The author discusses a network of wash houses which were in socialism considered to be a means of disburdening women of their workload in the household; by means of wash houses individual households, where women were required to look after their family, would become a part of social production. Mass consumption and production in Yugoslavia had an impact on increasing availability of washing machines in individual households, making the operation of public wash houses difficult. The findings of the treatise state that after having purchased a washing machine, the majority of women did their laundry in the privacy of their homes rather than in wash houses. In the period of public wash houses, doing laundry was considered to be work that had to be paid for, the emergence of washing machines placed it back to unpaid private sphere.