Washerwomen

Public opinion decried the occupation of seamstress

but offered no alternatives.

In looking at women who made a living doing needlework I have found that 19th-century attitudes considered seamstresses quite low on the scale of occupations. There were a couple of jobs open to females that were lower, however, among them prostitution and thievery.

Vanity Fair, 1861

Racial stereotyping of Irish laundress in a Civil War camp

One socially acceptable profession a step below seamstress was that of washerwoman. It was a job for the uneducated, the non-English speaker, the recent immigrant, the slave and the free-woman-of-color.

The Irish washerwoman was such a cliche that there is a fiddle tune with the name.

And nobody wanted one in New York City during the anti-Irish bigotry of the 1850s.

It wasn't that the job was unskilled labor; the advantage was

that it required no formal education. Another advantage:

There was always plenty of laundry to be done.

The stereotype is of a Chinese laundry man

but there must have been plenty of women working in Chinese laundries.

Civil war army laundress by Winslow Homer for Harper's Weekly

Hard, back-breaking work is another cliche.

Laundry wasn't only about getting the clothes and household linens clean, the laundress finished

with ironing in the age of starched cottons and linens. Catherine Beecher will tell you the basics in her 1841 book A Treatise on Domestic Economy: For the Use of Young Ladies at Home

Page 275

See Chapter 26 "On Washing"

Basic tools of the trade: a wooden laundry tub,

a barrel with staves so tight it holds water.

Note the iron on the ground in front of the tub of this army laundress during the Civil War.

The man is holding another basic tool, a wooden stick for agitating the wet laundry, called a laundry dolly in England. Beecher calls it a wash stick and says you need a wooden fork too, to remove the wet clothes.

This may be England, where the woman on the left is

agitating the clothes.

British washer women

An insult to the Scottish laundress

and some soft core pornography. Legs!

Mrs. Hallam, 1932

Archives of New Zealand

Another vital tool: Wash board to scrub stains.

This woman photographed in 1863 seems to have

a more sophisticated tool for scrubbing.

Jack Delano photo

Buckets from the pump in an Iowa winter in the 1940s

The hard work also involved obtaining the water. And as there was no cold water soap....

Photo by Arnold Genthe, New Orleans, 1920

Boiling the water first in a metal container

One needed some kind of a wringer to get the water out.

Then the clothes were dried---on a sunny day in the yard if one was lucky.

Boston 1905

Inside if it looked like rain

And then the ironing began.

There was no spray starch. You added the starch in a starch tub when the clothes were wet.

And if you go back to Catherine Beecher's time there was no commercial starch. She said you needed a supply of  "starch, neither sour or musty....Before hanging out, dip [the clothes] in starch, clapping it in, so as to have the equally stiff, in all parts."

You had to make your own starch and your own lye (she spelled it ley.)

They hadn't invented the electric iron yet. Heck, they hadn't invented

the ironing board yet.

Doris Ulmann photographed a woman using a "sad iron" in the 1930s. You heat a sad iron on a stove and use it with a pot holder while it remains hot. You have another iron in the fire waiting.

Russell Lee photographed a refugee ironing with a sad iron in a tent

in Oklahoma in the late 1930s.

Jack Delano photo, Georgia

Once everything was starched, ironed and primped there was optional delivery.

Bowling Green, Ohio

by Lewis Hine

Steam Laundry delivery, Alaska

After considering the whole occupation of washerwoman I have

a new respect for a skilled occupation.

Refugees in a cabin 

Russell Lee, Oklahoma

"Washings and Iornings

Done Here"

Bertha Bridges's 1940's string star quilt is on view right now

at the North Carolina Museum of History in QuiltSpeak.

She raised her daughter in Shelby County, North Carolina by working as a laundress,

sending her to the Hampton Institute and Columbia University.

See a post about Irish laundress Mary Kilraine Komiskey who was awarded Civil War veteran's honors at her death:
https://civilwar.gratzpa.org/2015/06/mary-kilraine-of-williamstown-civil-war-laundress/

And read Tubs & Suds: Civil War Laundresses in the Field, Camp & Hospital by Virginia Mescher:
http://www.raggedsoldier.com/final_laundry_vv.pdf

Historical Fiction

Being unable to find any facts about the sources of the chintz quilts we've been looking at closely for several years, I have come up with a fiction.

