Making Homemakers Responsible for Safety: Housework, Laundry Equipment, and the Unequal Burdens of Accident Prevention, c. 1910–80

Abstract:

This article investigates how twentieth-century U.S. corporations, nonprofit safety experts, and engineers came together to control the risks of home laundry equipment. Professionals worked with citizen-consumers to form a “voluntary safety system” intended to prevent injuries using education, markets for “safe” appliances, and consumer product testing. This system catered to informed middle-class families and relied on the principles of personal responsibility and free enterprise. Although home safety measures decreased fatal accidents, they disproportionately added to the workloads of contemporary homemakers and reinforced existing gender and class inequities. These inequities, this article argues, set the stage for later government intervention, offering new insights into the intersections between consumer technology, domestic labor, and regulation. Repositioning the history of safety from workplaces and transportation networks to the home, this article shows how injury prevention influenced how Americans shopped for and used potentially dangerous laundry machines.

Citation: Parry, Alexander I. “Making Homemakers Responsible for Safety: Housework, Laundry Equipment, and the Unequal Burdens of Accident Prevention, c. 1910–80.” Technology and Culture 66, no. 2 (2025): 411-447.