It depends on what you’re doing. When canning or doing large baking jobs...nothing beats it. Idf you have a family, you can teach them to scrape off any food and pit their dishes in the machine. When you have a lot of company for dinner, its a godsend. When folks are at home during the day, their dishes go into the machine throughout the day instead of the counter or sink..sometimes people make more work for themselves than is needed. I dont have a dishwasher right now, but I sure miss mine. When I visit family its a relief when they have one. A washing machine, dishwasher and freezer are my most needed and favorite appliances.
I'll agree; but add the stove and cooktop and the water heater.
We are blessed indeed in this country. People don't even realize. I remember my grandmother's difficult laundry toil with an old wringer washer, or the sink with a scrubbing board.
For drying, she had back yard clotheslines for fair weather, but had to use lines in the smelly basement in bad weather. She stretched men's and boy's broadcloth trouser legs over aluminum forms to dry, and had racks that looked like screen doors with nails around the edges on which to stretch lace curtains to dry in the sun. Cotton fabrics dried stiff and scratchy (unless they were soaked in starch solution before drying and then ironed) because there were no consumer fabric softeners, steam irons or spray starch until the 60s. The old flat irons were primitive and often scorched the fabric with brown burn marks.
The starching, sprinkling and ironing of the family's clothes took a second day's housework—for larger families than most people have today; people even used handkerchiefs instead of tissues to blow their noses until around 1959 or so, and they were also washed and ironed, as were cotton pajamas, pillowcases and the top edge of the bedsheets.
All of it began again every Monday and Tuesday.