I received from my husband today this link talking about an editorial in the Vatican's official newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. Apparently women owe their increased freedom to the invention of the washing machine. The contraceptive pill did not make any contribution other than polluting the environment and causing male infertility. One commentor felt this was a mis-interpretation of the article but I haven't been able to find it online. I have found many other similar takes on it though, like this one which mentions commentators and politicians reading the editorial the same way.
So ladies, enjoy your "freedom", get the washing done and while you're at it have a baby instead of messing up the environment. I cannot even comment on the link to the story about the 9 year old Brazilian girl - what is wrong with the Catholic Church?
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Actually, not to disagree with His Holiness or anything, the washing machine has increased the domestic workload, not decreased it. Prior to the advent of the clothes-washing machine, clothes were simply washed less often, if at all. It was a more pungent time, to be sure, but manual clothes washing is labour intensive so people were very particular about what they washed or they paid others to do it for them.
When the intensive physical labour was removed the result was to increase societal standards for cleanliness in clothes.
So, not unlike it's stand on abortion, birth control and sexual freedom, the Vatican is wrong about this.
Sandra,
I'll have to disagree with you on this one. My Mom and most of my cousins did not get a washing machine until the 1950's and they all consider it the greatest innovation ever made. Apparently the many hours hand scrubbing and bobbing clothes in pots of boiling water was both extremely time consuming and annoying. They do credit the washing machine with enabling them to effectively work outside the home in many professions. I personally am a big fan of the indoor toilet as the greatest innovation, but that is only because I hated the outhouse as a kid.
You're not just disagreeing with me; you're disagreeing with historical and sociological consensus:
Labor-saving devices are not necessarily what they appear to be. There is a consensus among historians and sociologists who have examined housework that "labor saving" appliances have generally had the effect of increasing, rather than diminishing the amount of time spent on household labor. (See particularly Juliet Schor, "Overwork in the household," in the Overworked American; Ruth Schwartz, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave; Ann Oakley, The Sociology of Housework; and Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework). "Advances" in the technologies of cleaning and cooking have not contributed to greater productivity, in part, because expectations regarding norms of cleanliness and food preparation have themselves become inflated. And as the products available for the household proliferated and redefined the meaning of well-being, the tasks necessary to maintain and reproduce the household proliferated and expanded.
Where are you quoting that from? I'm sorry, but in my experience, claims of consensus in academia are often specious.
That is not to say it doesn't make sense to me. I wash my clothes more than I have to. I'm sure the environment doesn't thank me for that, but my neighbors do.
However, I have washed clothes by hand before and I know how labor intensive it is. I can believe that getting a washing machine after years of doing laundry by hand would be revolutionary on an individual level. The stories of one person's mother and aunts may be anecdotal, but it's still a valuable part of this discussion.
Even if we are doing laundry more often these days, come on, laundry is an easy chore. You pop it in. You move it. You take it out and fold it. Done. If you have your own machine, you can do anything you want while it's running. If you're at a laundromat your options are more limited, but you can still read a book or something.
Also, in my household, laundry has always been a "do it yourself" chore, since I was in middle school. My mom passed that on to me as soon as she could. My dad does his own laundry. The way it works is that when you need clean clothes you wash them, and if you have extra space, you ask everybody if they have an item or two they would like to donate. I'm living with my boyfriend right now, and we do the same thing.
What do you want to bet that laundry wouldn't be so easy to delegate if it were still a labor intensive activity? The labor intensive chores are the ones that still seem to be gendered: yardwork, cleaning the bathroom, etc.
The easy ones are less gendered these days: laundry, dishes, cooking.
LOL! You think historical and sociological consensus is specious but anecdotal evidence is the bomb?
The quote is from a website I found when looking for the Ann Oakley book listed. All the books listed in the quote explain the whole phenomena with statistics and time/work studies. You don't have to believe it but it's true.
I think you've made a really good point. I think about the ways people have a tendency to re-calibrate their lifestyle and expectations in response to new conditions or technologies.
Does email save us time compared to snail mail? It's certainly more convenient and allows us to be more efficient in communicating, but if you are one of those people who gets 100 emails per day plus spam in your mail box, I think you can appreciate how technology can be a double-edged sword. Of course technology is the better edge in most cases, in my opinion...
LOL! You think historical and sociological consensus is specious but anecdotal evidence is the bomb?
I didn't say that, I asked you to cite your sources. I think historical and sociological consensus is hard to come by and people like to throw the world "consensus" around willy nilly when they can't back up their fucking argument.
I also think you were rude and condescending to principes and completely shut her down.
I never claimed that anecdotal evidence is better than statistical data. However, I do think that there is a place for listening to individual women's voices when you're talking about feminism. If you can open your mind a little, anecdotal evidence and statistical evidence both have their place. Anecdotal evidence needs to stay out of scientific journals, but on a feminist community blog it should be part of the discussion.
Get off your high horse. Seriously.
Talk about wanting to marginalize the importance of contraception (the pill) by stating it was a domestic appliance that liberated women.
The hierarchy of the Catholic Church is many things. Clued in on women's liberation is not one of them.
Before washing machines cleaning clothes was a labor intensive all-day affair, it's true.
You know what else is cool? The realization that laundry doesn't have to solely be a woman's job, men can clean clothes too.