Dishwasher - Connections Essay

The Dishwasher in History

From the point of view of average Americans—particularly the housewives who had labored to scrub their dishes by hand during the 1930s—the mechanical dishwasher was a welcome labor-saving device. But its historical significance is broader than simply its significance in the home.

The success of American industry in retooling from wartime production to consumer goods demonstrated the unparalleled flexibility of the U.S. economy, and the enormous relative advantage it enjoyed in the late 1940s compared to countries in Europe and Asia whose economic infrastructure had been wrecked by the Second World War. America’s success in manufacturing and marketing consumer goods—domestically, and via export—paved the way for the enormous economic expansion of the post-war era, a phenomenon that brought with it huge growth in the middle class and in the country’s standard of living.

Inventions like the mechanical dishwasher were a potent symbol of that rising standard of living. By the 1960s, such labor-saving devices were common in middle-class kitchens throughout America. They had also become an important symbol in the Cold War’s ideological struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union: western capitalism appeared able to provide its citizens with an appreciably higher standard of living than inhabitants of communist states enjoyed.