Laundrymen Construct Their World: Gender and the Transformation of a Domestic Task to an Industrial Process

Abstract

Laundrymen Construct Their World: Gender and the Transformation of a Domestic Task to an Industrial Process ARWEN PALMER MOHUN Laundry is women’s work. For some centuries, this is what most Europeans and Americans assumed. Whether in manor houses or army camps, by streamsides or in tenement rooms, laundrywork has traditionally been one of the most powerfully gendered ofall domes­ tic tasks. Men, on the other hand, avoided doing laundry for reasons beyond the fact it was hot, difficult work. The man who submerged his arms into a washtub or picked up an iron (except in a tailor’s shop) risked unsexing himself. A man who needed his washing done sought out a woman to do it for him—either wife, or servant, or washing woman.1 Women were also the guardians of knowledge about the processes involved. They taught their daughters how to make soap and to season an iron, how to brew starch and remove stains. The tools and the knowledge and the task itselfwere indisput­ ably theirs.2 Dr. Mohun is assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware. She thanks Nina Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, Carroll Pursell, Erik Rau,John Staudenmaier, and Angela Woollacott as well as participants in the Johns Hopkins Colloquium in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine for careful readings and wise advice on previous drafts of this article. ’Some anecdotal evidence even suggests that men who were forced to do their own washing did it at night or behind closed doors to avoid being observed; see Caroline Davidson, A Woman’s Work is NeverDone: A History ofHousework in the British Isles, 1650-1950. (London, 1982), pp. 136-37. 2For more on domestic laundrywork in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, see Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History ofAmerican Housework (New York, 1982) and Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Workfor Mother: The Ironies ofHousehold Tech­ nologyfrom the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, 1983). For Great Britain, see Davidson, and Pamela Sambrook, Laundry Bygones (Ayelesbury, Bucks, 1983). Patri­ cia Ma\co\rnson’s English Laundresses: A Social History, 1850-1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1986) is a unique study of the lives and experiences ofwomen who worked in both commer­ cial laundries and in taking in washing. There is no equivalent study for American washerwomen although Tera Hunter, “Household Workers in the Making: AfroAmerican Women in Atlanta and the New South, 1861-1920” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1990), is one of several recent studies of African-American women who worked as domestic laundresses.© 1997 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/97/3801-0007J01.00 97 98 Arwen Palmer Mohun In the mid-19th century, “steam” or “power” laundries began to appear in American and British cities, offering consumers an alter­ native to the rigors of wash day or the uncertainties of employing a washerwoman. These enterprises distinguished themselves from their domestic counterparts by adapting industrial methods and technologies to the problem of cleaning clothing, sheets, towels, and other items made of cloth. Rather than scaling up primitive washing machines then available for home use, early laundry proprietors bought or modified textile machinery that had been designed for bleaching and dying cloth.3 In common with other industrial em­ ployers, they also reorganized the work process, dividing up the tra­ ditional parts ofthe laundress’sjob—washing, drying, starching, and ironing—between multiple workers and, eventually, specialized ma­ chines. While women continued to constitute a majority of wage workers in these laundries and to do the wash at home, men controlled the industrialization of laundrywork. They created, propagated, and controlled the technology known collectively as a “steam laundry.”4 These first commercial laundries are hardly more than shadows in the historical record, evidenced primarily by their presence in city directories and fire insurance maps. In the 1880s, however, large numbers of new entrepreneurs entered into the laundry business. This period ofgrowth was accompanied by the first efforts oflaundry owners and managers, “laundrymen” as they now called themselves, to create a public identity for themselves. Through trade journals and associations, laundrymen created local, national, and transAtlantic (Anglo-American) communities where technical informa­ tion could be shared...