ANALYSIS: TRUE. Kitchen Design Isn’t Sexist. It Liberated Women.

All that stuff in our kitchens is, of course, why were able to leave them. Women in the 1920s spent about 30 hours every week preparing meals. Thanks to food processing technology and labor-saving appliances, that number has dropped into the single digits. Men have taken up some of the slack — and it seems worth noting that standardizing kitchens too high for the average woman has probably made them more attractive to the average man. But even if you add in the culinary labors of our male partners, Americans are still spending less than a third as much time cooking dinner as our great-grandmothers did.

Women could never have gone into the workforce in the numbers they did if they had still been expected to spend 30 hours a week feeding their families. They were propelled into careers by the mass-produced modern kitchen, which, with all its flaws, remains one of the greatest feminist advances the world has ever seen.

Ironically, much of that freed-up time has been expended on complaints about what sexist prisons kitchens are, and how that’s all the fault of men.