Return Down For What?

Can I bring my washing machine to your utopian vision of the mythic past?

Would abolition of washing machines lead to greater human freedom?

This was the question put forth on Twitter this month by a Dutch scholar, who suggested that degrowth—that is, the program of slowing economic output and capital accumulation, and instead investing in more environmental and human-friendly causes—should involve forgoing certain domestic technologies. Namely, washing machines. The tweet was almost universally dunked on (and if you’ve already read some of those dunks, I apologize, I was traveling and unable to dunk at the time). Environmentalists noted that washing machines produce almost negligible emissions. Feminists and labor scholars recalled that hand-washed laundry ranks among the most backbreaking and time-consuming work typically relegated to women, and that washing machines freed women to pursue their lives. Other degrowth advocates questioned whether opposing washing machines was even a degrowth position at all.

Normally I wouldn’t spend so much time on what is broadly understood as a bad take. But nostalgia for women’s unassisted manual labor is having a moment right now. Its most obvious advocates are right-wing trad influencers who urge women to forgo paid work in favor of highly stylized labor as homemakers. But figures from the self-described left are also getting in on the game. We see it in woo-woo womanhood influencers, in orthodox advocates for “natural” (ie. unmedicated) birth, and yes, in a specific brand of environmentalist who seems a little too concerned with the aesthetics of future women’s work. 

Uniting these ideologues and their ostensible enemies on the right is the desire to return to a mythic past whose foremost quality appears to be a pointlessly brutal and restrictive work life for women.

Control of women’s labor has always been political, as evidenced in the very history of laundry.

David Graeber, an anarchist anthropologist, describes women’s labor (and sometimes entire women, themselves) as acting as a unit of financial measurement in medieval Europe. In early medieval Ireland, Graeber writes in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, enslaved women (and only women) were referred to as units of account in monetary transactions, used to record finances and debts, even though the actual practice of slavery had long since died off. The reference to women’s forced labor served as a marker of value, which would then be paid off in cows or silver or an agreed-upon substitute.

In early economies like these, which were transitioning from communitarian to more commercial forms, coinage was scarce, informal, or nonexistent. Wealth and power in these patriarchal systems was measured in one’s ability to extract what early legal codes referred to as another person’s honor, often in the form of making that person do one’s most undesirable chores.

Medieval Welsh legal code was even more specific, decreeing that anyone who attacked a bishop or abbot would be forced to endure one of the greatest humiliations: “let him pay seven pounds; and a female of his kindred to be a washerwoman, as a disgrace to the kindred, and to serve as a memorial to the payment of the honor price,” one Iron Age Welsh law read.

“A washerwoman was the lowest of servants and the one turned over in this case was to serve for life,” Graeber writes. “She was, in effect, reduced to slavery. Her permanent disgrace was the restoration of the abbot’s honor.”

Laundry, in particular, was viewed as a degrading chore. It’s not difficult to imagine why. The tasks of hauling and heating water, of scrubbing and beating and hot-ironing are lousy and often literally shitty work.

Fittingly, when those with wealth or power can offload laundry to others, they do. This wasn’t just true of medieval men. The U.S. labor movement owes much to Black washerwomen in Mississippi, who kickstarted a wave of strikes and unionization in 1866, journalist Kim Kelly writes in Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor. 

Those women, many of whom had been enslaved just one year earlier, were pushed to wash clothes for meager rates. “The washerwoman’s wages were kept so low that even poor white families could afford to send their laundry out for Black women to clean,” Kelly writes.

The pay and conditions were so intolerable that Jackson’s laundresses formed Mississippi’s first trade union, the Washerwomen of Jackson, in 1866 and went on strike for higher wages, going so far as to storm a notoriously exploitative steam laundry shop, carry out strike-breakers, and board up the shop’s windows and doors.

Coercive laundry jobs with insufficient pay: universally hated throughout the historical record.

Other domestic work is similarly offloaded along lines of gender, race, and class, sometimes with support from legal codes like Welsh law and American chattel slavery, and sometimes from the inertia of privilege. Women are (unjustly!) expected to take on more childcare and housekeeping duties than men. In order to achieve parity with men, women usually have to find someone else (usually of lesser means) to take up their domestic work. It’s something of a pyramid scheme. There’s a reason this month’s New Yorker cover, which depicted women of color working as nannies for white children, raised so many hackles. It’s an uncomfortably accurate depiction of the way childcare can map social and economic hierarchies, even among people who oppose inequality.

Inventions like the laundry machine change the equation. With more time to engage in other pursuits, women can upgrade their ambitions. They can pursue more education, more leisure, and better-paying jobs that they actually enjoy.

It’s conspicuous, then, that the present anti-feminist backlash coincides with calls to abandon the technological tools that freed women’s hands and schedules.

On the left, those calls might look like efforts to deride washing machines as bourgeois indulgence. (The original tweeter behind the washing machine discourse also raised the possibility that communal hand-laundry centers might become social hubs, to which I say no, my social hubs are the places I go with friends when we’re not scrubbing marinara stains out of kids’ shirts.)

On the right, the anti-tech agenda often involves eroticizing obsolete forms of female labor, using images of pastoral bliss to equate homestead-style toil with a kind of essential femininity. Think large broods of home-birthed, homeschooled children, and pointlessly complicated “from scratch” recipe tutorials, all of which leave women too busy to achieve any measure of independence. 

And look, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the degrowth argument. It’s hard to look at atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, for instance, and conclude that we’re justified in driving up worker productivity rates and churning out cheap plastic goods in order to juice the quarterly earnings for some corporate conglomerate. Likewise I can find some appealing visual elements in trad TikTok’s vague anti-consumerist aesthetic, even if many trad influencers are just as guilty of selling garbage products designed to help fans cosplay a simple life. 

The throughline of these movements is their appeal to the many people who feel a nagging fatigue with living on the capitalist treadmill; to those doing work that they suspect is pointless, on behalf of people with more money and power than them. 

This is a reasonable fatigue. The trick is not to replicate it in new hierarchies that once again make women’s labor a form of currency under male control. The past isn’t an escape. It’s a palliative. There is no return, only a future that we can shape, if we’re not too busy doing laundry.