It just takes 5 seconds to think about the treatment of white workers in coal mine to debunk this entire article. My grandmother was a middle class family in mid 20th century and still preferred to hand wash the families cloths until arthritis took over.

My grandmother had a washing machine with a manually fed electric wringer until she moved into assisted living. It would've likely been no newer than the immediate postwar era, as that's when she moved into the house she lived in. I doubt she would've owned it earlier (steel being needed for the war).

It was a bit of a production to do laundry with it. I can buy the argument that it was tough to sell machines that weren't fully automated. It looked fun as a kid, but I can't imagine it's fun for more than a load or two!

Edited to add: they lived north of the Mason-Dixon in an area with very few Black residents.

If electricity gets any more expensive in the UK (it will), I might have to start hand washing clothes!

> Second, the semiautomatic washing machines themselves may have taken some of the drudgery out of clothes washing, but they did not really save time. Scott explains that the person washing “had to manually feed each item of clothing through the powered wringers between each part of the cycle.” You could not just close the door and turn the machine on and leave.

Second? Why not first? This could be the entire article. Why would I buy a machine that doesn't actually provide meaningful value? Everything else in this article is ragebait for HN.

I imagine there was also the ethical concern of putting all those people out of work...

We should have put more research into clothes fabric technology so that clothes never get dirty, no washing machines needed.