Summary: Love is a modern luxury that was often difficult and dangerous to pursue in premodern Europe. Geographic, social, economic, and physical factors limited and shaped romantic relationships among different classes of people. Historical sources and evidence show how love was harder in premodern Europe than it is today.

Love is the most common reason Americans get married or move in together. With such overwhelming agreement, it’s easy to forget that love is a modern luxury. While humans have certainly always fallen in love, it was often difficult and dangerous to pursue.

At the most basic level, love was limited by geography. In early modern Europe, the royalty and upper aristocracy sometimes courted and married across great distances, but the romantic range for the vast majority of people was as far as they could walk or ride. In his book, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, the English Historian Laurence Stone notes that in 17^th century England, almost eighty percent of local gentry married someone in their own county. Among the peasantry, ninety percent married within a ten-mile radius.

Ironically, the upper classes, who had the largest geographic reach, had the least control over whom they married. Stone writes that if wealthy parents did not select their child’s spouse outright, they would at least retain veto power over the relationship. The poorer the family, the less property the parents had “to withhold as a threat” if their children chose an unacceptable mate.

When choosing their child’s partner, wealthy parents, especially aristocratic ones, usually sidelined love and affection in favor of social and economic gain. In the marriage between Jemima Montagu and Philip Carteret, which Stone describes as “typical,” the two aristocratic families accepted the marriage and ironed out the financial details before even notifying the bride.

Not only did women have little agency before the marriage, but once married, they became their husband’s property. Peasant and, later, working class women could spend their entire lives in domestic drudgery, first for their parents, then for their employers, and finally for their husbands. Of those three stages, marriage was sometimes the worst. As late as 1869, John Stuart Mill wrote that:

In the most naturally brutal and morally uneducated part of the lower classes, the legal slavery of the woman … causes them to feel a sort of disrespect and contempt towards their own wife which they do not feel towards any other woman, or any other human being, with whom they come in contact; and which makes her seem to them an appropriate subject for any kind of indignity.

Of course, not everyone pursued status through marriage, and some people were lucky enough to marry someone they loved. But regardless of the social circumstance, the physical side of love was, for the most part, dirty (in a bad way) and dangerous.

First of all, there was no privacy. According to Stone,

Living conditions were such that among the bulk of the population before the second half of the nineteenth century, whole families lived, worked, ate and slept in one or two rooms. In Leeds in the early nineteenth century, the typical cottage was fifteen feet square.

The poor often had to share a bed with two or three other people, leading to some awkward situations. Court records from Elizabethan-era Essex “turn up evidence of a man having intercourse with a girl while her sister was in the same bed and of a case in which the girl’s mother was in the same bed.”

Hygiene was terrible across all social classes, and among the poor, it was atrocious. Soap was too expensive to use regularly, and decent sanitation was basically non-existent. Stone writes that in 19^th century Rennes, “there was a population of seventy thousand, but only two houses with bathrooms, and only thirty public bathhouses.”

Of course, people in premodern Europe were accustomed to strange-smelling lovers. But that doesn’t mean they liked them. Stone writes that the English diarist and naval administrator Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was so opposed to bathing that his wife kicked him out of her bed. In the 1760s, the women at a Blenheim Palace Christmas party collectively protested that the aristocrat Topham Beauclerk was giving them all lice. And it wasn’t just women who complained—in the 1670s, the Earl of Rochester wrote this particularly revealing stanza:

But filth was the least of their problems. People suffered from all kinds of horrible sicknesses, and diseases of love were no exception. Using an 18^th century English census, researchers at the University of Cambridge estimate that around eight percent of the population of Chester, a small English city, was treated for syphilis before the age of 35. In London, over twenty percent may have sought treatment. By all accounts, syphilis was common, and gonorrhea was rampant. The (admittedly libertine) Scottish biographer James Boswell (1740-1795) contracted gonorrhea at least nineteen times.

To treat syphilis and gonorrhea, which some believed were two versions of the same disease, doctors used mercury. Patients ingested it, spread it on their sores as an ointment, and were sometimes even blasted with mercurial steam in gigantic stoves.

While mercury did provide some relief from these diseases, it is highly toxic and builds up in the body over time, eventually causing permanent neurological damage.

In one way or another, modernity, which started with the Industrial Revolution, has solved all of these problems. Arsenical compounds and, eventually, penicillin provided safer and more reliable treatments for syphilis and gonorrhea. Even when HIV emerged in the 20^th century, we dealt with it quickly by historical standards.

Hygiene is also rapidly improving. Worldwide, nearly eighty percent of people now have access to a basic latrine, and in the developed world, good sanitation services are practically universal. Thanks to skyrocketing incomes, disinheritance has become an increasingly empty threat, meaning we have more and more agency over our romantic relationships. And, with cheap air travel and widespread access to cell phones, there is little stopping us from having a fling on the other side of the world.

So, however you spent Valentine’s Day, be grateful we live in a time when we can search for love, cure our clap, and sleep, alone or together, in our own beds.

Summary: In 1980, it took 54.17 hours of work to buy a coffee maker, toaster, blender, can opener, mixer, and food processor. In 2020, it took only 6.54 hours of work to buy the same set of appliances.

