Madame Thursday

I’ve noticed a sort of implicit belief that people used to do things the hard way in the past because they were tougher or something. In reality, labor-saving devices have historically been adopted by the populace as soon as they were economically feasible. No one stood in front of a smoky fire or a boiling pot of lye soap for hours because they were virtuous, they did it because it was the only way to survive.

Taking these screenshots from Facebook because they make you log in and won't let you copy and paste:

Transcript: The Curiosity Curator

When the washing machine arrived in 1925, she sat on the kitchen floor and cried for three hours-not from joy, but from grief for the fifty years she'd lost.

Mary Richardson was 62 years old when she turned on an electric washing machine for the first time. Her daughter found her sobbing, surrounded by soap and laundry, and asked if someone had died.

Mary looked up, tears streaming down her weathered face, and whispered: "All those Mondays. All those years. It didn't have to be that hard."

For fifty years-every single Monday since she was twelve years old-Mary had done laundry by hand. Not the romantic version you see in nostalgic photographs.

The brutal reality: waking at 4 AM, hauling 50 gallons of water from a frozen well, scrubbing clothes in boiling lye soap that stripped skin from her knuckles, bending over washtubs for ten hours straight until her back spasmed and her hands bled.

2,600 wash days. 26,000 hours of backbreaking labor.

Her diary entries, discovered by her great-granddaughter a century later, tell the truth history books sanitize:

"Monday again. My hands are so raw I can barely hold the pen. I watch Father reading while I scrub his shirts and think: why is his comfort worth more than my hands?"

She was only fourteen when she wrote that.

There was no "bonding" over shared labor. There was exhaustion and silent resentment. There were no songs-only groaning, water splashing, and women too tired to speak.

The washing machine had been invented in the 1850s. Electric models existed by 1900. Wealthy women in cities had them for decades. But Mary was born poor and rural, so she scrubbed on a washboard until her hands became gnarled and her back permanently bent.

That's a 25-year gap between technology existing and Mary being able to afford it. Twenty-five years of unnecessary suffering.

When the machine finally arrived, it did in fifteen minutes what had taken her two hours of brutal physical labor. She watched it fill with water automatically, agitate the clothes without anyone touching them, and she understood-truly understood for the first time-how much had been stolen from her. She cried for three hours. Not tears of gratitude. Tears of grief.

Her daughter Alice wrote: "Mother grieved for all the Mondays she'd lost. For her ruined hands. For the life she could have had. I tried to comfort her, but what could I say? She was right. It didn't have to be that hard."

Mary lived fifteen more years. She never did laundry again-not because she was too elderly, but because her daughters understood intimately what fifty years of wash days had cost her.

At her funeral in 1940, Alice said: "My mother's hands were destroyed by laundry. Her back was broken by it.

Half her life was stolen by a task that should have been mechanized decades earlier. We're told to celebrate women like her for their resilience. I think we should be angry instead. Angry that she had to be resilient at all."

The women in attendance-who'd lived their own decades of wash days-applauded. Because they knew. They all knew.

The washing machine didn't just save time. It liberated women. It gave them back their hands, their health, their Mondays, their lives.

When we romanticize "simpler times" and "family traditions," we erase the reality: women were trapped in systems of domestic labor that destroyed their bodies and stole their futures.

Mary Richardson never got to pursue education, travel, or develop talents beyond domestic skills. Because every Monday was wash day.

She was 62 when a machine did in fifteen minutes what had taken her fifty years. And she grieved for every Monday she'd lost.

Sometimes progress isn't about losing tradition.

Sometimes it's about ending suffering we mistook for virtue.

Sometimes the "good old days" were only good because we've forgotten who was hurting.

And sometimes the greatest gift isn't resilience-it's liberation from ever needing it again.