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Plus laundry. The invention of the washing machine is literally one of the things that allowed women to get jobs outside the house.
by mason55 5y ago
Plus laundry. The invention of the washing machine is literally one of the things that allowed women to get jobs outside the house.
- Retric 5y agoLaundry used to be extremely uncommon activity, among other things it damages extremely expensive clothing. It really only started to consume significant time as the production of textiles exploded.
- watwut 5y agoIt was done, it had to be done still. Just not that often and it was massive work. Source: I visited laundry museum once and it was pretty clear they have done it.
- Retric 5y agoIt was done yes. Did they all wash their outer clothes every month let alone every week, no.
- watwut 5y agoI don't wash my jackets or jeans that often either. Laundry was not "extremely uncommon" thing. It was thing that needed to be done in every household. The switch to washday as in once a week washing cloth happened in period we talk about - after 1800. That is when you would spend one whole day in the week doing laundry. Before that, you still had to do it, less often, but it took even more work due to lack of soap.
- Retric 5y ago1800 was post industrial, the steam engine had been around for 100 years at that point. The spinning wheel invented around 1030 and slowly spread to Europe after that caused a 5x increase in cloth production. Even that was recent, almost 20,000+ years of slowly improving drop spinning where cloth was rare, then a seemingly ever increasing explosion of cloth production. Really for most of human history washing clothes wasn’t that time consuming for average people. To the point where people today likely spend more time on it.