Laundry Day (Not the Band)
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- 1730
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- 1897
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- 1900
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.
“Stagecoach Mary” Fields Carries the Mail
Fifty years before the Six Triple Eight Central Postal Directory Battalion made postal history, a six-foot tall, powerfully built formerly enslaved woman named “Stagecoach Mary” Fields delivered the mail in rural Montana as a Star Route Carrier for the United States Post Office.*
When Mary was emancipated, she left West Virginia, where she had been enslaved, and worked her way up the Mississippi on the steam boats. She eventually ended up ending up in Toledo, Ohio.** She worked for a time at the Ursuline Convent of the Sacred Heart in Toledo, where she did the laundry,*** ran the kitchen, maintained the garden and grounds—and made friends with the convent’s Mother Superior, Mother Amadeus Dunne.*** *That friendship may have helped her keep her job: her gun-toting, hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, bad-tempered ways were not a good fit for the quiet of the convent
Mother Amadeus moved west to Montana, where she founded another convent. When she fell ill, Mary followed. She worked for a time at Mother Amadeus's new convent, St. Peter’s Mission, near Cascade Montana.. Mary’s rough manners and bad-temper ways got her in trouble with the bishop. The final straw came when she and a male employee of the mission got into a fight, in which they both pulled their guns. Neither fired, but the Bishop demanded that the nuns fire Mary. (Was the man she fought with also fired? My sources don’t say.)
Mary moved to Cascade, where she tried a number of ways to make a living. She took in laundry and opened several restaurants that failed—perhaps due to her habit of feeding people for free if they didn’t have the money to pay. Mostly she did odd jobs, including work for the Ursuline mission. (Evidently the nuns found ways to get around the Bishop’s orders.)
In 1895, now in her mid-sixties, Mary got a contract with the Post Office to be a Star Route Carrier, apparently with the help of the Ursuline nuns. She was the second woman to get such a contract since the Star Route service was established in 1845. Rural Montana was a wild place. Driving a stagecoach provided by the Ursulines, Mary delivered the mail in spite of bandits, wolves, and the weather. (A broader, more dangerous variant of “neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night.”*****) In bad weather, when the coach couldn’t get through, she picked up the mail bags and walked. She carried both a rifle and a revolver and built a reputation of being fearless and ferocious.
She retired after delivering the mail for eight years and settled down in Cascade, where she became a beloved town character, who drank in the town saloons and ate in the towns restaurants for free. She celebrated two birthdays a year because she didn’t know when she was born, wore men’s trousers under her skirts, and supported the local baseball team with flowers from her garden and a punch in the face for anyone who bad-mouthed the team.
She died on December 5, 1914. The town raised money to have her buried in a cemetery on the road that linked Cascade to the Ursuline mission, a route she had driven frequently with the mail. Her funeral was one of the largest the town had seen.
Montana-born actor Gary Cooper, who met Fields on a visit to Cascade when he was nine, summed up her life in an interview about Mary with Ebony magazine “Mary lived to become one of the freest souls ever to draw breath or a .38.”
*The purpose of the Star Route service was to reduce the cost of getting the mail from one remote rural post office to another. Previously, local stage coach companaies had carried the mail, often charging the government for the use of the horses, the wagon and a driver. Independent contractors, who provided their own transportation, which sometimes was no more than a horse or a canoe, bid for the four-year contracts to deliver the mail with “celerity, certainty, and security.”
**Which is not on the Mississippi. Some details are missing in Mary's story.
***Not a small job in the mid-nineteenth century.
****Some sources claim the friendship dated back to the days when Mary was enslaved in West Virginia, but this has not been substantiated.
*****The first version of this was written by the Greek historian Herodotus, referring to the couriers of the ancient Persian empire: “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these courageous carriers from the swift completion of their appointed course.”
https://www.sendoso.com/resources/blog/direct-mail-legend-stagecoach-mary
Hazel Ah Ying Lee: Chinese-American WASP
Hazel Ah Ying Lee was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1912. She was the daughter of Chinese immigrants—the second of eight children.
Lee was nineteen when she experienced her first flight, at the end of a friend’s flying lesson. She was hooked. She immediately began to save up the money for flying lessons from her job as an elevator operator in a Portland department store.
