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Notes -
I think people forget about how much labor household appliances have saved, and how poor a lot of people were until relatively recently. I deposed a guy who grew up in West Virginia in the 40s and 50s in a house without running water and he talked about how every Saturday his mother did the laundry and he, his dad (whose clothes were filthy from the mines) and all his brothers and sisters would spend half the day hauling buckets of water from a spring in the woods behind their house so their mother could heat the water on a stove and do the laundry with a wringer washer.
IIRC it might have been here, but I recall reading recently that almost all of the Amish have adopted mechanized laundry.
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And besides just the hard work there, knowledge spread a whole lot slower and in much lesser quantity. The number of women with stories about coming from laundry day with their hands burned on the lye improperly mixing it and thinking that was normal is astounding. Even with labor that is still around, you were likely doing inefficiently and taking more time with more suffering than you do nowadays.
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