These charts illustrate the rates of appearance of electrical equipment in housekeeping and the length of time spent on housework management across one region between 1920 and 2019.
It can clearly be seen that the increase in the implementation of electrical devices into people’s lives affected the number of hours spent on household chores.
As the graph reveals, only 30 percent of households in this country used to have vacuum cleaners, and four out of ten families had washing machines in 1920. Refrigerators were the rarest electric equipment at that time. After two decades, however, refrigerator possessions shot up, and almost half of the families owned these three electric items in their homes. More families started to own such devices, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, almost all households had fridges and vacuum cleaners. The washing machine was owned by more than 70% of families, which slowly but steadily increased until 2019. At that point, there was hardly any family without a refrigerator or vacuum cleaner.
Interestingly, with the increasing number of electric appliances owned by families, their need for household work such as preparing meals, cleaning, and washing clothes remarkably diminished. While they used to work for 50 hours per week doing such work in 1920, it decreased to 20 hours in 1960 and to 10 in 2019.