A few years earlier, it might have been hard for her to find a flight school that would take a Chinese-American teenage girl as a student. But the Portland Chinese Benevolent Society had recently opened the Chinese Flying Club of Portland in response to the Japanese invasion of China. Benevolent associations across the country had opened similar schools in cities with large Chinese populations with the goal of training pilots for the Chinese military.
Lee earned her pilot’s license in 1932, one of the first Chinese-American women to do so. In October of that year, she left for China with a squadron of her fellow classmates. When she arrived, she found that she was not allowed to fly with the Chinese Air Force. (Why this would have surprised her is not clear.) The air force offered her an administrative job, but she chose instead to relocate to Guanzhou,* where she worked as a commercial pilot. (Could she have done this in the United States in the 1930s? I’m not sure, but my impression is no.) She lived through the devastating bombing of that city by the Japanese in 1937—part of the Canton Operation, which was designed to blockade China and isolate the British port of Hong Kong. She spent a year in Hong Kong as a refugee, then returned to the United States where she worked for an organization in New York that sent armaments to China.
The creation of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program by the Army Air Force in 1942 gave Lee a chance to get back in the air. ** The purpose of the program was to train women to fly military airplanes. Trained WASP (not WASPs) flew non-combat missions and acted as test pilots in the United States, thereby freeing up male pilots for deployment overseas. Lee immediately applied. Lee was the first of only two Chinese-American women accepted into the program.*** At 30, she was older than most of her fellow pilots and soon became a leader in her training class. She was playful as well as a good pilot. For instance, she would write her classmates names in Chinese characters in lipstick on the tails of planes their planes.
Women pilots put up with grief because of their gender, but Lee faced special challenges because she was obviously Asian. On one flight, she was forced to land in a field. The farmer ran out to the field to investigate, armed with a pitchfork. He assumed she was part of a Japanese invasion force. Hazel had to talk fast to convince him that she was Chinese, and more importantly, American, before he would allow her to call for assistance. Back at the base, she reduced the entire chow line to tears of laughter with the story, but they all knew it could have ended badly.
After Hazel graduated from the training course in Sweetwater Texas, she was stationed at Romulus Army Air Base in Michigan, where she flew large transport aircraft as part of the 3rd Ferrying Group. In September, 1944, she was sent to Pursuit School, in Brownsville Texas, where she was trained to fly fighters like the P-51 Mustang and the P-63 Kingcobra.
In November, 1944, Lee picked up a P-63 Kingcobra from the Bell aircraft factory in Niagara Falls and flew it to Great Falls, Montana, which was a major staging area for planes being sent to the Soviet Union. (Male pilots flew the planes from Montana to Alaska, where Soviet pilots waited to fly them on the final leg to Russia.)
On November 23, Lee was making an approach to land. Another group of P-63s was arriving in at the same time. The radio on one of the planes in that group had failed several days before. The pilot, Jeff Russell, had relied on the other fliers in his group to inform the control tower at each stop that he did not have a radio.
As Lee began her approach to the runway, Russell was above her. Unfortunately, the personnel in the control tower lost track of who didn’t have a radio. When someone in the tower realized they were too close and yelled “pull up,” Lee heard the order instead of Russell. Responding to the order, she ran into Russell’s plane. Both planes crashed at the end of the runway and burst into flames. Both pilots were rescued from the planes, but Lee was too badly burned to survive. She died on November 25, 1944—the last WASP to die in the line of duty.
Because the WASP were officially civilian pilots, even though they flew under military command, the military did not pay for her funeral expenses, as they did for her mail counterparts.**** Lee’s family had to pay for the costs of transporting her home and burying her. When they tried to buy plots for Hazel and her brother, a soldier who had died in France three days after Hazel, the family was told that they could not be buried in the cemetery because they were Asian. The Lees fought back, and won.
The WASP program was disbanded on December 22. In 1977, Congress retroactively granted military status to the women who served in it.
*You may know it as Canton.
**The fact that the P is WASP is plural means that describing the women who served as WASPs is incorrect. But working around it is a pain.
***The other Chinese-American WASP was Margaret Gee, who went on to work as a nuclear physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
****Women in the WASP program also received less pay than their male counterparts, had to pay for their own room and board, and bought their own uniforms.