Thoughts about Laundry

Midday Saturday, and I am just getting around to writing.

Yesterday was a working day. Laundry, mostly.

Also, I was doing the church linens this week. Some of them come in lipstick stained from wiping the rim of the communion cup. They have to be cleaned, then starched and ironed. It's not a job I mind...for some reason, because I don't have much that has to be ironed, I think of ironing as a pleasurable activity.

And because I do history, and reenacting, it made me think of old ways of doing laundry and ironing. Washing was done for linens and cottons, but not usually for wools or silks (they got special treatment, and were seldom cleaned).

It began with water. Water to haul into the kettle to heat. I know what that feels like. There was a time for a few months I had to do my own laundry by hand. Just filling pots up and carrying them to where you are going to work is heavy work. About 8 lbs. a gallon.

Then you wetted the clothes, scrubbed them on a board to loosen the dirt, and often boiled them to get them really clean. You'd use bluing in the whites to keep them looking good, and dip them into starch.

And then the wringing. That's the worst. How your arms give out squeezing the water out.

During the 19th century, Monday was washing day, a custom that lasted well into the 20th century. In New Orleans, it became the custom to put a pot of red beans on the stove you had fired up to heat the water, both because the heat was there anyway, and because if you were doing the laundry, you didn't have much time to do any fancy cooking. It's still the custom there.

Tuesday or Wednesday were ironing and mangling days. Flat irons had to be heated on the stove, or sometimes had a spot to hold coals. There were special irons for ruffles. And in the days before perma press, sheets wrinkled, and they were ironed or run through a mangle, which was a device to smooth the wrinkles. Later it would look like wringers on a wringer washer, especially after they started to have electric heat for them, but the earlier ones involved boards. Took a good bit of elbow grease.

Everybody who could sent their laundry out, especially those living in town, or had their daughters or servant girls do it as much as possible.

So there, as I took the linens out of the dryer and took them over to iron them with my nice electric steam iron and my aerosol bottles of starch, I said a little "Thank you, Lord," for not having to do this the same way my great grandmother might have done it.