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...