Washing Their Hands Of the Last Frontier

"I think if I wash by my hands, I do a better job," said Andres, 65, of Germantown. "We have to fill up the dishwasher. If you do it by hand, it gets clean right away."

Her daughter, Grace Rivera-Oven, says she cannot afford not to use it. Her five-cycle, stainless-steel Kenmore allows her to spend more time shuttling her children to baseball and soccer, serving on community boards and freelance writing.

As a teenager, she got a friend to teach her how to operate the dishwasher -- "She was white; I figured she knew how." Before her mother got home from work, she would run a load.

These days, she can use the dishwasher anytime she wants. Even so, she feels as if she's missing something. That's why every Saturday morning, she does the breakfast dishes by hand with her 10-year-old daughter, Amalia.

"We just gossip, gossip," said Rivera-Oven, 35. "I just wash them, and she dries. It just reminds me of when I was her age. I did them with my mother. Oh, I loved the drying."

Her mother chimes in, stirred by the memory. "Oh, yes, I remember when she would dry and I would check," Andres said, pretending to rub a glass between her fingers. "Squeak, squeak, squeak."

Kitchen historians speculate that the dishwasher lies at the heart of what it means to be a family. Dishwashers began appearing in many middle-class American households in the late 1960s and 1970s, about the time that many women began entering the workforce. A decade later, the microwave came along. The family dinner hour disappeared. It's been downhill from there.

"When people ate dinner together, they also cleaned up together," said Vicki Matranga, a kitchen historian and designer for the Illinois-based International Housewares Association. "Americans now want convenience. The kitchen is a showplace where you heat up your food in the microwave."

Outside the United States, Canada and Western Europe, dishwashers are uncommon. In most countries, people cannot afford them; if they could, then they already have maids, who can do the dishes by hand.

A 2004 economics report from the government of India noted that a growing middle class had pushed up sales of clothes washers, refrigerators and small appliances by 20 percent a year. Dishwashers, however, were a "negligible market."

In tech-crazed South Korea, many families boast refrigerators with built-in TV screens and a cooler that regulates the temperature especially for jars of kimchi, the spicy pickled cabbage -- but no dishwasher.

At Sears, officials do not make much of an effort to market dishwashers to immigrants. The company's Kenmore Elite TurboZone was touted in mainstream media, but Spanish-language newspapers and magazines ran only general ads about appliances.