The washing machine liberated women

47 thoughts on The washing machine liberated women

1. I’m torn between giggling at how stupid this is, and being really sad about how far we still have to go.

   That would be liberating if it wasn’t assumed that women would still operate said machines.

   Now if the washing machine loaded and unloaded itself, and had nifty little robot arms so it could fold clothes, then I’d feel pretty liberated.

2. I completely agree that the washing machine has liberated women. Case in point, it’s liberated my wife since I do nearly all of the laundry and I wouldn’t possibly have the time to do so without one.

3. Sadly, I have to SOMEWHAT agree that modern efficient appliances were a huge boon to women’s lib. The household chores that used to take a whole day, could be done in only a few hours; one COULD have aspirations outside the home, without needing to hire a full-time domestic to do the dirty work.

   However, claiming that the washing machine (or even household appliances in general) were the saving grace of womankind ignores the complexity of the issues. Women’s liberation covers a range of problems; condensing that complexity to “whiny women who hated housework, then were freed from it” ignores most of what the quest for equality involves!

   Nice to see Catholicism continuing its leading stance on feminist issues.

4. By that logic, tractors “liberated” farmers, the printing press “liberated” scribes, the internal combustion engine “liberated” horses, etc. These people don’t seem to have a very firm grasp on the concept of liberation. (And why doesn’t that surprise me?)

5. It’s not an entirely unreasonable statement that the wachine machine was a liberating invention (certainly not moreso that the pull), but neither the article linked above nor Rush’s comments really go into why. Here’s a Slate article from 2001 by economist Steven Landsburg that actually goes into it:

   Along with new technology, the century brought new social norms. In 1900, fewer than 5 percent of women worked outside the home. The rest spent an average of 58 hours a week on housework. By 1975, that was down to 18 hours, and it’s probably lower today. As housework got easier, women’s social and economic status grew.

   So basically, prior to the invention of various time-saving home appliances, women didn’t really have the time or the social status to ask “hey, why do we do all the housework, anyway?” because it had been denied them, in part by shouldering the burden of all that housework.

6. Sadly, I have to SOMEWHAT agree that modern efficient appliances were a huge boon to women’s lib. The household chores that used to take a whole day, could be done in only a few hours; one COULD have aspirations outside the home, without needing to hire a full-time domestic to do the dirty work.

   Having lived where I pulled my water from a well at my neighbor’s house and washed my clothes by hand, absolutely modern appliances have been very helpful to women’s liberation. Without modern appliances, all the work that goes into maintaining a home was a full-time job.

   My problem is with the framing. Don’t worry about your silly little reproductive rights. You’ll still have washing machines. Um, no.

7. “…the right to work outside the home.”

   It blows my mind that people STILL believe that all women were housewives once upon a time. Poor women have been working outside the home prior to the twentieth century. And of course we had slavery in this country until 1863 — women of color have worked “outside the home” for a very long time. In the nineteenth century, the women of my farming family were also performing manual labor outside the home.

   Also, my college history professor once pointed out that with every time saving invention, the standards of cleanliness were also raised. So while at one time the average owned only a few articles of clothing that were washed once a week, now a piece of clothing is “dirty” after one wearing and our wardrobes are much larger. This is not to say that washing by hand is easier than using a machine, of course.

8. If the washing machine liberated women why is it that when my boyfriend said “but I keep forgetting to do laundry” this morning, I jumped out of bed and started sorting the laundry?

9. “My problem is with the framing. Don’t worry about your silly little reproductive rights. You’ll still have washing machines. Um, no.”

   EXACTLY.

10. “Also, my college history professor once pointed out that with every time saving invention, the standards of cleanliness were also raised. So while at one time the average owned only a few articles of clothing that were washed once a week, now a piece of clothing is “dirty” after one wearing and our wardrobes are much larger. This is not to say that washing by hand is easier than using a machine, of course.

    Agreed! I’ve vacuumed the house 3 times this week and it’s apparently already getting dirty so I have to do it again.

11. Sadly, I have to SOMEWHAT agree that modern efficient appliances were a huge boon to women’s lib.

    In a lot of ways, modern appliances and cleaning products have either had no impact whatsoever or possibly counteracted women’s equality. One huge thing (which very few people talk about) that happened in the 50’s as all these mod cons became affordable is that suddenly standards became way, way higher, and what you end up with is the same amount of time spent cleaning. Suddenly you didn’t just need to keep a passably non-squalorous home, you needed every surface to be spotless and sterile. You didn’t just need to have clean clothes, you needed to have pristine, pressed and starched clothes Every Single Day. Things like “ring around the collar” and dust bunnies under the bed became vile social ills of our time, rather than “meh, who looks under the bed?”

