9 Seriously Bizarre "Future Predictions" From The 1900s

3. Women Would Become Obsolete

In 1959, the trend for labour-saving devices was well and truly rolling.

However, this led to a fair amount of hand-wringing about what to do about our women. If we fill our houses with machines to wash the dishes, do the shopping and clean the carpets, then what exactly were women going to do all day?

One perspicacious columnist for the 1959 San Antonio Light, thought that this could well be the end of marriages. You see, with labour saving devices, a man doesn't really need a wife anymore does he? This is what he had to say:

There is an industrial designer in Detroit named Montgomery Ferar, who has taken a long look into the near future and thinks he knows what the American woman is going to be like. If he's right, she is going to be sitting on a silken pillow all day long, curling her hair, buffing her nails and thinking up ways to beguile a husband who won't need her any more.

Sounds like a nice, non-judgemental chap. Anyway, he worried what all of this free time would do to these housewives, writing that:

... the kitchen will disappear. Our woman will be sitting at the family table dressed to the teeth like a sultry adventuress while robot, self-energized utensils whip up the family dinner and serve it. After dinner the dishes "will be loaded," presumably by the husband and children, into a "dining caddy" or combination dishwasher and storage cabinet, which will roll off into another room, washing the dishes on the way.

Of course, these lazy women couldn't very well go out and get jobs, because, as the observant journalist point out, "we still haven't found a way to sew on buttons and send suits out to the cleaner". Gotta keep her around for that I suppose.