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Being a six foot plus guy, I can understand why the counters in a kitchen from the 1920s might be built assuming they'll be used by a 5'4" woman and so don't really fit me. But why the mirrors in a modern men's restroom? I keep encountering mirrors that don't show my reflection above the shoulders.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

vaccuum cleaners

my so called new and efficient machine clogs so often, and the canister needs to be emptied a lot faster than my old Hoover, I know it was designed by a man.

[avram]

Every time I talk about how most toilets seem to have been designed by a woman, people think I'm bragging.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

most public restrooms have to be designed by men, the doors open inwards, so you have to straddle the toilet to get the door closed, there is no place to hang your purse, and the toilet paper rolls are located somewhere behind you in a very inacessable spot. If you have to take a child in to pee, there is no room for 1.5 people in the stall either.

Whatever gender designed the actual toilets... thats up for grabs.

[avram]

See, all of those things about public restrooms annoy me too (except in my case it's my jacket I want to hang). (Actually, I sometimes find a stall that does have a jacket hook. I assume those are cases where the inspector for the Bureau of Petty Inconveniences was slacking off, or taking bribes.)

The actual toilets are clearly designed by someone who lacks dangling parts.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

Hooks in public loos seem to be quite common in the UK, although they are sometimes vandalised.

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

Toilet doors at my local mall have holes where the hook is supposed to attach, but for years no actual hooks. That changes recently.

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

Toilet doors at my local mall have holes where the hook is supposed to attach, but for years no actual hooks. That changes recently.

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

I think--and I am not thinking clearly at the moment; I'm waiting for the cold drugs to kick in--that those people are supporting a system for reasons other than its practical subjugation of women. So they aren't doing their analyses in terms of "what will put women in their place" but rather something like, "what is god's law?" it has as a necessary consequence the subjugation of women, but that's not its purpose, if that makes sense.

I base this on my experience that I can often get them to agree with me on component parts of the system right up until I hit something that contravenes their understanding of What Is Right.

[connactic.livejournal.com]

I had a similar idea wrt the rise of domestic appliances allowing the feminist movement to take off (although I may have got it from reading your usenet post- I don't remember.)

Also, I wanted to share a link with you, and was going to post it in a f/m thread, but it's much more appropriate here:

http://www.alternet.org/visions/154144/?page=entire


or was that already mentioned?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

When people look back on the 20th century from the vantage point of 500 years on, they will remember the 1900s for three big things.

[...]

Until the condom, the diaphragm, the Pill, the IUD, and all the subsequent variants of hormonal fertility control came along, anatomy really was destiny

Condom: Available commercially since at least the 18th century.

Diaphram: 19th century (with related devices going back thousands of years)

I'm curious what someone with a better grasp of the history of birth control than I have thinks of that essay.

[connactic.livejournal.com]

condom: not really useful to a woman if her partner refuses to wear one/doesn't have one.

diaphragm: less success rate than the pill. Also requires buy-in from the woman's partner.

The pill: also not perfect but a lot more effective than the diaphragm. It can also be bought and used without your boyfriend/husband/whatever's knowledge.

So, I think the essayist's main problem was in not explaining why the pill (and subsequent advances) matter more than the ones that existed earlier.

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

the one that I've never seen come up on anybody’s list of Innovations That Changed The World, but matters perhaps more deeply than any of the more obvious things that usually come to mind. And that’s the mass availability of nearly 100% effective contraception

I wonder what lists of Innovations the author reads. I've seen the Pill mentioned as society-changing invention many many times. And not just by women.

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

Given that the author of linked piece doesn't seem to realize that in Japan she seems to have lived in a really, really, really crappy place, and thus draws some pretty questionable conclusions from said experience... she isn't so much unreliable as blitheringly clueless.

And given the huge market segment that the housewife has been for decades - the commenters suggesting it's all about the evil corporations are worse. Doubly so given the *huge* market that was home renovations and upgrades from the early 90's through the dropoff a few years back. Triply so given the growth of the mommy/career track demographic across the same period.

[refugee50s.livejournal.com]

I, too, doubt that there's any "women's place" agenda.

It's just that people who invent stuff tend to be men. Fix that, and the problem will shrink.

I remember doing a class exercise once where small teams had to investigate some problem and write up a proposed fix.

My suggested topic was "kitchen mop design". I'd recently gone through three or four of them, looking for one I liked. They all performed terribly, hurt my hands, and failed after only a few uses.

My group was predominantly female. I got nothing but groans and eyerolls for my trouble.