    And, since this all apparently required no actual labor, you had to look fabulous while doing it, and your husband got to act as if all you did was sit around the house all day.

    On the other hand, modern appliances made it a little easier for middle class mothers to work outside the home. Though the rising standards and guilt trips applied to those women too, so I’m not sure it was all-around positive for them, either.

12. Errr, ummm, what Blitzgal and Jenny said before me, so clearly it’s not really “something very few people talk about”.

13. So while at one time the average owned only a few articles of clothing that were washed once a week, now a piece of clothing is “dirty” after one wearing and our wardrobes are much larger.

    I think this varies a lot between cultures. Where I lived, people did not own a lot of clothing, but they did laundry every day except Sunday. Women spent three or four hours every day doing laundry for their large families (see! contraception comes into play even when we’re talking laundry!). They would do laundry all morning and then head to the fields to join their husbands for the rest of the day. Yes, poor women worked outside the home, but their female children picked up the household work. A major reason girls weren’t/aren’t educated is that their unpaid labor is needed in the home.

    Without modern appliances, you could still advocate a more just distribution of labor, but modern appliances drastically reduce the amount of labor that needs to be done, period. It’s not “liberation” in and of itself, but it removes a barrier.

    Again, I disagree strongly with the framing in the article. But don’t knock washing machines until you’ve done laundry for a family of eight without one.

14. Modern appliances have made housework more convenient and less time consuming, but women are still doing the vast majority of household chores, so… it hasn’t liberated us from anything so much as it’s assisted us at our unpaid jobs.

15. So insulting. It reads like a ladmag joke, without a punchline. I don’t know why this has got to me so much. I was raised Catholic and educated in Catholic schools and I decided the Catholic Church was a force of pure evil in the world a long time ago. But this kind of casual, puerile, ludicrous sexism… it doesn’t feel misogynistic like so much of the guff that Rome pumps out. It’s more just sexist, and STUPID. I feel so offended that these morons had power over me, and power over the people who educated me. I feel angry that my sister who is a primary school teacher still has to be a practising Catholic to do her vitally important job. I feel angry that another generation of kids will be educated under the pervasive influence of these evil, stupid men. How and why does anyone listen to these fools? They’re like idiot blowhards in a pub. But with evil grated on top.

16. But don’t knock washing machines until you’ve done laundry for a family of eight without one.

    But then isn’t family planning half the battle, there? I sometimes hand wash my own clothes, and because I’m just one person and don’t have any messy babies* in the house or anything like that, it’s actually not that difficult. Of course, running water helps, there, too. Maybe it’s indoor plumbing that really liberated women.

    I also don’t think anyone is “knocking” modern conveniences, we’re just questioning to what extent they really had an impact in the overall liberatedness of women.

    * the degree to which children are allowed to be dirty is another standard that changed a lot when the washing machine and similar appliances became popular.

17. this is like saying the cotton gin liberated the slaves. fuck that logic. my womanhood is not defined by my household appliances, all of which my fiance has been known to operate without my supervision.

18. Well…I have to agree with those who have said that standards skyrocketed post-home appliance.

    On the other hand, if you were able and willing to buck the standard, it did free up a lot more time. Before, if you couldn’t afford servants, it did take a ridiculous amount of time to do household chores to even a basic standard.

    Do want to mention that a freaking LOT of women still don’t have these “liberation devices,” and would be thrilled to get one. Not to mention, you know, a toilet or a shower.

19. . . . it hasn’t liberated us from anything so much as it’s assisted us at our unpaid jobs.

    Awesome!!!

20. Er, to clarify, I meant that was an awesome comment, not that it is awesome to have some assistance in my unpaid job.

21. But then isn’t family planning half the battle, there?

    Good point. Oh, look, I already addressed it: “Women spent three or four hours every day doing laundry for their large families (see! contraception comes into play even when we’re talking laundry!)”

    I’m not objecting to anyone’s objections to this article. I share those objections. I voiced my objections.

    All I’m reacting to is people saying that modern appliances have actually resulted in more domestic work because of changing standards. And I’m saying hmmm, that wasn’t my experience when I actually lived without running water or any modern appliances for two and a half years. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I really do more housework than my great-grandmother did. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But I do know I spend a lot less time every week doing domestic work now than I did when I didn’t have modern appliances.