Has innovation improved kitchen appliances? To answer this question, we went back to the 1980 Sears Fall Winter Catalog and looked at the prices of various kitchen appliances, including a coffeemaker, toaster, blender, can opener, mixer, and food processor. The total cost of all these items was $219.94. In 1980 unskilled workers earned $4.06 per hour, so it took 54.17 hours of work to equip one’s kitchen with these modern appliances.

We then searched Walmart’s website to find similar items in 2020. The total nominal price of these six items had dropped by 57.32 percent to $93.87. However, nominal unskilled wages had increased by 253.7 percent to $14.36 an hour. As such, it only took 6.54 hours of work to buy these six appliances in 2020. The time price, in other words, had fallen by 87.9 percent. Kitchen appliance abundance increased by an average of 729 percent, from 254 percent for blenders to 2,023 percent for food processors. Here is a detail of our findings and analysis:

For the time required to buy a set of these appliances to equip one house in 1980, you could equip 8.29 houses in 2020. Abundance in the kitchen has been increasing at a compound annual rate of around 5.43 percent a year. At this rate, abundance doubles every 13 years.

As you prepare your dinner this evening, take a moment and thank the many kitchen appliance innovators who have given every household an extra 47.63 hours of leisure to enjoy.

Summary: This article challenges the common perception that human progress has made us work harder and deprived us of leisure. It shows how both market and domestic labor have declined over time, thanks to technological innovations and economic changes. It traces the history of labor alleviation from the Viking era to the present day, and celebrates the benefits of having more time and freedom to pursue our interests.

People often complain that we are all working too hard and that human progress is pointless if we have to labor and strain to achieve our current lifestyles. They say we would be better off curtailing our desires and returning to some Edenic life with more time for ourselves. The problem is that Edenic life never existed. In fact, over the past millennium, humanity has been working less and less. And a thousand years is probably long enough to make the claim that working less is a trend, not a blip.

To understand working hours, it is important to recognize two points. First, households (some societies define households as containing only parents and children, while others extend the definition to cousins and nephews and so on) are the central economic units that should be discussed. Second, labor comes in two flavors: domestic work and market work. Domestic work includes food preparation, childcare, cleaning, or any other labor within the household. Market work generates money or goods to trade for any goods and services that the household does not produce. The “labor burden” on the household is the combined number of hours spent doing those two types of work.

Market and domestic labor can substitute one another. Children can go to kindergarten, and food can be bought as take-out. Likewise, clothes can be purchased from a factory, or they can be stitched at home. People tend to use the option that gets them the desired good or service with the least amount of work. As I will show below, the net effect of changes in those two forms of labor determines the total household labor supply. Or, to put it less formally, it determines how long people have to work to gain what they want. Once those two kinds of labor are added up, a declining trend in the total number of hours worked becomes apparent. Consider this report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston:

Specifically, we document that leisure for men increased by 6-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours). 

And that was just for the period between 1965 and 2003. A closer look at the 20th century suggests that market working hours fell for men and rose for women. The rise in female market working hours was precipitated by technological innovation and a concomitant decline in the number of domestic working hours. Domestic working hours fell greatly for women and, less dramatically, for men. The net effect of the four processes was that leisure hours rose, and total working hours fell, for both men and women.

In his 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, the British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that the next century would usher in an age of prosperity. He also forecasted that people would work less and spend more time at leisure. Keynes turned out to be right. But many modern readers, who come across Keynes’ prediction of a 15-hour workweek, wonder why they are still putting in 40 at the office. The answer is that the work we killed was the domestic labor done largely by women. 

One author estimates that it took 60 hours a week of physical labor to keep a 1930 household working. Today, it takes perhaps 15 hours. Those numbers are not exact, but when you consider the washing machine, the gas oven, the vacuum cleaner, prepared food, and steam irons, the amount of household work eliminated is immense. One of Hans Rosling’s TED talks recounts how the washing machine brought him books. According to the Swedish physician, once the washing machine liberated his mother from laundry, she had more time to read to him. The South Korean economist Ha Joon Chang claims that the washing machine – by which he really means all domestic labor-saving technologies – changed the world more than the internet.

But labor alleviation did not begin in the 20th century. In her new book (The Fabric Of Civilisation came out in November 2020), the American writer Virginia Postrel estimates that it took 365 full days of work to spin enough thread to make a Viking sail. Days and days of work to create enough thread to weave a bandana and weeks to make a pair of jeans. The Vikings used the drop spindle to make thread – a basic technology that humans used for millennia. The spinning wheel, which partly mechanized the process, arrived in Europe sometime in the 11^th or the 12^th century A.D. 

Then came the Industrial Revolution, first with the Spinning Jenny, which was followed by Crompton’s Mule and endless other derivatives. These machines progressively automated what was a horrendously time-consuming and nearly exclusively female domestic task for centuries. The economic historian Brad Delong has remarked that when women of any class are depicted in older literature, there is always reference to their spinning. By the time of Jane Austen’s novels in the late 18th and early 19th century A.D., spinning is never mentioned – it was all done in the factories by then.

We all have more leisure now than our forebears did. We have more time to do as we wish and fewer needs that force us to do as we must. But this wonderful outcome of human progress is obscured by the fact that, in large part, it is the household labor that has been automated away. Sure, the Roomba might not be a great leap forward, but it is just the latest iteration of a process that began a thousand years ago. And there is no sign of it ending.