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In defense of the washing machine

The humble washing machine saves us from hours of backbreaking labor. And billions of people still don’t have them.

Dozens of historians of women’s labor jumped in to try to explain just how bad doing laundry by hand was and all the reasons a washing machine represents a big leap forward in quality of life, freedom, and human well-being. For the washing machine in particular, there’s a famous TED talk by the late Swedish academic Hans Rosling, which amounts to a beautiful articulation of how much good this humble appliance brought the world: The UN estimates that only for the other six billion, a life of washing clothes by hand is not a relic of the distant past but an exhausting chore that consumes a significant fraction of women’s time and energy worldwide.

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