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Comment by epx | Hacker News Reader

My grandpa married his second cousin, it was already frowned upon in 1935 but not unheard of. One improvement factor was transportation - the bicycle was invented not much before, and it was expensive. But a bike or a train ticket allowed you to know people beyond the rural village you lived. It's been even said that the inventor of the bicycle was the 2nd greatest feminist, because he improved the availability of suitable grooms, nobody needed to marry the violent moron next plantation anymore.

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Queen Elizabeth married her first cousin from one side and second from the other. Not frowned upon in certain circles...

Royalty is literally defined by marrying into your own family — essentially all royal families in Europe are a single large family with varying degrees of chin and haemophilia :)

Is there a known "greatest feminist"?

The one who invented the washing machine.

This is probably more true than many realize. There’s a great history re-enactment series on BBC called Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm, etc (I believe they’ve done more) and before technological innovations laundry was the largest time-sink in a woman’s life. Watching the labor involved was a horrible revelation for me.

Why is it horrible? Their work was valuable at the time. It’s only horrible if we choose to not see the value they provided; IMO It’s not any more or less horrible than the husbands whose largest time sink was deep in the coal mines or on the streets sweeping horse manure. I don’t know about you, I’d be annoyed at someone feeling bad for me having to do my work. I’m grateful for our ancestors putting whatever effort necessary to keep society going.

Also, it was an employment opportunity for many maidens, ie., not yet married women who needed some income might do laundry for people of greater means.

Cleaning out sewage pipes is a valuable and important job but that doesn't make it any less unpleasant.

Alison Wolf's book, "The XX Factor," examines time use diaries to gather data about which domestic tasks women spent the most time on, and the conclusion that she ultimately comes to is that while washing machines did make the process of washing laundry more efficient, the end result of these efficiency gains isn't that women spent less time doing laundry, but that people started doing laundry more often. So the washing machine made us more hygienic, but it didn't really free up a lot of time for women who performed those sorts of domestic tasks.

One Alison Wolf's main conclusions is that the inventions that actually resulted in women spending less time on domestic tasks were mainly those relating to cooking and food preparation (such as TV dinners and fast food in the 1950's), because the result of a x10 efficiency gain in food preparation isn't that people start eating x10 as many meals, but that the same number of meals get produced with 10% of the time investment.

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