Ohh Yes!
By the eve of WWI and certainly after WWII you notice all these "quirky" washing machines had long vanished. Yes, you had top loaders offering a vast and interesting methods of agitation but one thing became clear; American women wanted fully automatic washing machines that required little involvement.
Washing is done in two basic ways; you shift the water, or you shift the wash.
Few if any of those early washers had pumps and or filled automatically. Thus you still had to "shift water" because somehow tubs had to be filled and drained. The real labor savings came from fact machines (in theory) did the agitation. But that still left often wet floors, use of wringers (and or later spin dryers), buckets, hoses, etc....
You notice all these early machines were simply semi-automatic washers. All required some degree of user interaction and that meant having to hang around on wash day. You *could* start the thing and go off and do something else, but had to return sooner or later.
What is interesting is how many of those old "vacuum cup" washers are still out there. Mostly from Easy but have seen others.
