A labor-saving device to lighten the domestic workload … wouldn’t that be taken up in a second? The vacuum cleaner and the electric refrigerator certainly were. These were juiced-up variations on familiar things (brooms, iceboxes) and were welcome—if one could afford them. But electric-powered washing machines, which began to be introduced in the 1910s, had a more uphill road to acceptance at even half the price of refrigerators.
It took the hard sell, going door-to-door during the 1920s and 1930s, to get washing machines in people’s homes. As the contemporary trade publication Electrical Merchandising put it, the washing machine “does not add social standing, it has no luxury appeal, and no entertainment value.”
Business historian Peter Scott explains that clothes-washing was the “least popular chore for nineteenth century housewives, owing to the long, heavy, and unpleasant physical labor that hand-washing required.” Those who could passed the task on to domestic workers or commercial laundries. In the American South, in particular, racial and social dynamics were a high wall for the washing machine industry.
“Even working-class white women outsourced washing to black laundresses, reflecting both the low cost of black female labor and the social convention, established in the slavery era, that heavy manual labor was below the dignity of white southern women.”
Laundry, in short, was not (white) women’s work; even with a machine it wouldn’t be ladylike. Maytag, the industry leader, simply gave up selling in the South for the first half of the 1930s. The industry even tried “overtly racist arguments to deter southern white families from using black laundresses.”
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In response to this social reluctance, washing machine manufacturers and retailers resorted to high-pressure “forced selling,” as they themselves called it. They targeted blue-collar families who couldn’t afford to outsource their laundry. When the Depression undermined this market sector, the industry switched to selling to white-collar families who were, Scott writes, “struggling to maintain a middle-class lifestyle on reduced incomes.” (Since the Victorian period, cleanliness had been a big part of the middle class’s self-image.)
Two other factors pushed back against the rapid diffusion of washing machines. First, there was serious competition from the commercial laundry industry. The power laundry industry did some $700 million worth of business in 1928, the same year sales of electric washing machines for the home reached $108 million. In 1939, there were some 6,733 power laundries and 15,245 hand laundries in the US.
The National Laundry Owners’ Association and the American Washer and Ironer Manufacturers Association alternated between fierce competition—both claimed the other’s machines spread bacteria—and agreed-upon truces (1927, 1933) before another all-out advertising war and sales campaign in 1936.
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. Rinse tubs alongside the semiautomatic machines tripled space requirements, making for a much larger overall footprint than today’s models.
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Scott notes that Maytag largely controlled manufacturing through royalty licenses during the interwar period. The company “was said to have stronger competencies, and investments, in legal services than in R&D.” That paid off until it didn’t: a 1939 Supreme Court decision found Maytag’s patent claims invalid.
It would take the post-WWII economic boom, with this radical revisioning of the household (and for that matter, society), for the washing machine to triumph in homes across America. “The victory of the washer” over commercial laundries came only in the 1950s. That decade’s fully automatic machines could be left unattended to rinse, spin, and drain. They could also be readily accessed in self-service establishments—the first was called a “washateria,” but “laundromat” gained wider acceptance—for those without the wherewithal or space for their own machines.
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