to think the washing machine has liberated women more than the pill?

[bettybosseye]

I'm serious, think about it, there are alternatives to the pill but only one to hours spent every day hand scrubbing and wringing piles of washing.
The pill is held up as something that gave women control and this is undoubtedly true but the humble washing machine has emancipated us from hours of drudgery every day and like i say it is unrivaled. The washing machine rules!

Alistron1 - you're quite right, there's still a very long way to go before there will be true equality of the sexes, and so depressingly much of it is women who allow their men to walk all over them, as we so often see here on MN. But at least we're moving in the right direction.

Its rubbish to say washing clothes now takes as much time as it used to before washing machines. I remember my mum in the 60's and early 70's doing all the washing by hand - clothes, sheets,the lot. It used to take a whole day.

And yes adults may change their clothes more frequently now. But these were the days when children went outside to play often coming back with dirty or muddy clothes.

And in a similar vein - some shameless self-promotion

alistron1you have missed the point and as much as i'd love to stay and debate with you, i'm off to bed. Glad we've the luxury of enough free time away from all the house work to sit at our computers pontificating.
The washing machine rules.

Spot on! Yes I read books before I had a family.

So your argument at 21:36:28 that time-saving "devises" (sic) enabled me to read "all those books" doesn't hold.

Now I really am going away.

This is Very Silly.

betty, I think women still found plenty of time to pontificate before the washing machine was invented. It's just that the invention of the interweb gives us a global arena to vent our spleens

Before the pill was ever dreamed of, there were condoms and some bizarre contraption called a pessary. But like a washing machine, the pill took some of the drudgery out of the process.

I think this thread is totally bizarre, it's not comparable at all.

We don't need alternatives to washing machines because they don't cause health issues, side effects, only work effectively for some people etc. You should be comparing invention of contraception with invention of washing machine.

At the moment it's like saying that owning a Peugeot is more liberating than owning a washing machine because you know, there are other types of car.

YABU

YADNBU My grandmother was the eldest of 12 and as a girl helped her mum with the washing using a tub with a wringer on the top. When helping my grandmother with the laundry (as easy as putting it in the washer or transferring to the dryer), I recall she used to get tears in her eyes as she gazed at her washer/dryer.

Just the other day I was thinking of the section in The Odyssey when Odysseus comes upon the daughter of the King of Phoenicia and her 'women' doing the laundry down at the river. Machines and electricity are amazing.

Otoh, my great grandmother, she of the 12 children, might take the other side of this argument. But then she had her daughters to do the laundry, didn't she? Her husband was off in the coal mines. It wasn't as if the men were spared drudgery.

I do think that if the housework is expanding to fill all the time available, you are doing it wrong.

I've never understood the pill. Why have sex with a man who is too thick to understand what his semen is going to do if it enters a woman's vagina It causes pregnancy, so unless you're planning a baby, having intercourse is always going to be risky. Using your imagination is obviously the way to go.

Been reading about how liberal lefty men fought for abortion rights for women in the sixties so that women no longer had an excuse to say no to penetrative sex.

I also don't think the washing machine is that liberating because women still end up washing men's clothes. A more revolutionary concept is for women to "shed their husbands" thereby forcing men to do their own washing...

southeastastra, it was women, children and men who worked down the pit.

I remember reading up on the pill as a teenager out of curiosity and was when I got to the side effects: thrombosis, blood clots, cancer ...

The pill allowed me to have two children roughly when I wanted them. the snip has made sure that that's it. Washing machines on the other hand have no real impact on my life at all, as dh does the washing.

so for me personally contraception has been rather more important, even limited to the pill if I wanted to be as pedantic as the OP.

Oh, and there is a fairly straightforward alternative to having a washing machine, which is to get someone else to do it for you. Whereas (unfortunately/fortunately depending on your viewpoint) there aren't really any very good alternatives to having babies, which is what generally happens if your contraceptive failed.

I started to take the pill as a teenager. It was nothing to do with my mother (and mothers can drive their child to the doctor, but it is the girls choice as to whether to ask to be prescribed and to take the pill, not the mothers).

But you can space your children without the pill.
I'm really irritated by men's obsession with having access to women's vaginas, acting dumb, pretending as though they don't actually know what their sperm is going to do in there.

How about a woman being able to have sex with whom she pleases without worrying about contraception? What about women being able up secretly control her fertility?

And it's a silly argument, these things occur within context of other things. But yes a washing machine is very helpful if you hsvec12 children.

And yes natural family planning is 99 % effective, according to NHS , in conjunction with other forms of contraception and/or taught be specialist teachers.

Frankly, it's ridiculous to pretend it's as effective as other methods.

I put on a load of washing every single day. Every day I sort and put away another load, do some ironing, and hang out a load. Added together, I am sure it would take a whole day. We just don't have the drying space to let it go beyond a day.

It is a stupid waste of time and resources, but if we wore grubby, smelly clothes we'd be judged. Travelling in some other countries, the smell of BO is overwhelming, but obviously not an issue. Standards change.

Beh. Both mean that we are supposed to be blooming perfect all the fecking time. Having it all and living the dream. Pah.

agree with alistron, that if we didn't have washing machines, we simply wouldn't be doing the enormous quantities of washing we do today

also with whoever said that men can do washing too

I remember times in my life when we did not have a washing machine, but boiling some clothes on the stove doesn't take your full attention: you can multitask- and delegate to the males in the family

I think the most liberating thing was the scientific discovery that a man is not actually some kind of overgrown baby who needs his every need catered for by more together people

If you are doing a full load of washing every day you either have a very large family or you are changing your clothes several times a day and not rewearing them!

For those who don't think washing everything by hand takes a lot longer then do what my mum did. She washed large things e.g. sheets in the bath and everything elose in a sink. And you can't just leave them to soak, she would actually have to rub and wash them.

Adults didn't change their clothes every day, but children's clothes were changed very frequently. Children then played outside most evenings and weekends and would come back with dirty and muddy clothes. Also had cloth nappies to wash by hand.

Also people don't realise the difference modern fabrics and treatments to fabrics makes. Nowdays clothes are less likely to attract stains that require lots of rubbing to remove and washing powders do their job much better.

And yes middle class women would pay someone to do their laundry. But ordinary women couldn't afford this!

Give me the pill any day!

This coming from someone who hand washed everything weekly for months when I bought my first flat as I couldn't afford a washing machine.

The OP is not being pedantic. It is really common for the media to talk as if the pill's arrival in the 60s was this huge liberating thing. I think that the OP asks a really interesting question when she compares it with the washing machine and says " was it really such a huge liberating thing, particularly given that there were and are alternatives to the pill out there anyway?"

I would say YANBU. There is an interesting discussion in The Politics of Breastfeeding about how ordinary women (not upper class women) in previous centuries used breastfeeding to space their families. Likewise the condom has been around for a long time (Casanova used one) and women with regular cycles could be pretty certain they would not get pregnant if they avoided their fertile time.

The washing machine is new and has saved ordinary women days of relentless heavy work and drudgery, freeing their time for other things.

Normantebbit - nobody is saying that natural family planning is just as reliable as the pill, but it is effective, and it was an option for a lot of women.

I feel uncomfortable at your argument regarding women needing to secretly control their fertility. Why?