Historical Implications Of The Washing Machine

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The invention of the washing machine (as a designed object) along with other household technologies, created more work for the everyday woman in the 1900’s. In this paper I will explore the Theoretical and historical significance of gender in the use, and creation of the washing machine, and the capitalistic gain that followed. Insight into the overlooked critical design of the washing machine will help explore the creation of the modern housewife, and the environmental implications in this historical design.

Housework in the pre-industrial period is essentially the maintenance of survival located in the home. Since very few people worked for wages, the household was were most supplies were produced. Food, candles, clothes, and the tools …show more content…

First, there is a shift from production of goods in the home for commerce outside the home to consumption of goods from outside the home within the home. The goods and services she notes are in the food, clothin,g and health care system. Increasingly, food and clothes are purchased. Utility companies shift resources the opposite direction rather than having to bring fuel and water into the home, they set up infrastructures for these resources to be provided to the home: water, gas, electricity and oil. Transportation also becomes the job of the house worker, as delivery becomes less and less common. Commercial and social enterprises that could have produced differing arrangements of goods and labor failed. Commercial laundries, boarding houses and apartment hotels were all attempts to relieve homes of the most intensive labor activities which was laundry and food prep. The washing machine was a perfect example. The washing machine is a designed appliance for cleaning clothes. It uses a combination of a mechanical process and a chemical process to get the clothes clean. Most home-use washing machines consist of a vertical barrel mounted on top of an agitator. The agitator is able to rotate the barrel clockwise or counter-clockwise, and to spin the barrel at low or high speeds. Water is introduced into the barrel at the beginning of a wash cycle, along with a user determined amount of detergent or bleach. …show more content…

We look at the washing machine as this sought after commodity both in the past and present, there for mystifying it. Although it is not a magical device, it is a product of our creation and labor. The electricians that make these machines do not directly relate to each other as workers, but instead by their products. They are able meet in the market place and are exchanged between one another. When we look at a washing machine we don’t think about the work that went into create them, all we see is products standing in relation to one another as values. There is this a social power to a product like the washing machine, but not to the relation of the workers who created it. When we buy a commodity we are only having an experience between the product and us. We are blind to the social relations behind these interactions. A social relation between people and things is called reification. Marx explains how in a capitalistic society things are able to take on the characteristics of people. A housewife could set a value for a washing machine at twelve hundred dollars, this amount doesn’t come from the machine itself , you will not find twelve hundred dollars within the machine. This figure comes from the relation of the machine to all other commodities on the market at the time. These commodities are material forms of a social

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