Isaac Merritt Singer was an unlikely feminist. Whereas married to Catherine for 30 years, he had 10 youngsters with one other associate (Mary Ann) and 7 with a 3rd (additionally referred to as Mary). When Mary Ann came upon about Mary, and confronted Isaac, he beat her mindless — whereupon she had him arrested. One other of Singer’s households was later found: one more Mary, and one other little one too. Ultimately, he married Isabella Boyer and had six extra youngsters along with her.
No shock, then, to listen to Singer’s response when he first encountered a prototype stitching machine: “What a devilish machine. You need to eliminate the one factor that retains ladies quiet: their stitching.” No shock, that’s — besides that because of some technical enhancements and sensible enterprise choices, Singer’s title grew to become synonymous with the devilish machine itself.
In 1860, as Singer stitching machines have been beginning to catch on, The New York Instances opined that “Nobody invention has introduced with it so nice a reduction for our moms and daughters . . . Certainly, it’s the solely invention that may be claimed mainly for ladies’s profit.”
It’s definitely true that stitching was thankless work, and a time-consuming responsibility for a lot of ladies. And it is usually true that, armed with a stitching machine, a seamstress or tailor might make many extra garments in far much less time.
One shirt manufacturing facility in Connecticut in 1860 employed a workforce of 400 folks, every with a stitching machine, to supply the identical whole variety of shirts as 2,000 hand stitchers. Output per employee rose from fewer than 5 shirts per week to 2 dozen shirts per week. Pay was higher, too: $4 per week as an alternative of $3 per week for the hand sewers.
However did Singer’s machine really liberate ladies? A lot is determined by which ladies — and what we imply by “liberation”.
A brand new working paper from economists Philipp Ager and Davide Coluccia [pdf] appears to be like at detailed information from Nineteenth-century Massachusetts to attempt to tease out how the stitching machine modified ladies’s lives. Their conclusion is that the machine provided working-class ladies a measure of financial independence — they tended to delay marriage and childbearing and to be extra more likely to work in paid employment. (Not that these jobs have been significantly nice: shirt- and dressmaking have been the unique sweatshop jobs.)
For wealthier ladies, “liberation” seemed completely different. The stitching machine freed them from a time-consuming home responsibility, which created house within the diary for becoming a member of charities and neighborhood organisations. However for these upper-middle-class ladies, probably the most important factor the stitching machine made time for was earlier marriage and extra youngsters.
It’s a story that echoes down the ages: innovations that save labour on the degree of a job don’t essentially save labour total. As a substitute we “spend” the financial savings: perhaps on extra garments, perhaps on extra youngsters, perhaps in another method. The canonical instance is the washer. Given a selected load of garments to clean, this cuboid miracle-worker saves extraordinary time and hassle. However as Ruth Schwartz Cowan argued in Extra Work for Mom (1983), the consequence was that garments can be washed extra usually. No extra detachable cuffs and collars, or darkish outer layers to cover the grime: simply throw the whole lot within the laundry basket every single day. Mom will type it, by some means.
The dishwasher is one other “liberation expertise”, and older than one would possibly suppose. Josephine Cochrane patented the primary efficient dishwashing machine in 1886.
Once more, the story of liberation is just not fairly as simple as one may think. Cochrane didn’t invent the dishwasher to save lots of herself time within the house; she was rich and attempting to stop her servants from chipping her finest china.
Though the dishwasher saves solely modest quantities of effort and time relative to the washer per load washed, it most likely saved far more effort per family, as a result of in contrast to with the washer, folks noticed no want to clean the dishes extra usually. The time period of artwork right here is the elasticity of demand. Demand for clear garments is elastic: when it turns into a lot simpler to clean garments, we wash many extra garments. Demand for clear dishes is just not: when it turns into a lot simpler to clean dishes, we merely depend our blessings.
Queen of the labour-saving applied sciences, argued Alison Wolf in The XX Issue (2013), was the TV dinner (inventor: bacteriologist Betty Cronin) and extra usually all of the industrially processed meals: the pre-plucked hen, the pre-chopped salad, the canned soup and jars of sauce, together with the straightforward availability of reasonably priced takeaway meals. It’s unglamorous and generally unhealthy, but it surely saved actual time.
Within the Sixties, affluent ladies with college levels would sometimes spend 4 to 5 hours a day getting ready and serving meals and cleansing up afterwards. For these ladies, “placing meals on the desk” wasn’t a metaphor. It was one thing that they did fairly actually — and it took many hours every week. The American Time Use Survey now means that determine has fallen to lower than an hour a day for ladies — and half an hour for males.
Crucial “liberation expertise” of all, maybe, was indirectly labour-saving in any method: it was the contraceptive tablet. Neat, discreet and extra dependable in apply than condoms or the diaphragm, the tablet gave ladies higher management over their fertility and due to this fact a motive to spend money on skilled careers akin to legislation, medication and dentistry. The economist and Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin, with Lawrence Katz, has constructed a compelling case that the provision of the contraceptive tablet to single ladies sparked a generational shift of girls into the professions.
Does the historical past of labour-saving applied sciences from the stitching machine to the washer, the dishwasher to the tablet, educate us something about what we’re informed will likely be a revolution in AI? Maybe. I draw three classes.
First, these are difficult tales. Even a easy discount in the price of stitching led some ladies to have youngsters earlier, and others to postpone marriage and motherhood. Penalties that make sense in hindsight might be onerous to foresee.
Second, elasticity issues. Whether or not we’re speaking about clear garments and clear dishes, we might or might not demand far more when prices fall.
And third, as Isaac Singer’s battered associate Mary Ann might attest, social progress might be superior by individuals who have the basest of motives.
Written for and first printed within the Monetary Instances on 30 September 2026.
Loyal readers would possibly benefit from the e-book that began all of it, The Undercover Economist.
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