The hidden herstory of laundry

The surprising, almost feminist history of a hated household chore

 “To fail to understand the history of housework is to fail to understand ourselves.”

—Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave

I’ve become obsessed with the history of housework lately because it turns out to be more fascinating than you would think. It’s a story about gender, technology, time, and value. It’s the story of how women got stuck with the “second shift” and the “mental load” and it has nothing to do with God, the bible, genes or gender. The story is also not as simple as “women did all of it and then got machines to do it and we were free.”

But this post is just about laundry. 

In olden times, everyone agreed that laundry day was the worst. It involved hauling buckets of water. Firewood needed to be chopped or otherwise acquired—this was usually a job for men and/or children. The fire had to be started and maintained. Large vats of water had to be brought to a boil. Clothes needed to soak, to be soaped up, swirled around, and rinsed. Wet clothes had to be hauled from one tub to another (and wet laundry is heavy). Water had to be wrung out. Then everything to be hung up to dry.

Ironing was another day of hellish work with hot fires and heavy irons. 

It was a two day process that had to be repeated weekly and in addition to all the regular household chores of the day. And it had to be done no matter the weather—imagine hauling around cold wet laundry on a freezing winter day, or standing over hot irons in the heat of summer. Nobody really liked it. 

So you can see why the first thing anyone did as soon as they had any extra income was send their laundry out to be done, or hired someone to come do it at their home. 

That someone was almost certainly a woman. 

Olden times laundry day.

Taking in laundry was work women could do from home while taking care of her other chores and watching the kids. It was a really hard job, but it was a way for a “housewife” or “trad wife” to earn some money on the side (though the money she earned from it went straight to her husband because of patriarchal laws designed to keep women financially dependent on men and powerless in the world). But it was a job a woman could do from home, on her own terms and her own time. I imagine more than a few of them did not hand over everything they earned. It’s interesting to think that doing laundry could be a source of independence for women. The original WFH gig. 

In her book More Work For Mother, Cowan writes: 

Laundresses were the most numerous of all specialized house servants; many women who did their own cooking, sewing, and housecleaning would have a laundress to do the wash or, failing that, would send some of it to be done. “Out” might have been the home of the laundress herself, or it might—especially in the early decades of the century—have been a commercial laundry, business establishments that were especially numerous in urban and suburban communities.

Later in the 19^th century, humans developed commercial laundries in the cities. People just sent out their dirty laundry and it came back clean and pressed. Woohoo! Women were freed from laundry day—imagine getting an extra day in the week! Working women were able to affordably and reliably get help at home. This was especially great now that there was more laundry, thanks to the mass production of cloth and the arrival of ready made clothes and other linens which made it easy to have more. So everyone who could—just about everyone did—sent out their laundry to commercial laundries. 

A commercial laundry in the late 1800s.

Before we lament the terrible conditions of factory work—long hours, hard, tedious and dangerous work, low wages—it must be noted that overall, 19^th century women vastly preferred factory work to house work or being a servant because even though the hours were long, they were clearly defined and a woman could be “off the clock” at the end of the day and had her own free time. Finding household help was the great problem of the era—keeping house at almost any class level required help and no one wanted to do it. Because housework is relentless and thankless and now women had other options.

Then the washing machine came along and ruined everything. 

Throughout the 19^th century, people were inventing and patenting machines to help with laundry. In the early 1900’s, machines that resemble the washer/dryers we have today hit the market…and so did the utilities and infrastructure to support it, like running water and electricity. Yes, it made doing laundry at home easier than ever before. But this wasn’t a good move for women’s free time.  Cowan writes:

“The decline of the commercial laundry is, in fact, one of the few instances we have of a household function appearing to be well on its way to departing from the home — only to return.” 

Laundry once again became a chore someone did at home. And that someone most likely a woman. It used to be that men had a part in this chore—they gathered the fuel for the fire and the water. But thanks to the technology of running water and electricity, their role in the chore had been outsourced, setting them free from it entirely. This happened with so many of the household chores men helped with. Cowan writes, “Virtually all of the stereotypically male household occupations were eliminated by technological and economic innovations during the nineteenth century, and many of those that had previously been allotted to children were gone as well.” 

What remains is a woman at home, sorting laundry, putting it in the dryer, pulling it out to fold it and put it away all while doing sixteen other things at home. Because women were now doing laundry at home “easily” and “for free” commercial laundries fell out of favor. And so we’re stuck doing laundry once again.