Not everyone can afford to have someone else clean for them. In fact, those who can afford it are a small and privileged group even in cities like NY and SF where they're relatively highly concentrated. The article above is specifically about average families in parts of the country where jobs paying that kind of money are extremely rare.

And if you don't clean a certain minimum amount, yeah, your home gets unhygienically disgusting. As proven by the 6 months of beard shavings and toothpaste spittle crusted up on my ex's sink. (And that was the least disgusting surface in the bathroom.)

The same goes for things like washing bedsheets and towels now and then; leaving clothing all over the floor where you trip on them in the dark; letting dishes pile up in the sink until you get pests; and more.

Technology has decreased the amount of time required to keep a home to a minimum standard of cleanliness - but it still requires a certain amount of attention and effort.

Then if you have a partner who's either unwilling to clean or whose standards for "gross" are far lower than yours, you're stuck cleaning for two or living in conditions you find unlivable.

And that's without even beginning to get into the complications of childcare for those couples who want children for reasons other than social pressures and norms.

Hiring a cleaning service once a month costs as little as $50. It's not really some hoighty-toighty privilege - in fact it's far, far cheaper outside of those NY/SF bubbles.

My mother is a school teacher in rural Maine and hires a lady to vacuum and dust and change the bedding every week.

That is assuming that a household can afford it, which is not always the case.

Then, historically, before house appliances, the burden of home tasks was brutal. No washing machines, driers, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, microwave ovens, no instant or fast food, etc. What can now be done in a few minutes used to take hours, and require more work, to the point it was a full time occupation.

I am glad this is no longer the case.

Hans Rosling has a talk dedicated to just the effect of the washing machine on female emancipation:

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing...

Well, you could also hire laundry services, which used to be done by hand either individually in water courses or in places known as washhouses or lavoirs... or in laundry boats (french bateaux-lavoirs). My grandfather, who was not wealthy, told me that he used the services of a professional laundress in his 20s.

But then once you are done with laundry you've got cooking, washing, ironing, etc...

Ironing became optional for some people as fibers started receiving a special treatment to reduce wrinkling. Before that, clothes would wrinkle beyond what most people today would be comfortable wearing. Before electricity, irons were powered by coal and of course had no thermostat.

Before refrigeration and other modern methods for preserving food, you also had to buy fresh food constantly, or preserve food in archaic ways like salting.

Then, before plumbing and sewers, rather than getting water from a faucet you had to go get water from a well.

Part of the effect of that automation wasn't to free up women's time but rather to raise the standards of cleanliness against which we judge people's homes to the level achievable by a woman working at it full time WITH that automation.

That sort of makes sense. Lets say that you are housewife that believes female purpose is in being housewife. Automation freed up time quite a lot, but did not changed your believes about your own purpose. So what you gonna do? Doing crosswords for hours or watching tv for hours is lazy. So, you just continue to spend time on what you perceive as your purpose, to be better at it.

And maybe, Betty over the street did the above reasoning, has cleaner house and you want measure up. You wanna do right by your family. Maybe there is a piece of you that is competitive, which is pretty normal among humans, although you don't use that piece often.

For automation to really free time the women's time, the next step is needed - women finding the reasonable socially accepted thing (most people want to do socially accepted things) to do with that time. Eventually it did happened, just not right away.

It's largely subjective.

You can set an unrealistic standard of cleanliness, like: polishing doorknobs, cleaning windows, the roof and the basement every day. Or do your cleaning routine twice per day, or 3 times... when does it stop?

Then, at some moment cleaning has diminishing returns and becomes redundant. Plus, day to day activities may require to make things dirty temporarily, and wanting to preserve a permanent state of cleanliness may interfere with those activities.

It never stops. The more you clean, the better you get at seeing parts that are not absolutely super clean. Kinda like refactoring code base. Until you find something that makes more sense to do.

It's worth noting that his position isn't universally accpeted. I know Tim Harford for example questioned these findings in one of his podcasts.

https://twitter.com/TimHarford/status/883373670990786561

Of course some people then went on to question Tim Harford...