Laundry

• 1. Introduction

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  Laundry is one of the few tasks that every human culture has had to solve, ever since people first began to wear clothes. In Homer's Odyssey, Princess Nausicaa and her handmaidens are washing laundry by the shore when they spot the shipwrecked Ulysses and rescue him. The scene is ordinary work made memorable by chance. That ordinariness is the point. Because the need is universal, the methods used to meet it have drawn the interest of several branches of scholarship. Who did the washing, and where, and with what? Why did a stream-side chore become a social institution in some places and a despised trade in others? And how did a job done by hand for thousands of years become a machine humming in a basement?

• 2. Down By The Water

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  Watercourses were where laundry was first done, letting the moving water carry away the materials that caused stains and smells. In the rural regions of poor countries, clothes are still washed this way. Agitation does much of the work, so laundry was rubbed, twisted, or slapped against flat rocks. One name for such a surface is a beetling-stone, linked to beetling, a technique used in making linen. A wooden substitute went by the name battling-block. The dirt itself was beaten out with a wooden implement called a washing paddle, battling stick, bat, beetle, or club. Over time these scrubbing surfaces near a water supply gave way to portable rub boards. Those in turn were replaced by factory-made corrugated glass or metal washboards. Once the clothes were clean, they were wrung out, twisted to force out most of the water. Then they were hung on poles or clothes lines to dry in the air. Sometimes they were simply spread across clean grass, bushes, or trees.

• 3. The Village Wash-House

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  Villages across Europe that could afford it built a wash-house, sometimes called by its French name, the lavoir. Water was channelled from a stream or spring into the building, which might be no more than a roof with no walls. Inside, two basins usually sat with water flowing constantly through them, one for washing and one for rinsing, beside a stone lip inclined toward the water for beating the wet cloth. Some lavoirs set the wash-basins at waist height, while others kept them on the ground. The job of doing the laundry was reserved for women, who washed all their family's laundry. Washerwomen, also called laundresses, took in the laundry of others and charged by the piece. Because the wash-house was an obligatory stop in many women's weekly lives, it became a meeting place. It was a women-only space for discussing issues or simply chatting. The Catalan idiom fer safareig, literally to do the laundry, means to gossip. European cities ran public wash-houses too, so the poorer population would have somewhere to wash. The authorities hoped to foster hygiene and reduce outbreaks of epidemics, and these facilities were sometimes combined with public baths. To make the water more effective, large metal cauldrons known as a wash copper were filled with fresh water and heated over a fire, since hot or boiling water removes dirt better than cold. A posser agitated clothes in a tub, and a washing dolly, a wooden stick with an attached cluster of legs or pegs, pushed the cloth through the water. Many of these village wash-houses are still standing, historic structures with no obvious modern purpose.

• 4. The Machine Age

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  The Industrial Revolution completely transformed laundry technology. Christina Hardyment, writing a history that begins with the Great Exhibition of 1851, argues that it was the development of domestic machinery that led to women's liberation. The mangle, called a wringer in American English, was developed in the 19th century. Two long rollers sat in a frame with a crank to turn them, and a worker fed sopping wet clothing through, compressing the cloth and forcing out the excess water. It was far quicker than twisting by hand. The mangle was a variation on the box mangle, used mainly for pressing and smoothing cloth. Other 19th-century inventors built hand-operated washing machines to replace the tedious rubbing against a washboard. Most worked by turning a handle to move paddles inside a tub. Early-20th-century machines added an electrically powered agitator. Many were simply a tub on legs with a hand-operated mangle on top. In time the mangle itself became electrically powered, then gave way to a perforated double tub that spun out the water in a spin cycle. Drying followed the same path with clothes dryers, also spinning perforated tubs, but ones that blew heated air rather than water. The credit for the appliances stretches across more than a century. The manual clothes dryer was created in 1800 by M. Pochon of France. Henry W. Altorfer invented and patented the electric clothes dryer in 1937. J. Ross Moore, a North Dakota inventor, designed automatic clothes dryers and published his electric dryer design in 1938. Industrial designer Brooks Stevens added an electric dryer with a glass window in the early 1940s.