22. The difference is that it’s possible to tell that ridiculously high standards are ridiculously high, and start wondering “Why am I doing all this work, anyway?” when what’s going on is that you have time-saving appliances and so your standards have gone way up.

    It’s quite possible that in the fifties, the average woman did just as much housework as women in the 1850’s did. But the average woman today doesn’t do anywhere near 58 hours of housework. The washing machine and other such implements made it *possible* for women to keep a passably clean house while having a white-collar job outside the house (the push for women’s liberation didn’t come from the women who worked the fields all day, because they were too exhausted from working the fields; it’s generally the middle class who have the education and the time to worry about things like the unfairness of life.) Having the white-collar job caused women’s status to go up, and that made it possible to wonder “Hey, why *do* I do all the shit jobs, anyway?”

    That being said, obviously contraception was *the* magic bullet if you have to point to any one invention that made women’s liberation possible. Which, obviously, the Catholics can’t admit to.

23. This is a both-and blog, isn’t it? I think Chingona is right AND Oppoponax is right.

    There is no question that modern conveniences have reduced the amount of time people NEED to spend on housework. I do all the housework in my (childless family) and it takes me about 4 hours a week. There is no way I could have cleaned three bathrooms, a kitchen, and four other rooms and do the laundry in that amount of time 100 years ago. If you are willing to (in Linda Hirshman’s words) “tolerate dust,” there is no need anymore to devote all your time to house cleaning.

    But it is true that a lot of women FEEL pressure to do more. Work tends to expand to fill the amount of time allotted to it. As a result, modern homemakers from the 1940s and 1950s onward elevated the standards of homemaking to an extremely high level, since many women weren’t working. My own stay-at-home mom cleaned the house from top-to-bottom every single day, in addition to cooking fantastic dinners every night, sewing and doing crafts, maintaining the yard and garden, preparing to host social events related my father’s work, etc.. She treated it like a full-time job; she was expected to do this and she expected it of herself.

    As a result standards of what a wife and mother SHOULD do raised — and even working women today feel that pressure to conform (whether self-imposed or externally imposed) to these heightened standards.

24. Yeah, see, and I don’t feel those pressures. I tolerate the dust, and every time I read an article about how kids in dirty homes have fewer allergies, I pat myself on the back and tell myself what a good mother I am.

25. All I’m reacting to is people saying that modern appliances have actually resulted in more domestic work because of changing standards.

    I don’t necessarily think that modern appliances resulted in more domestic work than before, just that it’s not as simple as “whee, totally labor saving!”, because standards did change, and ultimately the amount of work stayed pretty level. Things like dust bunnies, bacteria lurking on kitchen counters, ring around the collar, pristine infants, Donna Reed vacuuming in heels — those things didn’t exist before “labor saving” devices became popular in the post-war first world.

    I also don’t think that you can take any one convenience and peg something as big as “liberation” on it — the reason laundry takes hours of physical labor in the developing world is not that there’s no washing machine, but that there’s no indoor plumbing, no running hot water, little access to consumer goods, little or no ability to control family size or living arrangements,and most people do heavy physical labor for a living (thus resulting in clothes getting dirtier faster). I often don’t have reliable access to laundry facilities. And yet I manage not to spend hours a day doing laundry, because I have everything else on that list except the washing machine.

    If I were to peg “women’s liberation” one one thing on that list, it would be family planning, and especially the ability to remain single and determine my own lifestyle and living arrangements.

26. Considering it STILL took me all day to do laundry for a two person household and I haven’t even started ironing, I call bullshit. The washing machine’s counterpart, the dish washer, is not off the hook either because its takes my partner just as long to knock through all those ‘extra’ prep and storage dishes that never fit in the bloody thing. The real ‘liberation’ is that we split these unpleasant tasks between each other, something the RCC declared to be be a threat to its very foundation. Something about gender roles and bad for the environment.

27. There is no way I could have cleaned three bathrooms, a kitchen, and four other rooms and do the laundry in that amount of time 100 years ago.

    Then again, if you could afford a home of that size with 3 bathrooms 100 years ago, you’d have had household help. Which is another way that standards have changed. My apartment was built in 1940 and has 5 very small rooms (that includes bathroom and kitchen). It also lacks most “mod cons”. I can clean the whole thing in a couple hours regardless. With the move towards a more affluent car dominated suburban lifestyle, houses are bigger there’s a lot more to clean.

28. @chingona: “I tolerate the dust, and every time I read an article about how kids in dirty homes have fewer allergies, I pat myself on the back and tell myself what a good mother I am.”
    You read my mind, chingona.

