Doing Laundry: Appliances of Freedom

About this episode

The electric washing machine may be the single most liberating household technology ever invented. Before it arrived, millions of people—mostly women—spent enormous portions of their lives bent over washtubs and washboards. Join Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore how laundry technology transformed work, family life, public health, and modern society itself. Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance Except for fire and stone tools, clothing may be our species’ oldest technology—it was invented 170,000 years ago or more. The first humans to don clothing soon made a discovery: worn too often, their garments would become infested with lice. Soon followed another invention: laundry. That laundry was presumably done by banging animal skins on rocks, more or less as people do with rugs today. Soap did not become part of the process for tens of thousands of years. Indeed, the first recipe for soap in the historical record dates only to ancient Babylonia, where big commercial laundries served all the main cities.  Over the centuries, clothing became the province of an extraordinary industry of toil—one that was blown apart in 1907, when the