Sex, Washing Machines, and The Politics of Liberation
Margaret Sanger, founder of the American birth control movement and of the organizaton that became Planned Parenthood, called birth control “the liberation of human development.”
Nor surprisingly, Pope Benedict begs to differ with the all-time papal nemesis, Ms. Sanger.
The Times of London did a great riff on the Pope’s recent pronouncement that it was the washing machine, not the ability to control fertility and separate childbearing from sex that has been most liberating, listing the top ten ways women throughout history have been freed by various sudsy technologies:
1. Joy unconfined for the most important person in the world
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The automatic washing machine was indeed a great innovation, even if that £30 price-tag would have put it well out of the reach of many downtrodden housewives.
2. The selling line was simple …
Of course you only did the washing once a week, on Mondays, and little did you expect that once you had a washing machine people would want clean clothes all the time and suddenly every day would be washday.
3. The new machines offered a new leisured life, freed from drudgery, back-ache and steamy kitchens. No more exhausting wash days for us
4. This one was even called The Liberator
5. And we’re told that even husbands got enthusiastic about this precision-built wonder – not because they were planning to use it of course, just because it was cheap.
6. How depressing is this for a selling line: More wives put a stop to the lost hours
“Nearly two years in the life of almost every mother in Britain with two or more children is almost literally drained away with the dishwasher.”7. The predecessor of all these wonders was, mystifyingly, called the Thor. Although it promised to do the whole household’s washing for a penny ha’penny, it’s clear from this 1919 picture that the lucky owner still has a housemaid to operate it for her. No doubt her newly liberated status left her more time for polishing the silver.
8. Ten years later the Thor still seems to have had a monopoly, but this time the housewife is in the driving seat
9. On a larger scale, this glorious essay describes how 320,000 table napkins and 280,000 waitresses aprons are washed in the vast boilers of the Lyons corner house laundry in Brixton. Sheer poetry.
10. Not an actual washing machine but, talking of poetry, what about this absolute gem from A. P. Herbert; the Queen of Sheba is complaining to King Solomon about having to her own washing …
“For shame,” cried the King, “I’ve seen so many beauties
Lose charm and content through these odious duties.
The lily-white hands that for love were designed
Grow podgy and pink, and repellently lined.
The faces, the souls, that were happy as fishes
Are soured by the soaping of napkins and dishes.
Fine ladies, I know, have gone over the brink,
Surrendering beauty and love to the sink.”
Leading scientists and philosophers can investigate the question of whether women actually have a washing gene that makes washing machines particularly liberating to them and not to the male gender.
If so, I must have missed out because I discovered many years ago that this poster better describes me (and as the abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Sojourner Truth said, “Ain’t I a woman?”)
The same Pope, who is so mired in gender role stereotype that he attributes greater liberating power to washing machines than to the much higher moral and technological value of determinining whether and when to bear a child, has also deemed condoms the cause rather than the prevention of HIV/AIDS.
But this is no joke: politicians who have allowed such perversions of justice to go unchallenged are as guilty as the Holy See of not just permitting but actually abetting the deaths of hundreds of millions of women, more than equal to the numbers of men who have died fighting wars. It’s time for this page of women’s history to be scrubbed clean of this misguided framework and rewritten with a firm grip on the reality of women’s lives.
For as Sanger also said, “No woman can call herself free until she can decide when she will become a mother.”
GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”
As co-founder and president of Take The Lead, a leading women’s leadership nonprofit, her mission is to achieve gender parity by 2025 through innovative training programs, workshops, a groundbreaking 50 Women Can Change The World immersive, online courses, a free weekly newsletter, and events including a monthly Virtual Happy Hour program and a Take The Lead Day symposium that reached over 400,000 women globally in 2017.