Touch command

The button was added to many household appliances in the 50s and 60s to eliminate daily drudgery, to automate daily tasks that get in the way of our leisure time with the remote control. And what’s more drudgy than washing clothes?

This ad for a 1959 Hotpoint washing machine sums it up well. She has Touch Command! She has absolute control over her laundry! Do not get in her way! Notice how she pushes the button, as if she’s knighting a valorous warrior.

So did automating washing machines really cut down on our laundry time? Yes and no. They definitely cut back on the brute muscle work in washing clothes, yet we still do a lot of laundry. Easy access to clean clothes now meant that we should own MORE clothes. Consider the sizes of closets in homes built in the 1920s and 1930s compared to homes built in the 1970s. You were expected to have more clothes. Automating laundry meant that expectations increased on cleanliness and variety, not just removing the drudge.

By this time, the phrase “push the button” was completely entrenched to mean “hey, it’s easy!” It was so entrenched that products that never had and never will have buttons could get in on the button act. Look at this ad for Rit color dye.

This fickle woman just can’t make up her mind what color this bedspread should be. No problem with Rit! Just push a button. It doesn’t matter whether a block of dye has buttons or not. Just push the button to follow your whim.

And now, the punchline: These two ad images were actually back to back in the same magazine, pages 15 and 16 in the October 1959 issue of Good Housekeeping. I’ll have to buy a second copy of this issue if I ever want to put them on display.

(Thanks to mikek for some inspiration on this post.)