This is a prescription for re-enslaving women to domestic service, and ensuring that only the wealthy can live with the basic dignity of cleanliness. What is described here is exactly how we used to do laundry, and it was terrible. Laundry was difficult manual labor that took up an entire day of the week, and was part of why being a housewife was a full-time job. To quote a scholar who actually knows this topic (Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother): “For most women, for most of the year, the labor of doing laundry meant carrying heavy buckets of water from tap to stove and from stove to tub, repeatedly overturning the tubs and refilling them, as well as carrying, scrubbing, wringing, and hanging the heavy fabrics that were the only ones cheap enough for poor people to buy. The labor of getting the family bathed was similar, lacking only the carrying, scrubbing, wringing, and hanging of the wash.… “Even if a dwelling contained a sink, it was usually not deep enough for doing laundry and may not have had a drain. Public laundries were few and far between; and so, for that matter, were public bath houses… “The net result of the profound difficulty that washing and bathing presented was that precious little of it got done; underclothing might be changed only once a week, or even once a season; sheets likewise (if they were used at all, since featherbeds did not require them); outerclothes might do with just a brushing; shirts or shirtwaists might go for weeks without benefit of soap; faces and hands might get splashed with water once a day; full body bathing might occur only on Saturday nights (and then with a sponge and a wooden tub and water that was used and reused) or only when underwear was changed—or never at all. “‘Some women have a feeling that cleanliness is a condition only for the rich,’ one home economist remarked of the immigrant women with whom she worked…” Cowan also quotes an early 20th-century writer as saying: “Many people do not sufficiently realize the extent to which the increase in cleanliness of home and person contributes toward the growth of democracy. So long as the upper classes felt the necessity of using smelling salts whenever approached by one of the common people, just so long would they despise the vile-smelling yokels. Cleanliness is not only next to Godliness, but it is essential to the establishment of the Brotherhood of Man.”