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