Laundry Day (Not the Band)

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…

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Telling Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Scott Stern

When I asked the people at Beacon Press whether there were other Beacon authors who would be a good fit for this series, several people immediately answered Scott Stern, author of The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison ‘Promiscuous’ Women. The book is the account of a little…

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