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

[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.