    @Opoponax: “100 years ago, you’d have had household help”.
    yes, and my grandma would have provided it. While my mother spent most of her childhood at a nunnery, where my grandma would visit her on sundays. Still, being a maid to rich people in town was better than working on the family farm, my grandma told me.
    Frankly speaking, I’m happier being a university professor with a washing machine. It is a great invention for mankind, just like indoor plumbing and the referigerator. It doesn’t per se have anything to do with women, except for the (church-supported) culture which sees the female sex as servant to the male.

29. The washing machine is a great invention. But no matter how easy a machine is to use, that doesn’t mean the person using it can’t be exploited. There are millions of women around the world who use sewing machines in sweatshops. Are these women liberated because they don’t have to hand sew garments? Neither are women who are forced to use the washing machine because the men in their lives feel like they’re above that type of thing.

    And vacuum cleaners are pretty suckish, no pun intended. It might not take as long to clean the floor, but you still have to lug that thing from room to room.

30. If I were to peg “women’s liberation” one one thing on that list, it would be family planning, and especially the ability to remain single and determine my own lifestyle and living arrangements.

    I don’t disagree with this, but we get a little bit chicken-and-egg here. Before modern appliances, it’s not just a matter of splitting the work more equally between men and women because of the sheer amount of time that gets consumed doing domestic work. Again, poor women who worked outside the home were handing these jobs over to other female relatives, often their children, maybe a younger sister or a cousin, but it was still a full-time job. In part, you can afford to remain single and determine your own lifestyle or not have kids or have fewer kids because you aren’t dependent on the labor of an extended family and you yourself are not being kept at home to provide unpaid labor. That you can live away from your family and have your own job allows you to determine your own fate – it creates the social space for women to make their own decisions.

    It’s not that “the washing machine liberated women,” and certainly not in the way the church means, because one thing I’m getting at here is the ability of women to negotiate non-traditional roles for themselves, but I really do believe that a lot of technological changes and economic changes over the last 100 years have helped open up the space for women to push back more against traditional roles. I feel like I’m not expressing this really well. I’m not saying one thing caused the other, but that these things are working in conjunction with each other, in a self-reinforcing way.

    Like, why was the pill so revolutionary when the condom had already been around for a long time? Well, the pill is more reliable, but the pill also is woman-controlled, and you don’t have to negotiate its use on a case-by-case basis with every sex act. So on its own, the pill doesn’t liberate women, but it gives women more control over their lives in a way that opens up space and breathing room to challenge other things.

    Similarly, no, we are not “liberated” from our traditional roles by a washing machine if women continue to do all the laundry, but having a washing machine makes it easier to get time to do other things – work or study, for example – and when women have more education and more work opportunities, that allows them to exercise more independence.

    Am I making any sense here?

31. Chingona, I am definitely on board w/ your last paragraph (#30). Nobody is dissing the washing machine or other modern appliances! But to call the washing machine the most liberating thing in women’s lives ignores the fact that men equally sharing household chores would be a hell of a lot MORE liberating. But that’s the Catholic Church for ya; men can’t do laundry because they’re too busy trying to convince the world’s women that subjugation = freedom.

32. … and ultimately the amount of work stayed pretty level.

    I don’t mean to harp on this, but I think it actually gets to why we’re not seeing this the same way. I know your history professor said this, but I really don’t believe this is true. It may have been true in the 1950s when the cult of the housewife was at its highest, but most middle class women didn’t work then. Every survey I’ve seen of how we spend our time today shows that working mothers spend more time directly engaged in child care than previous generations, despite working outside the home. What’s gone by the wayside is housekeeping. Yes, standards change, and different cultures have different standards for cleanliness, but in my own experience, there is just no comparison because pre-modern everything and today. For example, you might think that no one would worry about dust if you had a dirt floor, but actually you need to sweep at least every day, if not twice a day, to help keep it compact. That’s just one example. If you don’t have a refrigerator, you can’t cook ahead and store stuff. I could go on and on.

    I’m harping on this because my previous comment depends on people believing these devices save time. Obviously, if you don’t believe me, you don’t believe me, and we’ll just have to disagree. But in my own experience, having lived both with the same family size and the same level of sharing of domestic tasks with my partner, it’s less work with modern appliances.

33. The washing machine and other such implements made it *possible* for women to keep a passably clean house while having a white-collar job outside the house … Having the white-collar job caused women’s status to go up, and that made it possible to wonder “Hey, why *do* I do all the shit jobs, anyway?”

