I did not expect to have to write this, but I can say publicly and without reservation that I absolutely love my tumble dryer. I love its stern prompts to empty the lint filter or the water reservoir. I love the bossy beeping sound it makes when it has finished a cycle, asking me to stop what I am doing to attend to the fruits of its labour. Most of all though, I love the smell that this faithful matron workhorse casts around the house: a smell of clean clothes and boiled Persil. In short, the smell of domestic order. Sniff closely enough and you will detect the curious whiff of my moral virtue.
Martin Lewis, doyen of personal finance, otherwise known as Mr Money Saving, has branded the tumble dryer a ‘demon appliance’
Sadly, this is a minority take. Tumble dryers are now seen as the enemy. Martin Lewis, doyen of personal finance, otherwise known as Mr Money Saving, has branded the tumble dryer a ‘demon appliance’. Speaking on his Radio 5 Live podcast, Lewis urged his listeners to use a drying rack or dehumidifier for laundry citing the rising cost of tumble drying – typically ‘a quid per load’ – as evidence enough that the tumble dryer has had its day. In these straitened times of eco-zealotry, a vented or condenser tumble dryer with a power rating of 1,500- 2,500W could cost approximately £1.21 to £1.56 to run per cycle according to fuel poverty charity National Energy Action.
But it’s not just about the dosh. Tumble dryers are the environmental equivalent of a gas-guzzling SUV, releasing microfibre pollution into the atmosphere with every load, according to research by Prof Kenneth Leung, director of the State Key Laboratory of Marine Pollution and department of chemistry at City University of Hong Kong. These facts have begun to drip – or should that be dry? – into public consciousness. Search on Reddit and you will find that the consensus seems to be to use the tumble dryer sparingly. Those forced to put their clothes on unwieldy drying racks are though at risk, apparently, of ‘looking poor’, while many cite space and heating bills as reason enough to bung the whole snake of wet washing into the dryer to avoid your house turning into a Chinese laundry.
This is all fair enough, but I ask you this, Mr Lewis: do you have children? Because if you do, the tumble dryer is the sine qua non of your daily grind. It may not be the environmental choice nor aesthetic preference, but need a pair of hockey socks dried in the nine minutes before you leave for the school run? Get that dryer on. Toddler sick down their pyjamas in the crucial bedtime window? The tumble dryer greets you with open arms, firmly instructing you to put the quick spin on pronto.
Yes, the washing machine may have done more to liberate women than the contraceptive pill but spare a thought for its now maligned sister appliance before she gets condemned to the annals of the prelapsarian period before eco-housekeeping took off. A time when you flung whatever you wanted into the rubbish bin, shoved anything else into the fire and cleaned your sinks with nuclear-grade bleach strong enough to clean up a Chernobyl reactor.
Scholars of the domestic have rightly made much of the rise of technology in the home. In his book Evolving Households: The Imprint of Technology on Life, professor Jeremy Greenwood of my alma mater the University of Pennsylvania, cites the washing machine as the crucial development in unlocking women’s entry into the workforce as the time spent on domestic chores decreased. This idea, while compelling, has now been widely debunked as it emerges that even with the helping hand of technology women are still spending 2.5 hours a week laundering clothes that are probably not even their own whilst also being part of the economically acknowledged workforce. As I happen to quite enjoy doing the laundry this statistic does not offend me; indeed, some of my best literary ideas have come to me as I have fished a pair of children’s pants out of the back of my Bosch condenser dryer. I prefer to see the rise of technology as a hand up rather than a straight handout as Thatcher would have done. The washing machine and the tumble dryer are technological interventions, but I alone am responsible for the socks.
But I wonder what first-wave feminists make of the recent demonisation of the tumble dryer. Are we women – and it is overwhelmingly women who do the laundry according to YouGov – set to regress back to a time of mangles and linen presses? Are we to spend our days turning towels on radiators, regressive slaves to the weather and the washing line? No and no again. We must resist as we know how, by putting on a 30-minute tumble speed dry and consigning Martin Lewis to the damp washing line outside where he belongs.
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