{"text":[[{"start":4.9,"text":"Isaac Merritt Singer was an unlikely feminist. While married to Catherine for 30 years, he had 10 children with another partner (Mary Ann) and seven with a third (also called Mary). When Mary Ann found out about Mary, and confronted Isaac, he beat her senseless — whereupon she had him arrested. Another of Singer’s families was later discovered: yet another Mary, and another child too. Eventually, he married Isabella Boyer and had six more children with her. "}],[{"start":33.65,"text":"No surprise, then, to hear Singer’s reaction when he first encountered a prototype sewing machine: “What a devilish machine. You want to do away with the only thing that keeps women quiet: their sewing.” No surprise, that is — except that thanks to some technical improvements and smart business decisions, Singer’s name became synonymous with the devilish machine itself. "}],[{"start":54.25,"text":"In 1860, as Singer sewing machines were starting to catch on, The New York Times opined that “No one invention has brought with it so great a relief for our mothers and daughters . . . Indeed, it is the only invention that can be claimed chiefly for women’s benefit.”"}],[{"start":69.45,"text":"It is certainly true that sewing was thankless work, and a time-consuming duty for many women. And it is also true that, armed with a sewing machine, a seamstress or tailor could make many more clothes in far less time."}],[{"start":83.95,"text":"One shirt factory in Connecticut in 1860 employed a workforce of 400 people, each with a sewing machine, to produce the same total number of shirts as 2,000 hand stitchers. Output per worker rose from fewer than five shirts a week to two dozen shirts a week. Pay was better, too: $4 a week instead of $3 a week for the hand sewers."}],[{"start":105.75,"text":"But did Singer’s machine actually liberate women? Much depends on which women — and what we mean by “liberation”."}],[{"start":113.5,"text":"A new working paper from economists Philipp Ager and Davide Coluccia looks at detailed data from 19th-century Massachusetts to try to tease out how the sewing machine changed women’s lives. Their conclusion is that the machine offered working-class women a measure of economic independence — they tended to delay marriage and childbearing and to be more likely to work in paid employment. (Not that these jobs were particularly pleasant: shirt- and dressmaking were the original sweatshop jobs.)"}],[{"start":141.15,"text":"For wealthier women, “liberation” looked different. The sewing machine freed them from a time-consuming domestic duty, which created space in the diary for joining charities and community organisations. But for these upper-middle-class women, the most significant thing the sewing machine made time for was earlier marriage and more children. "}],[{"start":164.55,"text":"It is a story that echoes down the ages: inventions that save labour at the level of a task do not necessarily save labour overall. Instead we “spend” the savings: maybe on more clothes, maybe on more children, maybe in some other way. The canonical example is the washing machine. Given a particular load of clothes to wash, this cuboid miracle-worker saves extraordinary time and trouble. But as Ruth Schwartz Cowan argued in More Work for Mother (1983), the consequence was that clothes would be washed more often. No more removable cuffs and collars, or dark outer layers to hide the grime: just throw everything in the laundry basket every day. Mother will sort it, somehow."}],[{"start":205.45000000000002,"text":"The dishwasher is another “liberation technology”, and older than one might think. Josephine Cochrane patented the first effective dishwashing machine in 1886. "}],[{"start":215.75000000000003,"text":"Again, the story of liberation is not quite as straightforward as one might imagine. Cochrane didn’t invent the dishwasher to save herself time in the home; she was wealthy and trying to prevent her servants from chipping her best china. "}],[{"start":228.50000000000003,"text":"Although the dishwasher saves only modest amounts of time and effort relative to the washing machine per load washed, it probably saved much more effort per household, because unlike with the washing machine, people saw no need to wash the dishes more often. The term of art here is the elasticity of demand. Demand for clean clothes is elastic: when it becomes much easier to wash clothes, we wash many more clothes. Demand for clean dishes is not: when it becomes much easier to wash dishes, we simply count our blessings."}],[{"start":258.15000000000003,"text":"Queen of the labour-saving technologies, argued Alison Wolf in The XX Factor (2013), was the TV dinner (inventor: bacteriologist Betty Cronin) and more generally all the industrially processed food: the pre-plucked chicken, the pre-chopped salad, the canned soup and jars of sauce, along with the easy availability of affordable takeaway food. It is unglamorous and sometimes unhealthy, but it saved real time. "}],[{"start":287.45000000000005,"text":"In the 1960s, prosperous women with university degrees would typically spend four to five hours a day preparing and serving food and cleaning up afterwards. For these women, “putting food on the table” wasn’t a metaphor. It was something that they did quite literally — and it took many hours each week. The American Time Use Survey now suggests that figure has fallen to less than an hour a day for women — and half an hour for men."}],[{"start":312.45000000000005,"text":"The most important “liberation technology” of all, perhaps, was not directly labour-saving in any way: it was the contraceptive pill. Neat, discreet and more reliable in practice than condoms or the diaphragm, the pill gave women greater control over their fertility and therefore a reason to invest in professional careers such as law, medicine and dentistry. The economist and Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin, with Lawrence Katz, has built a compelling case that the availability of the contraceptive pill to unmarried women sparked a generational shift of women into the professions."}],[{"start":347.70000000000005,"text":"Does the history of labour-saving technologies from the sewing machine to the washing machine, the dishwasher to the pill, teach us anything about what we are told will be a revolution in AI? Perhaps. I draw three lessons."}],[{"start":361.35,"text":"First, these are complicated stories. Even a simple reduction in the cost of stitching led some women to have children earlier, and others to postpone marriage and motherhood. Consequences that make sense in hindsight can be hard to foresee."}],[{"start":377.35,"text":"Second, elasticity matters. Whether we are talking about clean clothes and clean dishes, we may or may not demand much more when costs fall."}],[{"start":385.8,"text":"And third, as Isaac Singer’s battered partner Mary Ann could attest, social progress can be advanced by people who have the basest of motives. "}],[{"start":395.85,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram"}],[{"start":409.65000000000003,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1790784949_2293.mp3"}