Did the Sewing Machine Reduce the Workload for Women?

Is new technology that replaces a worker a good thing? We have a tendency, it seems to me, to believe that most previous inventions turned out to have overall net social benefits, but to be worried that all future inventions will instead have overall net social costs. Philipp Ager and Davide Coluccia tackle the question of how the arrival of the sewing machine affected women in the second half of the 19th century in “Liberation Technology? The Impact of the Sewing Machine on Women” (CEPR Discussion Paper 21496, May 2026). Tim Phillips interview Philipp Ager about the research in “Did the Sewing Machine Liberate Women?” (VOXEU Talk, June 12, 2026). I’ll quote here from their discussion. The sewing machine was expensive enough that it was only used by industry up to about 1860. At that point, Isaac Singer introduces a much less expensive machine for household use. Sales to households rose into the hundreds-of-thousands per year, and by the end of the 1870s, about half of all US…