Laundry — it’s the chore that none of us look forward to. Unless you are rich enough to hire someone to do your laundry, it is a necessary evil. The photo on the left is in my laundry room reminding me to look at the bigger picture and not focus on mundane tasks. I love the final result of doing laundry. That clean, fresh smell always gives me a feeling of accomplishment. I am grateful I don’t live in a country where the only way to clean clothes is to swish them around in a less-than-pristine body of water, laying them on large boulders to dry. Today’s washing machines and dryers sometimes take someone with a Ph.D. to operate. The abundance of buttons to push on a typical washing machine is nothing more than an answer to the clamoring needs of the American consumer. I have used laundromats before. I don’t like washing clothes only during certain hours and being so completely focused on the task — whereas at home I can do something else while clothes are washing. However, I love to sit in a giant room and smell the freshness of everyone’s clothes coming clean. I will also admit to being slightly mesmerized by the tumbling loads in giant dryers. In other words, I have a love/hate relationship with doing laundry. Let’s learn more about it.
According to Wikipedia, laundry refers to the washing of clothing and other textiles and, more broadly, their drying and ironing as well. Laundry has been part of history since humans began to wear clothes, so the methods by which different cultures have dealt with this universal human need are of interest to several branches of scholarship. Laundry work has traditionally been highly gendered, with the responsibility in most cultures falling to women, formerly known as laundresses or washerwomen. The Industrial Revolution gradually led to mechanized solutions to laundry work, notably the washing machine and later the tumble dryer. Laundry — like cooking and child care — is still done both at home and by commercial establishments outside the home.
The word "laundry" may refer to the clothing itself or to the place where the cleaning happens. An individual home may have a laundry room; a utility room includes but is not restricted to the function of washing clothes. An apartment building or student hall of residence may have a shared laundry facility such as a tvättstuga, a room in an apartment block usually in Sweden or Finland providing communal laundry facilities for the residents. A stand-alone business is referred to as a self-service laundry — launderette in British English or laundromat in North American English.
History – watercourses
Laundry was first done in watercourses, letting the water carry away the materials which could cause stains and smells. Laundry is still done this way in the rural regions of poor countries. Agitation helps remove the dirt, so the laundry was rubbed, twisted or slapped against flat rocks. One name for this surface is a beetling-stone, related to beetling, a technique in the production of linen; one name for a wooden substitute is a battling-block. The dirt was beaten out with a wooden implement known as a washing paddle, battling stick, bat, beetle or club. Wooden or stone scrubbing surfaces set up near a water supply were gradually replaced by portable rub boards, eventually factory-made corrugated glass or metal washboards.
Once clean, the clothes were rinsed and then wrung out — twisted to remove most of the water. Then they were hung up on poles or clotheslines to air dry or sometimes just spread out on clean grass, bushes or trees. Finally, they were ironed.
According to the article “History of Laundry” at oldandinteresting.com, long thin washing bats are not very different from sticks. Both can be used for moving cloth around as well as for beating the dirt out of it. Doing this with a piece of wood was called possing, and various styles of possers, washing dollies etc. developed as an improvement on plain tree branches.
A milking-stool-on-a-broomstick contraption is generally called a dolly nowadays, but was also a dolly-legs, dolly-pegs, peggy or maiden, in different parts of Britain. The metal cones on a handle as shown in the photo on the left are usually possers in the UK or plungers in the U.S., but can also be called dollies, possing-sticks, or poshers. Some people used sticks with grooved blocks of wood on the end, called dollies or ponches for "punching" the laundry. All were for agitating the cloth in a washtub, dolly-tub or possing-tub.
The metal cone possers used suction to drive the water through the dirty clothing. Some had perforations to help the water circulate. They were more suitable for manufactured cotton clothes than earlier tools designed for linen, as only the heaviest cotton fabrics could take a beating from a big wooden dolly.
Possing is an older word than dolly; it means beat down or thrust. There are early 17th century references to linen being possed and to possing tubs, and the big Oxford English Dictionary quotes a 1764 source describing a posser as a "log of wood." The first written mention of a washing dolly is in the last decade of the 18th century, when the word started to apply to rods or paddles in early washing machines. The plain wooden stick used for lifting the laundry from a tub of boiling water to a cold rinsing tub was also called a dolly or dolly-stick.
Domestic laundry was often treated like newly woven textiles being "finished." Today we have only vague ideas about how the fabrics in our store-bought clothes are manufactured, but traditional laundry methods often followed techniques used by weavers, including home weavers.
History – lye, bucking and soaking
Soaking laundry in lye, cold or hot, was an important way of tackling white and off-white cloth. It was called bucking and aimed to whiten as well as cleanse. Colored fabrics were less usual than today, especially for basic items like sheets and shirts. Ashes and urine were the most important substances for mixing a good "lye." In addition to helping to remove stains and encourage a white color, these act as good degreasing agents.