(My other suggestion, dealing with some huge nebulous social problem, drugs or something, was enthusiastically embraced.)

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

Your post seems to contradict itself. First you say "fix predominance of men in design teams, and the blinders will disappear". Then you give an example of predominantly female team which had just these blinders. What gives?

[brett-dunbar.livejournal.com]

I think what refugee50s is saying is that there isn't any specific agenda by men to keep women in their place, and as evidence for this cited the unwillingness of a predominately female group to address design issues in a domestic product mainly used by women. Basically they are being ignored but not primarily because most designers are male. Female designers are also intent on ignoring the same sort of practical day to day inconveniences.

[(Anonymous)]

I can remember the washing machine my grandmother used, and the first one my mother had, for that matter. They compare to our current washing machine as an icebox does to a refrigerator - assuming you have to load the ice yourself.

Oh yes, she had an icebox, too. And her dryer was a line, of couse. I do laundry in at most a quarter the time it took her.


For a true horror story, look at the second volume of Caro's LBJ biography, "means of ascent", go to the chapter on life in the hill country in the 1930s, and in particular the section on wash day. No surprise that hill country women looked old at forty. And this was in a developed country, in my parents' lifetimes.

William Hyde

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

My mother had scars from an encounter as a girl child with a laundry device very accurately called a "mangle".

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

So you come from a long line of survivors.




(Now that I think about it, we all do.)

[(Anonymous)]

The first washing machine I can recall had one of those. It was replaced circa 1960, in part perhaps because I was getting tall enough to reach the rollers.

William Hyde

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

My parents were born in 1927 and 1937. They used outhouses, washed clothes in big pots with washboards, irons were metal things you heated on the stove, had no furnaces in the house, running cold water through a pump tap, etc. Things improved greatly in the 1950s when technology for household chores was almost a fad (see the "Design for Living" short, etc.) There have been improvements in household technology since then, but not by such leaps and bounds as the 1940s and 1950s.

[refugee50s.livejournal.com]

Heh. Washing machines. My parents' washing machine is an LG front loader, and we hates it, we does.

Needs the "new and improved" high efficiency detergent.

Door must be left open between loads to prevent mildew.

Bleach not dispensed reliably.

Cannot manually balance an awkward load.

And the little tune it plays to indicate the end of the cycle is twee beyond words.

===

I don't think it's safe anymore to assume that household appliances will be used solely by women.

As I remark below, user interface design is appallingly hard.

[refugee50s.livejournal.com]

Something else: User interface design is an extremely difficult problem.

The power tools I use are uniformly clumsy. Every year or two somebody releases a slight but incredibly useful modification that makes me slap my head: "Why didn't I think of that?"

Tape measures are still being tweaked. Spirit levels are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Hammers are still being dinked with. We're talking about stuff that's been in use for hundreds or thousands of years, almost exclusively by men, and we still haven't got them right.

I hate my TV set, which has a pilot light that is always on to indicate that it's plugged in, and does a slow blink when turned on — that is, activate the power switch, and the pilot light goes out for a second.

Do I need to even mention computers?

Housekeepers aren't being picked on; it's just that most designers are esthetic and ergonomic idiots.

Engineers, of course, have no design sense at all. They just want to make it WORK.

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

Obsfr: In "Mote in God's Eye" (written in 1974) Kevin Renner examines an apartment Moties built for him, and comments on the bathtub as "interesting". His host responds "We saw designs of human bathtubs, but they are ridiculous, given your anatomy." Renner agrees -- "Nobody ever designed a decent bathtub" (this takes place in 32nd century).

Well, body contoured bathtubs are now if not exactly common, but at least exist. What took so long?

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

Or the tools are a class thing that are just now getting addressed because it's ok to work with your hands now?

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

I agree with the assessment that most designers don't know anything about ergonomics. The truth is most designers are more concerned with how devices look, rather than how they perform. My old CAD/CAM teacher had a story about a design class she was in where a student proudly showed off the rolling luggage he had won an award for. When she pointed out that the design was so wide it wouldn't go through airports easily, he actually got highly offended- the notion that practicality was an issue was anethema to that group of students.

And then of course there was the time my sister designed a buckydome style house that she actually got to show to Buckminster Fuller. As we all oohed and ahhed over the highly modernistic plans, my mom eyed the blueprints and asked "So, where's the kitchen sink?" My sister was embarrassed to admit she had forgotten it, because who actually cooks in this day and age?

Practicality is a secondary consideration for most designers- if they had our way we'd be living in houses without sinks.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

Hans Rosling agrees:

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html