Laundry

"Man and woman washing linen in a brook", from William Henry Pyne's Microcosm (1806). Unusually, this is depicted as a mixed-sex activity.

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.[3] The dirt was beaten out with a wooden implement known as a washing paddle, battling stick,[3] 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 wrung out — twisted to remove most of the water. Then they were hung up on poles or clothes lines to air dry, or sometimes just spread out on clean grass, bushes, or trees.

Washhouse in Sanremo, Italy, at about the turn of the 20th century

Washhouse in Cabeção, Portugal, today. Note the two basins and inclined stone lip.

Before the advent of the washing machine, laundry was often done in a communal setting.

Villages across Europe that could afford it built a wash-house, sometimes known by the French name of lavoir. Water was channelled from a stream or spring and fed into a building, possibly just a roof with no walls. This wash-house 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 wash-houses 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 (laundresses) took in the laundry of others, charging by the piece. As such, wash-houses 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 (cf the concept of the village pump). 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 wash-houses. 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, see for example Baths and wash houses in Britain. 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),[4] were filled with fresh water and heated over a fire, as hot or boiling water is more effective than cold in removing dirt. A posser could be used to agitate clothes in a tub.[5] A related implement called a washing dolly is "a wooden stick or mallet with an attached cluster of legs or pegs" that moves the cloth through the water.[6]

Model Steam Laundry, Colfax, Washington, c. 1900

The "Woman's Friend" washing machine, c. 1890 U.S.

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.[7]

The mangle (or "wringer" in American English) 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 mangle, compressing the cloth and expelling the excess water. The mangle was much quicker than hand twisting. It was a variation on the box mangle used primarily for pressing and smoothing cloth.

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 mangle on top. Later the mangle 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.

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.[8][9]

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 the 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 (CHLA), which successfully challenged this provision of the law, allowing Chinese laundry workers to preserve their livelihoods.[8] 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).[8]

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".[10]

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.

Until the early 1980s, when washing machines became more affordable in the country. much of the laundry work in the Philippines was done manually, and this role was generally assigned to women. A professional laundrywoman was called a labandera.

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.

Various chemicals may be used to increase the solvent power of water, such as the compounds in soaproot or yucca-root used by Native American tribes, or the ash lye (usually sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide) once widely used for soaking laundry in Europe. Soap, a compound made from lye and fat, is an ancient and common laundry aid. Modern washing machines typically use synthetic powdered or liquid laundry detergent in place of more traditional soap.

Many dry cleaners place cleaned clothes inside thin clear plastic garment bags.

Dry cleaning refers to any process which uses a chemical solvent other than water.[12] The solvent used is typically tetrachloroethylene (perchloroethylene), which the industry calls "perc".[13][14] It is used to clean delicate fabrics that cannot withstand the rough and tumble of a washing machine and clothes dryer; it can also obviate labor-intensive hand washing.