Historical fiction. The tale:

Reasonable approximation of Miss Black and Mr. Green

before their marriage

Twenty-year-old Jane Black is making a good marriage in South Carolina in 1835.  Her intended is heir to an enormous lowcountry plantation empire---thousands of acres of rice and cotton, hundreds of slaves to farm it and a beautiful if isolated country home called Oulde Scotland in the backwaters just a little west of the Atlantic sea islands.

Currier & Ives approximation of Oulde Scotland

Human property makes the Green family one of the richest in the U.S.

Her future mother-in-law Mrs. Green wants Jane to have a thoughtful gift and the best household linens so she asks her husband to contact their factor in Charleston.

Their factor Mr. Brown

might look like this. Prosperous, reliable, honest.

Their factor or agent Mr. Brown does all their business. He sells their crops in England and loans them money to buy next year's seed and this year's household goods like sugar and coffee. He arranges to ship the manufactured goods up river to the plantation and to ship the crops out.

Mr. Brown has recently purchased a set of Sevres china for the Greens.

Mr. Brown does their shopping in Charleston and he has contacts in England and France for real luxury goods. He keeps accounts with little actual money changing hands. Annual cotton sales pay for a year's worth of shopping. If the cotton fails, he keeps his planters afloat for a year until the next crop. Thus the Greens are not affected by weather or market ups and downs unless year follows year of poor weather or political instability.

Mr. Brown has recently purchased an up-scale house like the one on the left in 

the city. Although not really Carolina aristocracy he lives like it.

 Mr. Brown, of course, keeps a percentage of transactions for himself.

Mrs. Green's neighbor has purchased two quilts similar

to this for her daughters.

Mr. Green writes Mr. Brown that his wife would like to buy an elegant chintz bedcover for her new daughter in law. Engagements are often short but there is enough time before the wedding that the enslaved needlewomen (the "servants") can get it quilted if it is promptly delivered. Mr. Brown often deals with requests like this as chintz bedcovers are quite the fashion in Georgia and the Carolinas among the elite. He knows just whom to contact.

Mrs. Lavender runs a high-end sewing business in Charleston. She herself is a free-black woman (an F.P.C.---free person of color as the census would show). She employs many free black seamstresses to sew household goods for the wealthy. Several of her seamstresses are enslaved but have been hired to work out in her sewing room with their wages going to their owners, of course. She also has a few Irish immigrants who do good work. And several widowed Charleston matrons do handwork for her at home but few people know that these down-on-their-luck aristocrats are forced to earn money.

Charleston was a major port and a major retail center

Mrs. Lavender is a good designer, an excellent needlewoman and a careful supervisor, well known for her drapes, chair covers and bedcovers.

She is also quite frugal and often buys fabric directly from ship owners who import English chintzes in quantity. The regular captains know she is a good customer for high-quality cotton florals and stripes. She is known never to waste a square inch of the imported cottons or silks.

Mrs. Lavender tells Mr. Brown she has just the thing for the Greens. She's recently purchased a good stock of chintz with fruit baskets and stripes to match.

All the Charleston society ladies have been ordering bedcovers featuring these large fruit baskets or similar chintzes. Give her a few days and she will have her girls stitch a large top.

Mrs. Green is thrilled to have her order delivered so quickly and she sets Lucy and Dorcas, her most talented servants to work at quilting the top in a simple grid design.

Saida might have time to help quilt when the

baby is asleep

All other household sewing comes to a standstill while Lucy and Dorcas sit at the frame with a little help from some of the other enslaved women who have time. The bedquilt is quilted, bound and ready to give to Jane just in time.

Mrs. Lavender might design something like this,

not a lot of applique work, incorporating small scraps from other

projects. Stripes are quite the fashion as in the borders. Her sewing girls

can get it finished in a few days.

Jane loves the bedquilt and saves it for best. As her daughters grow up they learn to respect it too and when their mother dies after her eighth childbirth, the children put it away. The eldest, another Jane, gives it to her own daughter telling her the story of how her sainted mother stitched the quilt with her own hands when she was a young bride.

"She was an excellent needlewoman but this is the only piece

of her work that's been handed down. Treasure it always."

Well I made the whole thing up. But I like the scenario.

As we often say around here:

"That's my story and I'm sticking to it."