• 5. Who Did The Washing

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  Around 1900, one in four ethnic Chinese men in the United States worked in a laundry, typically putting in 10 to 16 hours a day. Discrimination, a lack of English-language skills, and a lack of capital had shut Chinese immigrants out of most desirable careers in both the United States and Canada. By the start of the Great Depression, Chinese people in New York City were running an estimated 3,550 laundries. In 1933 the city's Board of Aldermen passed a law clearly intended to drive the Chinese out of the business, limiting ownership of laundries to U.S. citizens among other measures. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association tried fruitlessly to fend it off. Out of that failure came the openly leftist Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, or CHLA, which successfully challenged the citizenship provision and preserved the workers' livelihoods. The CHLA grew into a broader civil rights group, but its numbers fell sharply after the FBI targeted it during the Second Red Scare of 1947 to 1957. Other places assigned the work differently. From 1850 to 1910, Zulu men took on the laundering of Europeans' clothes, both Boer and British. The work recalled the specialist craft of hide-dressing that Zulu males practiced as izinyanga, a prestige occupation that paid handsomely. They built a guild structure, much like a union, to guard their wages and conditions, becoming one of the most powerful groups of African work-men in nineteenth-century Natal. In India the laundry was traditionally done by men, where a washerman was called a dhobiwallah and dhobi became the name of their caste group. A laundry-place is generally called a dhobi ghat, a term that survives in place names such as Mahalaxmi Dhobi Ghat in Mumbai, Dhoby Ghaut in Singapore, and Dhobi Ghaut in Penang, Malaysia. In the Philippines, much of the laundry was done by hand until the early 1980s, when washing machines became more affordable, and the work fell generally to women, with a professional laundrywoman called a labandera.

• 6. Stalls, Lye, And Solvents

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  The workers in ancient Rome who cleaned cloth were called fullones, the singular being fullo. They treated clothes in small tubs that stood in niches surrounded by low walls, known as treading or fulling stalls. Each tub held water mixed with alkaline chemicals, sometimes including urine, and the fuller stood inside and trampled the cloth, a technique called posting elsewhere. The aim was to apply the chemical agents so they could resolve the greases and fats. These stalls are so typical of the workshops that archaeologists use them to identify the remains of a fullonica. The chemistry behind washing has always mattered as much as the muscle. Various substances increase the solvent power of water, such as the compounds in soaproot or yucca-root used by Native American tribes. Europeans long soaked laundry in ash lye, usually sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide. Soap, made from lye and fat, is an ancient and common aid, though modern washing machines typically use synthetic powdered or liquid detergent instead. Some fabrics never touch water at all. Dry cleaning uses a chemical solvent other than water, typically tetrachloroethylene, which the industry calls perc. It cleans delicate fabrics that cannot survive a washing machine and dryer, and it can replace labor-intensive hand washing.

• 7. The Right To Dry

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  Florida, the Sunshine State, is the only state to expressly guarantee a right to dry, while Utah and Hawaii have passed solar rights legislation. Many homeowners' associations and other communities in the United States forbid residents from using a clothesline outdoors, or restrict it to spots not visible from the street or to certain times of day. Citizens protesting these rules created a right to dry movement. A Florida law states plainly that no deed restrictions, covenants, or similar binding agreements running with the land may prohibit solar collectors, clotheslines, or other energy devices based on renewable resources from being installed on buildings. No other state has such clearcut legislation. The fight has played out bill by bill across the country. Vermont considered a Right to Dry bill in 1999, but it was defeated in the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee. The language later appeared in a 2007 voluntary energy conservation bill introduced by Senator Dick McCormack. Colorado passed legislation in 2008 that made it possible for thousands of American families to use clotheslines in communities where they had been banned. In 2009 clothesline legislation was debated in Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Oregon, Virginia, and Vermont. The energy stakes drive much of the argument, since dryers can make up a considerable fraction of a home's total energy use. Similar measures have been introduced in Canada, in particular the province of Ontario.

• 8. Heat, Shrinkage, And A Demon

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  Drying at a temperature of at least 60 degrees Celsius, or 140 degrees Fahrenheit, for thirty minutes kills many parasites, including house dust mites, bed bugs, and scabies mites along with their eggs. Just over ten minutes is enough to kill the mites themselves. Simple washing kills dust mites, and three hours of direct sunlight kills their eggs. Heat that cleans can also damage. Novice users sometimes shrink garments when applying heat, and wool is the worst offender because scales on the fibers stick together under heat and agitation. Cotton and other fabrics shrink a little too, since their fibers are stretched by force during production, though far less than wool. Some clothes are pre-shrunk to avoid the problem. Color bleeding is the other common trouble, when dye runs from a colored article onto white or pale ones. Many laundry guides advise washing whites separately, and the bleeding is lessened by cold water and repeated washings. Sometimes the blending is welcomed, as with madras cloth, and laundry symbols printed on clothes help consumers avoid these pitfalls. Synthetic fibers carry a newer cost, contributing to microplastic pollution. The mundane machine has even fed the imagination. A 1972 short story by Stephen King called The Mangler, and its 1995 film adaptation directed by Tobe Hooper, unfold at the Blue Ribbon Laundry, where a demon-possessed mangler spreads terror.