Bucking involved lengthy soaking and was not a weekly wash. Until the idea of a once-a-week wash developed, people tended to have a big laundry session at intervals of several weeks or even months. Many women had agricultural and food preparation duties that would make it impossible for them to "waste" time on hours of laundry work every week. If you were rich, you had lots of household linen, shirts, underclothing etc. and stored up the dirty stuff for future washing. If you were poor, your things just didn't get washed very often. Fine clothing, lace collars and so on were laundered separately.
Soap — mainly soft soap made from ash lye and animal fat — was used by washerwomen whose employers paid for it. Soap was rarely used by the poorest people in medieval times but by the 18th century, soap was fairly widespread — sometimes kept for finer clothing and for tackling stains, not used for the whole wash. Starch and bluing were available for better quality linen and clothing.
History – drying, bleaching
The Grand Wash or the Great Wash were names for the irregular "spring cleaning" of laundry. Soaking in lye and bucking in large wooden bucking tubs were similar to processes used in textile manufacturing. So was the next stage — drying and bleaching clothes and fabrics outdoors. Sunshine helped bleach off-white cloth while drying it. Sometimes cloth was sprinkled at intervals with water and/or a dash of lye to lengthen the process and enhance bleaching.
Towns, mansions and textile weavers had an area of mown grass set aside as a bleaching ground or drying green where household linens and clothing could be spread on grass in the daylight. Early settlers in America established communal bleaching areas like those in European towns and villages. Both washing and drying were often public and/or group activities. In warmer parts of Europe some cities provided communal laundry spaces with a water supply.
People also dried clothes by spreading them on bushes. Large houses sometimes had wooden frames or ropes for drying indoors in poor weather. Outdoor drying frames and clotheslines are seen in paintings from the 16th century, but most people would have been used to seeing laundry spread to dry on grass, hedgerows, etc. Clothespegs/pins seem to have been rare before the 18th century. Pictures show sheets etc. hung over clotheslines with no pegs.
History – washhouses
According to Wikipedia, before the advent of the washing machine, laundry was often done in a communal setting.
Villages across Europe that could afford it built a washhouse, sometimes known by the French name of lavoir. Water was channeled from a stream or spring and fed into a building, possibly just a roof with no walls. This washhouse usually contained two basins — one for washing and the other for rinsing — through which the water was constantly flowing, as well as a stone lip inclined towards the water against which the wet laundry could be beaten. Such facilities were more comfortable and convenient than washing in a watercourse. Some lavoirs had the wash basins at waist height, although others remained on the ground. The launderers were protected to some extent from rain, and their travel was reduced, as the facilities were usually at hand in the village or at the edge of a town. These facilities were public and available to all families and usually used by the entire village. Many of these village washhouses are still standing, historic structures with no obvious modern purpose.
The job of doing the laundry was reserved for women who washed all their family's laundry. Washerwomen or laundresses took in the laundry of others, charging by the piece. As such, washhouses were an obligatory stop in many women's weekly lives and became a sort of institution or meeting place. It was a women-only space where they could discuss issues or simply chat. Indeed, this tradition is reflected in the Catalan idiom "fer safareig" — literally, "to do the laundry" — which means to gossip.
European cities also had public washhouses. The city authorities wanted to give the poorer population — who would otherwise not have access to laundry facilities — the opportunity to wash their clothes. Sometimes these facilities were combined with public baths. The aim was to foster hygiene and thus reduce outbreaks of epidemics.
Sometimes large metal cauldrons — a "wash copper", even when not made of that metal — were filled with fresh water and heated over a fire, as hot or boiling water is more effective than cold in removing dirt.
History – washerwomen
A washerwoman or laundress is a woman who takes in laundry. Both terms are now old-fashioned.
As evidenced by the character of Nausicaa in the Odyssey, in the social conventions depicted by Homer and evidently taken for granted in Greek society of the time, there was nothing unusual or demeaning in a princess and her handmaidens personally washing laundry. However, in later times this was mostly considered as the work of women of low social status. The Magdalene asylums chose laundering as a suitable occupation for the "fallen women" they accommodated.
In between these two extremes, the various sub-divisions of laundry workers in 19th-century France — blanchisseuse, lavandière, laveuse, buandière, repasseuse, etc. — were respected for their trade. A festival in their honor was held at the end of winter — Mi-Careme, halfway through Lent i.e., three weeks after Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday. This festival has now been revived as Mi-Carême au Carnaval de Paris.
The wet nurse to George III of the United Kingdom — who was born two months prematurely — was so valued by the king when he grew up that her daughter was appointed laundress to the Royal Household, "a sinecure place of great emolument."
While having a significant social function in various human cultures over thousands of years, the spread of washing machines and self-service laundries has rendered washerwomen unnecessary in much of the contemporary world.
In literature, the washerwoman may be a convenient disguise, as with Toad, one of the protagonists of “Wind in the Willows,” in order to escape from prison; and in “The Penultimate Peril” story of the Lemony Snicket book series “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” Kevin the Ambidextrous Man poses as a washerwoman who works in the laundry room at the Hotel Denouement.
Also, washerwomen serve as characters depicting the working poor, as for example in “A Christmas Carol” when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come showed Ebenezer Scrooge his future where he is dead, the laundress assists the charwoman Mrs. Dilber and the unnamed undertaker into stealing some of Scrooge's belongings and selling them to a fence named Old Joe.
