In my last post, I made a casual reference to just how hard it was to do laundry in the mid-nineteenth century, but I didn’t bother to elaborate.* Time to correct that oversight.

Laundry in the mid-nineteenth century was a difficult job, one that most households undertook no more than once a week.**

Washing machines were a relatively new invention, first demonstrated at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition in London. They consisted of a ten- or twenty-gallon cylinder on top of a boiler that produced both hot water for the clothes and the steam that drove the engine. The operator would put clothes and soap in the cylinder, which then revolved for five or ten minutes. High-end versions had a second boiler for hot rinse water. The machines were expensive and found only in the wealthiest homes. In 1861 a basic machine cost $50—more than $9,000 today. (Realistically, anyone who could afford to buy a washing machine in 1861 also could afford to hire someone to wash the household linens. Maybe even more than once a week.)

Most people made do with wooden washtubs, large kettles for heating water, and plenty of elbow grease.

The first step, one most of us don’t think of as part of the laundry process today, was mending and patching. Once she finished mending torn clothing and bed linens, the laundress or housewife moved on to stain removal, which was a time-consuming process that could involve applying lemon juice to stains (a relatively expensive choice), exposing stained items to direct sunlight, or soaking them overnight in “blood warm water” (basically the same temperature as a baby’s bottle). Washable clothing (made from fabrics such a cotton and linen as opposed to silk, leather, velvet and some woolens), bed linens and rags were then washed in hot water using soft soap and a washboard,*** boiled to kill lice and insects, rinsed several times in hot water, allowed to cool, and then rinsed again in cool water.**** Wet laundry was hung out to dry on anything that would hold it off the ground: a clothesline if you were lucky enough to have one, bushes, a porch railing. A home laundry guide from 1902 pointed out that even drying clothing had its challenges. You needed a “grassy corner well open to the sun,…sheltered from high winds…the attentions of wandering poultry… and the incursions of pigs, puppies and calves…they not only soil the clothes, but will tear and even eat them.” Once dry, clothing would be ironed using a cast-iron metal iron heated on a stove or run through a mangle, a device made up of two rollers and a crank that used pressure to smooth wrinkles from the fabric.

All this sounds hard enough, but this description masks the layers of physical work involved in the process. Water had to be brought from sources with varying degrees of inconvenience: a stream or pond at some distance from a home, a shared pump in an urban neighborhood,  a farmyard well. Once acquired, water was heated in large kettles on wood-or coal-burning stoves—the fuel for which had to be lugged as well— and carried from kitchen to washtub. Commercial soap was not yet widely available outside of major cities. Many families made their own.

From mending to folding, laundry was backbreaking work. There’s a reason why washerwomen are portrayed as physically powerful in popular literature and images of the time.

Makes you appreciate modern laundry equipment doesn’t it?

*In part because I assumed I wrote a blog post about this back in 2015 when I was writing Heroines of Mercy Street, a book about Civil War nurses in which laundry played a surprisingly large part.

**My description draws on research in the United States. The details may have differed in Europe but the big picture would have remained the same.

***I paused here to do a little dive into the question of washboards, which seem to have appeared in the early nineteenth century and were greeted as a serious technological improvement

****Though I’m willing to bet that some harried women skipped a few rinses on occasion.