Historical Laundry Part 1: Who Did The Laundry In The 18th Century?

they don't have the best reputation they're known for being very broad a very loud drunkards rough on the laundry difficult to work with not the most pleasant women to be around but usually they are from the very lowest class of people so often when we're thinking about the 18th century we can learn a lot about the material cultures the the thing that the things that people are working with in the 18th century or we can learn about the techniques but so often what we want to learn about is the people of the 18th century the kind of people that do certain sorts of jobs I've got with me Carol Jarboe who does Maggie a laundress and she's going to tell us a little bit about what she knows about laundresses the kind of people that did that work the different levels so tell me about laundresses washerwomen all that and all the difference yeah you have such a different category of people that do the laundry you have servants in high houses who are paid laundresses that do that kind of work you have the fine laundresses that do the very hand washables the ladies maids you have the servants who work under another laundress in the household you have a household that has servants but maybe not a paid laundress and they'll bring a laundress and a professional in to do laundry every so many weeks and the other servants will help and then you have the professional laundresses who work on their own and they are normally the washer women is what you hear and they don't have the best reputation they're known for being very broad a very loud drunkards rough on the laundry difficult to work with not the most pleasant women to be around but usually they are from the very lowest class of people almost always you see the women that are doing the professional washer women of the lower class they're women whose husbands are idlers who do not help support the family or they're drunkards they perhaps don't have a husband the husband has left has abandoned them has died something along that line so you you have this group of women that turn to laundry because it was one of the very few things that any woman could do to help survive in the colonies it was a job that that was always out there and even if you lost everything you could start taking laundry from people in a living out by now you might not have been able to have done a very good laundry you would be more apt to be down by the river and you'd be more apt to be doing just the very hard rubbing or the very hard beatings and you would be very rough on the clothes but for the poorer classes of people you could be working for them and and then it wouldn't matter so much but the documentation we have on those women talk about the fact that so many of them would leave their children behind in whatever hovel they were living in even even the babies and they would go to work in the mornings like at 4:30 and not be home until after dark and the children would be there alone all day long by themselves but again this was a way they could survive it was one of the if you were someone with no education and you were a very rough kind of low person to begin with to try to do something outside of that period would be or in a higher paying job would be almost impossible so you've got these Street jobs and then you've got the washer women and you even have some that are just strictly iron manglers they called them and they would be doing just the mangling of the clothes we have documentation of neighbors chipping in and helping a woman who has lost her husband to purchase a mangles so that she could begin to make a living for herself so so you do need a lot that would they need a lot of equipment just the washer women no you would not you could just work like I said if you had a battled or you had a rock you had a place at the river that you could go you could be doing your laundry down there the bleach that you're using the chamber lye of course is something that you could be collecting on your own so you could always be bucking or bleaching if you if you had a container to put it in so but just the the washing itself just the going to the water the running water and beating even without so beating the dirt out of it and things like that it's something that a woman could get started in without having to have a lot of background behind her one of the reasons we've had so much trouble building a laundry demonstration those of us that do it is because there is very little out there it's scattered everywhere because nobody goes home and says today I washed the clothes by doing this so you just don't have that kind of information because we learned it from our mothers and our mothers from theirs and in up the line like that so so it's it's something that's passed down and handed down that's one of the reasons we all do it differently it's because it depends on where you came from the region as to what kind of things you're going to learn to do so was it sounds like there was a lot of laundry to do there was there was you can imagine if you don't live in a place big enough to do your own laundry even if you're a middle-class person if you don't have the place to have a laundry if you don't have a laundry house or wash house if you don't have a large area to do that in and then that's not stuff that you're going to keep around you'd rather hire somebody to come in and the poorer you are the more app you're going to have to have to give somebody else the laundry to do plus you have hospitals to do laundry for you've got the work houses that they would bring laundresses in sometimes to do the laundry there for them so you've got institutions that you can work with that you could always do that kind of work for you've got a lot of single men out there that need that kind of work done you know that maybe they're not they're not married or maybe they're traveling so you could do laundry at the hotels or the ends and taverns so you've got a wide range of places you could do laundry for and then you've got the camp followers that follow the the army usually they were wives of the soldiers but so that's a lot of laundry and that's a whole nother situation and a different difference of what can you do with what you've got what can you carry so were there instances of were there fraudulent things that would happen in laundry not getting paid is one of the things that I've seen the most often is that someone would bring laundry and the laundress would do it and then they would not pay them for it and I've seen several laws several things that have been written where the laundresses are having to complain or perhaps if you were to stop bringing in soap because you were embargoing somebody then here they are with no soap and they don't have any way to do that so I've seen differ different situations the biggest one though I think of the problems is the times they've had to go to court because they've not been paid and not only is that going to feed them you know but that's enough to keep them going for another day to pick up and do it again but the one thing about the laundress is that it was so difficult on your body and you see the women that do the washerwoman professionally the the lower-income people break down pretty fast because it takes a lot of work to do them it's very hard on you especially if you're doing it every single day yeah doing that to your skin oh and your elbows and shoulders from the beating just break them out and rip them apart so it's it's very very harsh very very harsh so often you've talked about the poor and the lowly how does that deal how does this connect with work houses and what's happening to the proper houses yeah there was a movement toward the end of the 1700s in this country where they were thinking that just providing poor relief for poor people was not really working really well and they had begun already building alms houses and bringing them in and they decided in Philadelphia was the first one to take off with this that it would be better if they built him a place of Industry and gave them something to do anyone who was able-bodied enough to do anything have them do something and they actually called it a bettering house because it was going to make you better for society and they built this bettering house and the women did laundry and they also took in mending and mend and clothing and they built gardens all around this this this institution would get with fences of course that you could see through and outside in these beautiful gardens they had little tea tables and it was a lovely little area and people would come and have tea and eat sandwiches and watch the poppers do their bettering you know be better for that and they would pay money to do that and that helped support the popper house also like animals in the zoo and it's kind of the the thought that was behind that so you see a lot of times in the poor houses in the houses the work houses in particular where they were always trying to come up with something to not only help support the house but to give the people who are able to do something something to do so you see laundry coming to the women's areas a lot in those places thank you so much Carol for all this wonderful information so easy to digest and there's so much there in fact we've got several upcoming episodes on the process on the equipment on the chemistry of laundry so stay tuned thanks for watching

Channel: undefined

Views: 382,625

Rating: 4.9622312 out of 5

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, laundry, doing laundry, washing clothes, soap, laundry soap, laundry soap homemade

Id: wK9OyW4Jx_g

Length: 9min 22sec (562 seconds)

Published: Wed May 29 2019