    This is an extremely problematic way of understanding the origins of Second Wave feminism. To say the least.

    The bottom line is that appliances (or pills, for that matter) don’t create social change. People do.

    Chingona, the above paragraph is also a response to you — I kind of feel we’re at cross-purposes, here, because we both know that getting a washing machine didn’t ever make anybody feminist.

    My mom grew up with a washing machine, and has worked outside the home for most of her adult life. She’s still not a feminist. She doesn’t expect my stepfather to do the teensiest lick of housework. She doesn’t really seem to understand that women have a say now in how we want to organize our lives (or, at least, that’s the only thing I can take from her repeated attempts to get every young/single woman she knows married, pregnant, and chained to a stove).

34. Before modern appliances, it’s not just a matter of splitting the work more equally between men and women because of the sheer amount of time that gets consumed doing domestic work.

    I think that depends what we mean when we talk about “modern appliances”. Before running water? Sure. Before it was easy for most people to have dozens of pairs of underwear if they want to? Probably. Before reliable birth control? Absolutely. Before the advent of the modern Western sedentary lifestyle? Definitely. But, seriously, really and truly, I hand-wash pretty often due to a really inconvenient laundry situation. It doesn’t take hours a day. The simple addition or subtraction of an appliance doesn’t really change the time frame that much, what it changes is the amount of active physical labor.

    The same is true for dishwashers, by the way. I don’t have one. I spend about 20 minutes a day washing dishes. I honestly can’t imagine ever wanting a dishwasher. As far as I can tell, all they do is attract roaches.

35. I suspect a significant portion of the labor-saving these devices were meant to do was mostly swallowed up by a mixture of higher standards and “hey, now that this job takes less time you have more of it to devote to (other job).”

    If you have a vacuum cleaner, you have no excuse for your floors to be the slightest bit dirty, after all. And if you have a washing machine, well, do the family a favor in return for making your job easier (because you didn’t buy that thing with your own money, did you, salary-less housewife?) and wash their clothes after every wearing instead of every four or five. Et cetera.

36. By that logic, tractors “liberated” farmers, the printing press “liberated” scribes, the internal combustion engine “liberated” horses, etc. These people don’t seem to have a very firm grasp on the concept of liberation.

    and

    this is like saying the cotton gin liberated the slaves. fuck that logic.

    Right on, right on, right-the-fuck on. Every time a labor-saving device that saves time, energy, and/or health on a predominantly male workforce, the language of “liberation” isn’t used. When I first went into the apprenticeship, “star drills” and “brace-and-bit” were still on the tool list, even though everyone had stopped using them in favor of electric hammer drills and drills instead. No “liberating” tired craftsmen. Labor saving devices are thought of as both cost savings and health saving (a lot of innovations help prevent repetitive-use injuries); it’s what is supposed to be, not viewed as a favor.

    That’s what gets me in the framing here—how drudgery for women is seen as the norm, and we should feel thankful for this favor. Bullshit.

    every time I read an article about how kids in dirty homes have fewer allergies, I pat myself on the back and tell myself what a good mother I am.

    Heh! Me too, chingona.

37. because you didn’t buy that thing with your own money, did you, salary-less housewife?

    Yep, that’s another bit of baggage that came with the post-war wave of domestic conveniences. How much “I Love Lucy” was dedicated to Lucy and Ethel trying to convince their husbands to buy them washing machines, or the husbands bitching about “after ALL I DID FOR YOU, buying you that dishwasher, giving you everything you ever wanted, you’re just going to laze about the house watching your stories on the TV I bought with my money…”

38. I have a comment stuck in moderation for reasons that are not really clear to me. I think we are at cross purposes, so I’m not going to belabor this too much, but the gist of what’s in moderation is that it’s not one machine, one innovation, but if you look at the collective set of innovations – which include all those things you mentioned, like having 12 pairs of underwear and having running water and not having to grind your own grain by hand or grow your own food and the list goes on – frees up a certain amount of space. No, these things aren’t going to make anyone a feminist on their own, but they create a freedom that allows people who are feminist to actually act on their feminism.

    And we may just not agree on this, and that’s fine.

39. The saddest thing is that women now have “the right to work outside the home” but the housework is still a woman’s work. For some reason the housework argument got dropped during the first wave of feminism. I don’t think we will have true equality until men are cleaning toilets in the same numbers.

