This, young 'uns, is a picture of a washboard. It's an object that you might have seen in an antique store or a museum. The washboard (this one is made of metal, like the one I remember from my childhood, but they also came in glass and wood) sat in the "laundry sink," which was filled with hot soapy water. You scrubbed your clothes on the washboard. It might be hard for you to believe, but when I was a youngster there was no such thing as a washing machine. It came later -- in our house, sometime in the early 50s, just a little after the refrigerator replaced the icebox. The washboard pictured above was cutting-edge technology in the 40s.
What was a "laundry sink"? In our house, and I think in most regular-people homes, the kitchen sink had two parts -- a shallow basin for everyday use, and a second basin, deeper and wider, for dirty clothes. In some houses, the laundry sink was made of soapstone or concrete, but ours was porcelain.
Every Thursday was "wash day," which meant that my mother spent the entire day, dawn to dusk, doing the laundry, sometimes with the help of a hired "colored woman," but more often with the help of her mother, my grandmother, who lived just around the corner but spent wash day with us. It was a two-person job. Clothes were soaked, scrubbed on the washboard, rinsed, squeezed, then hung on the outside line to dry. Then, after a few hours, taken down and ironed. Sheets and pillowcases, if I remember correctly, were washed every week; blankets periodically.
It was an difficult task, but I don't think anyone ever recognized how arduous it was. It was just the way things were. Women, as everyone knew, did laundry. I know that I never thought to lift a finger to help, though I wonder whether, if I had had a sister, she would have been recruited to do so. Certainly, I never saw my father participate, not in the slightest. If my mother ever complained, she never did so in my hearing. "Wash day" customs were immutable, or seemed to be so. Gender relations in the world of my youth were criminally unequal. Embarrassing to recall even now.
Then, sometime around 1950, came the wringer-washer.
Now more hand squeezing. Clothes were washed in the tub, then fed through the mechanical wringer, which consisted of two rubber cylinders which were turned with a crank. The pressure squeezed out the water, eliminating the need for hand wringing. It was a great step forward. In our house there was a wringer washer, portable, that had to be wheeled into place and connected to the kitchen faucets. It was a scary machine because a child had to worry that his mother's fingers would be accidentally wrung.
Sometime later (I can't remember exactly when) came the washing machine with a spin cycle. I remember that when I worked at the Sears Roebuck warehouse starting in 1957 that we delivered many of them, so they must have appeared hard on the heels of the brief flowering of the wringer washer.
In retrospect, I don't think there's a machine that contributed more to the revolution in housework and therefore the revolution in women's work and status than the washing machine.
This morning I did my laundry. Two minutes to put the dirty clothes in the washing machine and another minute to transfer the clean clothes into the dryer. That's it.
Let us therefore pause to appreciate the luxury and convenience of the contemporary laundering. And let us pause also to appreciate our hard-working mothers and grandmothers.