Your washing machine is actually a time machine

If Good News had a patron saint, it would be the Swedish professor of global health Hans Rosling.

Rosling, who died in 2017, was a wizard at using data and storytelling to challenge misconceptions around global development and progress. With statistics in hand, Rosling could convince the most determined pessimist that the world was, on balance, getting better. And there’s no better example of the Rosling touch than a TED talk he gave in 2010 called “The Magic Washing Machine.”

“Laundry day” used to actually mean an entire day of soaking clothes, heating water, hauling, scrubbing, rinsing, wringing, and hanging. But standing on the stage next to the most basic washing machine you can imagine, Rosling described the day his family first used one. His awed grandmother watched the tumbling drum like a movie as his mother sat down and did something unheard of on laundry day: She read a book.

That’s the point. For people of Rosling’s mother’s generation, a washing machine wasn’t just a washing machine, it was a time machine. It created time — time to learn, earn, rest, and parent. And the past century of advances in what we might call household technology have given people — and especially women — the freedom to fill their hours as they wished.

In the US, the household appliance revolution of washing machines, dishwashers, and microwaves — plus the electrification that made them run — cut the burden of housework from something like 60 hours a week at the start of the 20th century to around 28 hours by 1970 and under 20 by 2005. Food work alone

visit website