40. Labor saving devices are thought of as both cost savings and health saving (a lot of innovations help prevent repetitive-use injuries); it’s what is supposed to be, not viewed as a favor.

    Yeah. Really, Labor-saving devices improve the efficiency of women’s efforts. This doesn’t really translate into more time to do what you want, it just means that there’s more energy to do more of that job!

    Noone built a labor-saving device so that people could take a break. They built it to get more work out of you.

41. One thing that really stuck out for me reading these comments is the number of times that people noted that households that could afford washing machines could also afford domestic help. So while the women of those households were “liberated” by not having to do housework, other women (poor women) were still doing that work — and working outside of their own homes to do it! Which brings me back to my main point earlier and the biggest issue I have with the Catholic Church’s proclamation. A great deal of women have been toiling outside of the home for a long, long time. There is a definite middle/upper class mindset to that article that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

42. It is not _complete_ bullshit… I mean it sure didn’t liberate anyone, but it helped. It made life easier for many women.
    I mean OK, it would be better if men and women shared house chores equally etc… but that’s not close to happen, right? Meanwhile, the washing machine saved housewives (and on the long run everyone, including single guys who’ve been liberated as well, in a sense) from hours of degrading and physically destructive labor.
    When my mother liberated herself by going to work in a culture that wouldn’t allow women to do that lightly, the first salary she got, you know what she did? She bought a washing machine for her mother.

    It’s not _absolute_ bullshit.
    After that, it sure depends a lot on the way it’s said ^^’

43. @ Blitzgal, you are exactly right. This is a very race and class based argument. First, it was only a blip in time in the forties and fifties, when the middle class got larger, that women staying at home became the norm, but it certainly wasn’t the norm for everyone, especially women of color who’s husbands did not earn a family wage.

    Second, we have a really long way to go. Yes, we now have washing machines. That means we get to have a career and housework too.

    We do less housework than women did in the fifties. But that is not because we have changed gender norms. It is because standards of cleanliness have gotten lower. And many middle class women can afford to contract out their housework to a less fortunate woman.

    Since the fifties, men have doubled the amount of housework they do. But when you double a tiny amount, it is still a tiny amount. And when men do housework, they choose the more preferred jobs, such as cooking and shopping. We are so grateful they are helping at all, and there is such a stigma attached to being a nag, that we are still not making them do the gross work like clean toilets. Plus, traditionally male jobs are weekend jobs like trash or mowing the lawn. Traditionally female jobs are every day, basically adding up to a second shift.

    Many women make their sons do housework, and not necessarily gender based work. But when they see their fathers sitting on their ass, or doing the easier stuff, they are still more likely to sit on their ass when they grow up. Thus perpetuating the cycle.

    All of this is also very linked to the wage gap.

44. In a way, this argument proves that what the Catholic church said is correct. We are not even questioning the fact that laundry is still a woman’s work.

    Hmmm? Puts that failblog post in a new perspective.

45. The bottom line is that appliances (or pills, for that matter) don’t create social change. People do.

    See, I totally disagree with this.

    Well, not totally. People must create change. But the *environment* to create a change is created by technology. Women’s liberation couldn’t have had any success, no matter how many women railed against the inequalities of life, as long as women had no means of controlling their own reproduction… Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of the writer of Frankenstein, was an early feminist whose career in advocating for both human rights in general, and women’s rights in particular, was cut short by death in childbirth. That kind of says it all right there. Childbirth needed to become something a woman could avoid, with safe technology that was under her control, and it needed to become something that kills very few women who do undertake it, before a society that pushes all women who have children into child care could produce enough women who were free from the burden of child care that they could create a social change.

    Slavery was not eliminated in the North until after the North’s industrialization made slavery less necessary. The South required slavery to maintain their agrarian economy, so they would not voluntarily get rid of it, but it took the North being free of slavery for many, many years before there could be a powerful enough abolitionist movement in the North that it could create serious opposition to the expansion of slavery, which is one of the proximate causes of the Civil War.

    Yes, change won’t occur until the people make it happen… but often, the people can’t make it happen until a technological change occurs that allows large numbers of people to agree that the change in question can be implemented. (Sometimes the “technology” in question is a social science tech, rather than a physical science tech… for instance, it was the rise of the merchant classes in Europe that gave rise to the middle class and social mobility, which eventually gave rise to the Enlightenment and the notion that humans have inherent rights and that kings don’t have a divine right to rule. And the rise of the merchant classes may have come about because of the invention of the corporation. Ironic that an invention which promoted human freedom and human rights at one point may now threaten it.)

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