In the American television show “Power Rangers Beast Morphers,” the character Zoey Reeves started out as a washerwoman for Grid Battleforce.
Washing machines and other devices
The Industrial Revolution completely transformed laundry technology. Christina Hardyment, in her history from the Great Exhibition of 1851, argues that it was the development of domestic machinery that led to women's liberation.
The wringer was developed in the 19th century — two long rollers in a frame and a crank to revolve them. A laundry worker took sopping wet clothing and cranked it through the wringer, compressing the cloth and expelling the excess water. The wringer was much quicker than hand twisting.
Meanwhile, 19th-century inventors further mechanized the laundry process with various hand-operated washing machines to replace tedious hand rubbing against a washboard. Most involved turning a handle to move paddles inside a tub. Then some early 20th-century machines used an electrically powered agitator. Many of these washing machines were simply a tub on legs, with a hand-operated wringer on top. Later the wringer too was electrically powered, then replaced by a perforated double tub, which spun out the excess water in a spin cycle.
Laundry drying was also mechanized with clothes dryers. Dryers were also spinning perforated tubs, but they blew heated air rather than water.
Chinese laundries in North America
In the late 19th and early 20th century, Chinese immigrants to the United States and to Canada were well represented as laundry workers. Discrimination, lack of English-language skills and lack of capital kept Chinese immigrants out of most desirable careers. Around 1900, one in four ethnic Chinese men in the U.S. worked in a laundry, typically working 10 to 16 hours a day.
Chinese people in New York City were running an estimated 3,550 laundries at the beginning of the Great Depression. In 1933, the city's Board of Aldermen passed a law clearly intended to drive the Chinese out of business. Among other things, it limited ownership of laundries to U.S. citizens. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association tried fruitlessly to fend this off, resulting in the formation of the openly leftist Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, which successfully challenged this provision of the law, allowing Chinese laundry workers to preserve their livelihoods. The CHLA went on to function as a more general civil rights group; its numbers declined strongly after it was targeted by the FBI during the Second Red Scare (1947–1957).
South Africa
From 1850 to 1910, Zulu men took on the task of laundering the clothes of Europeans — both Boers and British. "Laundering recalled the specialist craft of hide-dressing in which Zulu males engaged as izinyanga, a prestige occupation that paid handsomely." They created a guild structure — similar to a union — to guard their conditions and wages, evolving into "one, if not indeed the most, powerful group of African work-men in nineteenth-century Natal."
India
In India, laundry was traditionally done by men. A washerman was called a dhobiwallah, and dhobi became the name of their caste group.
A laundry-place is generally called a dhobi ghat; this has given rise to place names where they work or worked, including Mahalaxmi Dhobi Ghat in Mumbai, Dhoby Ghaut in Singapore and Dhobi Ghaut in Penang, Malaysia.
Ancient Rome
The workers in ancient Rome who cleaned the cloth were called fullones, singular fullo (cf fulling, a process in wool-making, and Fuller's earth, used to clean). Clothes were treated in small tubs standing in niches surrounded by low walls, known as treading or fulling stalls. The tub was filled with water and a mixture of alkaline chemicals, sometimes including urine. The fuller stood in the tub and trampled the cloth, a technique known elsewhere as posting. The aim of this treatment was to apply the chemical agents to the cloth so that they could do their work, the resolving of greases and fats. These stalls are so typical of these workshops that they are used to identify fullonicae in the archaeological remains.
Right to dry movement
Some American communities forbid their residents from drying clothes outside, and citizens protesting this have created a "right to dry" movement. Many homeowners' associations and other communities in the United States prohibit residents from using a clothesline outdoors or limit such use to locations that are not visible from the street or to certain times of day. Other communities, however, expressly prohibit rules that prevent the use of clotheslines. Some organizations have been campaigning against legislation which has outlawed line-drying of clothing in public places, especially given the increased greenhouse gas emissions produced by some types of electrical power generation needed to power electric clothes dryers, since dryers can constitute a considerable fraction of a home's total energy usage.
Florida, "the Sunshine State," is the only state to expressly guarantee a right to dry, although Utah and Hawaii have passed solar rights legislation. A Florida law explicitly states: "No deed restrictions, covenants, or similar binding agreements running with the land shall prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting solar collectors, clotheslines, or other energy devices based on renewable resources from being installed on buildings erected on the lots or parcels covered by the deed restrictions, covenants, or binding agreements." No other state has such clearcut legislation. Vermont considered a "Right to Dry" bill in 1999, but it was defeated in the Senate Natural Resources & Energy Committee. The language has been included in a 2007 voluntary energy conservation bill, introduced by Senator Dick McCormack. Legislation making it possible for thousands of American families to start using clotheslines in communities where they were formerly banned was passed in Colorado in 2008. In 2009, clothesline legislation was debated in the states of Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Oregon, Virginia and Vermont. Similar measures have been introduced in Canada, in particular the province of Ontario.
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