ShmoopTube

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electric ovens microwave ovens vacuum cleaners just every other household [household appliances circling a boys head]

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gadget out there doing its thing put them all together like Voltron and

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they're bigger than the sum of their part but how exactly what bigger

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effects can they have welcome to nutshell this wave of electric [nutshell cracks open]

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appliances totally redefined the way people did housework and by people doing

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housework we mean women doing housework while trying to look like movie stars [woman doing housework duties]

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well the big selling point was that technology would allow us to put the burden

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of labor on machines rather than on ourselves so almost every sci-fi movie

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ever tells oh how well that you know, trusting the machines works out but we'll worry [vaccum cleaner sucks up woman housemaid]

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about that when the time comes. In some ways it's worth an eventual robot

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revolution working is you know work the idea was that women who were and are the [woman baking cupcakes in the oven]

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primary doers of household chores would be much more free.. free from the burdens

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of sweeping the floors, washing laundry in the tub, cooking over a coal stove of

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course like every beautiful dream the fantasy promised by electrical [vacuum doing the cleaning by itself as woman sits down]

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appliances didn't totally come to be sorry to burst bubbles they're people

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history can we get down like that what exactly happened to destroy this

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electricity fueled utopia well these new cooking and cleaning technologies [health inspector man walks into a kitchen]

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actually changed the standards of cooking and cleaning they raised the bar

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on cleanliness this meant that these labor-saving devices often resulted in [woman doing vacuuming]

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women doing more work people thought that since the vacuum can

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suck up dirt so easily there was excuse for one speck of dirt

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in the house and the house might as well be condemned if there weren't vacuum [health inspector plants a condemned sign outside of house]

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lines in the rut..well before the only people who could keep big houses spotless their

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entire families fed and their clothes all neatly washed and ironed were mega [rich man served food by woman maid]

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rich people who hired servants but now things were different now there were

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these handy-dandy gadgets that allowed one mom to do all the labor herself poor [mother putting clothes in a washer]

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and middle-class families were now held to new standards of health and cleanliness

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to be fair though lots of these devices reduce the sheer back-breakingness of

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household tasks they just didn't save that much time for example watching [girl puts clothes in a dryer machine]

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machines reduce the sweat of scrubbing clothes in buckets but women in

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households with washers tended to spend more time doing the laundry till the

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whole 1950 dream-home thing and it turns out to be a heck a lot of work. No,[woman using a pick-axe in a mine]

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these suburban moms weren't exactly slaving in a salt mines but they weren't

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kicking back and letting robots do the work and this may be a good thing that [woman laying down while robot cleans the house]

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had already been the case in the 50s as robots doing everything.. well,

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robots today might already have us and there's wrap! [robot sucks up woman in vacuum]

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