Not many of us would reverse the changes that came with widespread home appliance availability and adoption on either a personal or societal level but every significant change comes at a cost to someone to whom you might well be sympathetic is something worth remembering when looking forward.
Washing machine has done more to liberate women than all political efforts combined.
My grandma really spent a lot of time washing clothes, so i dont think this is a significant factor
Women typically would change a bit more often, and generally tried to have fresh panties every day (they would wash them separately from the main laundry). Men who considered themselves sophisticated would change _socks_ every day, but this was a minority. Nobody washed a shirt that they only wore once. Nobody washed pants until they had visible spots or smelled really bad.
And these were civilized XX century households, with access to hot and cold running water, gas, and electricity (but not always a bath or a shower, and rarely a washing machine).
Try wearing the same briefs and socks and shirt for a week, and you will show much you reduce your laundry load...
It takes a considerable amount of time.
And before anyone asks she raised five children like that and I'm not the one to try to convince someone who on top of that lived through WWII to change anything in their life.
For sure it all depends on how you define "basic needs", and how do you divide "work time" from "leisure time".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society#%22W...
At some moment I've heard of more recent studies about the myth of the increase in leisure time, but I don't manage to find any good reference now. In any case, I suspect Graeber had a point.
My grandma took a bath/shower once a week - she grew up when a bath meant bringing water in from outside by hand, heating it on a fire, and then you had to bring it back outside to dump it - I sometimes shower twice a day, and I still use less effort over a week to get clean than my grandma did back in the day.
