Hating laundry is not rational, but I do. Laundry has never been easier; to give a serviceable performance requires minimal labor and even less skill. We have not only washers now but dryers, soaps that whiten whites and brighten brights, wardrobes of machine-washable clothes. According to the Census Bureau’s 2020 American Housing Survey, more than 85 percent of Americans can do it without leaving the house. Yet despite all of technology’s best efforts, the problem still exists. There is always more laundry.
“Laundry defies the rules of lifestyle innovation and the promises of capitalism”
This is not for lack of trying. We have been doing what is recognizable as modern laundry — using soap and water to make what was dirty clean — for 200 years now. We have outsourced it and insourced it and mechanized it and developed apps for it, but while we have made it easier, we have not made it less. Like so many basic functions of life maintenance — eating, showering, cleaning, sleeping — laundry has yet to be hacked out of existence. But what makes laundry special is that it has also not improved.
Laundry defies the rules of lifestyle innovation and the promises of capitalism. In the years after World War II, automatic washing machines and accompanying in-home dryers became suburban household staples, and laundry now looks more or less as it did then. It has not been elevated to the status of a wholesome “hobby” (cooking), nor has it been successfully captured by the wellness market (washing your face). Laundry is instead an intractable condition. And if we are in a multi-decade stalemate, the only option is to change ourselves.
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time before laundry, although it was less romantic than one might hope. Until the 19th century, most outerwear, made from wool, leather, or felt, couldn’t be washed, and while linen underlayers could, they often weren’t, explains Suellen Hoy in her history of cleanliness. It wasn’t until cotton became the fabric of our lives — in part because it was so easy to clean — that American women entered the era of perpetual washing.
“This development was no doubt viewed as an improvement by many people,” writes technology historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan in her landmark analysis More Work for Mother — one imagines it certainly improved how many people smelled — but it also introduced the nation’s women to yet another chore. Nineteenth-century laundry was performed and dreaded weekly. Historian Susan Strasser points to the diaries of one Nevada woman who, in 1867, called laundering “the Herculean task which women all dread” and “the great domestic dread of the household.”
The descriptions of this process defy nostalgia: Sort the clothes, and soak them overnight in separate tubs. In the morning, drain that water, and then pour “hot suds” over the “finest clothes.” Rub each item against a washboard. Wring out each item, and “rub soap on the most soiled spots, then cover them with water in the boiler on the stove and ‘boil them up.’” Repeat with plain water. Wring. Rinse with bluing (a trace of blue dye to restore whites to optimal whiteness). Wring. Dip items in need of starching in starch, and wring again. Hang dry. Start again. Generally, this would take place on Monday, conveniently freeing up Tuesday for intensive ironing.
An 1888 Ivorine ad featuring women washing clothes.Donaldson Brothers/Buyenlarge/Getty Images
Presumably, at least one 19th-century contrarian must have enjoyed this process — there is always one — but it was mostly loathed and whenever possible avoided. “From all available evidence — how-to manuals, budget studies of poor people’s households, diaries,” Strasser observes, “it appears that women jettisoned laundry, their most hated task, whenever they had any discretionary money at all.”
To know how a society feels about a task, you only have to look at who gets the honor of performing it. In the South, enslaved and then free Black women. In the North, often young, unmarried immigrants. Whenever possible, it was delegated to laundresses, or outsourced to commercial laundries, and by the end of the century, the majority of American households had at least some of their washing done by someone else.
There is an alternative version of history where laundry left the home and stayed out — most of us don’t mill our own flour, for example, or churn our butter, or bake our bread, and when we need or want new clothing, we buy it at the store. But commercial laundries peaked in the 1920s. Then laundry came crawling back, thanks to the rise of the electric washing machine. The promise of the electric washer was that it did the hard labor of scrubbing for you, although you’d still have to fill it, empty it, and wring out the wet wash.
The promise of the automatic washing machine, which...
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