Every Sunday, my husband and I have a ritual: We strip the sheets off the bed, put them in the washing machine, and about ten seconds into the first spin cycle, I stop the badly-knocking washing machine and cuss, variations on the theme of how the goddamn sheets have gotten tangled up AGAIN, when I was SO CAREFUL in how I loaded them. It’s a good way to start my Sunday; I like to get a lot of my cursing out of the way before I go to church. Also, that way I know I’ll have something fresh to consider during confession, even if it is the same every week. And it keeps the sheets fresh, too.
Before we moved to the tropics, we didn’t wash the sheets every week. There were a lot a cleaning tasks we could afford to be more lax on when we lived in a temperate climate, including laundry. For example, I didn’t even know that bleaching the ceiling was a possible chore before we moved here—but that’s a must-do at minimum once a year if it’s 90% humidity and never colder than 60 Fahrenheit where you live, because otherwise the ceilings will mold. There is a lot of essential labor that I didn’t merely take for granted, but that I never even considered the existence of.
“Thank you for tumble dryers,” I pray, taking the damp sheets out of the washer that has FINALLY SPUN CORRECTLY and tossing them in the dryer.
We didn’t have a tumble dryer when we first moved here—though we did have 90% humidity and rainy seasons. Taking the laundry out of the washer and hanging it outside on the line meant staying at home all day to watch it—and promptly bring it, still very damp, inside when it started to rain. Hanging it inside would result in it never fully drying at all.
These days, the tumbler dryer does its thing while I’m at church, saying that I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do. For instance: I have done the laundry, but I have failed to be as thankful as I should. I was cussing at the washing machine less than an hour earlier, rather than being overwhelmed with gratitude for having a washing machine at all. And, if I’m honest, I’m probably going to do the same thing next Sunday, too.
“To my grandmother, the washing machine was a miracle,” the late Dr. Hans Rosling (1948 - 2017) relates in a famous TED talk from 2010, sharing his memory of how his mother’s acquisition of a washing machine when he was a child growing up in Sweden allowed them the free time for his mother to learn English as a second language and to read to him, paving the way for his future as a physician and the public science educator who created Gapminder.
In the 1920’s, when my grandmother was a young woman, the average American woman spent about 11 hours a week on laundry.1 This is surely an undercount: It doesn’t count the additional 1 - 2 hours a week she spent collecting firewood and hauling water, and it doesn’t count the time making her own laundry soap, necessary extra tasks for most women doing laundry in the United States at that time—the pericraft2 of laundry, if you will. By 2010, that had fallen to under four hours per week on laundry—with zero hours per week spent collecting materials to heat washing water or making soap, needless to say. And they are a very different kind of hours than my grandmother would have spent on laundry, in that my laundry hours do not involve me laboring over a basin and washboard, but rather reading things on the internet between rounds of cussing and readjusting the tangled sheets.
The first washing machine was patented in 1805, but fully automatic washing machines with a spin cycle to wring excess water from clothes didn’t exist until the 1930s, and the first laundry detergent wasn’t sold until 1918.3 The electric iron was patented in 1882. Prior to that, ironing was done with cast iron “flatirons” that were heated on the top of a stove that burned firewood or coal.
I do not iron. I cannot emphasize this point enough. Even with our fancy non-scorch ionic steam iron, ironing is awful and I hate it. This is why all my clothes are fabrics that don’t need ironing, and why my husband can fend for himself.
Wrinkle-free fabrics like the ones that make my dresses weren’t invented until after World War 2.
After the invention of the washing machine, it’s been observed that women still spent almost as much time on household chores as they did before its invention. For instance, in 1965 American women still spent over seven hours a week on laundry, and still over 50 hours a week on household chores overall. A popular explanation for this paradox is that housekeeping standards became more perfectionist4: “The standards for the amount of socially-acceptable wrinkles in your blouse or dress suddenly shot up. Even children’s school clothes had to be neatly ironed. Previous to this time, the idea of children needing to appear in ironed clothes would have seemed ludicrous,” Robin Mark Phillips writes in a review of Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch. Women would even be expected to iron the underwear and the bedsheets to keep a neat home.
Ironing bedsheets? What a ridiculous make-work task to keep women in the home by holding them to an ever-ratcheting and impossible to meet standard! That is a thought I once thought.
I had a lot of time to reflect on the privilege underlying that misconception while my husband and I were ironing bedsheets so we’d stop getting ringworm rashes and bedbug bites, before we had a washing machine plumbed with hot water and a hot air tumbler dryer.
So the thing is, about living in a place with 90% humidity and a temperature that never falls below 60 Fahrenheit, and doing your laundry with cistern water, is that it’s not just the ceilings that will mold—your sheets will, too. And those humidity and temperature levels mean that there are a lot of insects about—there’s no winter to knock down the numbers of bitey bugs. Once you get an infestation with something like bedbugs, it takes a lot of physical labor that I had never known existed to eradicate it. Mold spores and bedbug eggs are never fully removed from the wash merely by washing with cool and unchlorinated water, and they’re not killed by drying on the line outdoors, either. After washing and hanging out to dry, everything—but especially laundry that touches the skin the most, like underwear, socks, and sheets—had to be ironed to kill the mold spores and bedbug eggs.
“Forgive me my haughty spirit,” I pray, turning the dial to “Automatic-regular-more dry” and pressing the start button on the dryer. Then I put on my wrinkle-free georgette dress and head off to church.
Laundry also expanded as a task in the 19th and 20th centuries because clothes were laundered more frequently. As cotton replaced wool and leather as the dominant fabric from which clothes were made, clothes became both more washable and more abundant. Why cotton came to be the fabric of choice for clothing is because the spinning jenny had been invented in 1765, and the fully-automatic loom was invented in 1848,5 making woven cotton clothes much cheaper to make than they had been. Before the mechanization of fabric production, cloth making was almost exclusively the province of women, in an example of essential labor that we have so thoroughly taken for granted that we have forgotten it.6 In classical art, the Virgin Mary is often depicted holding a spindle. I’d seen this many times in my forays through art museums, but never recognized it—I didn’t know what a spindle looked like.
Once, women had far less labor in washing clothing because they had far more in making the raw materials from which clothing is made. And as a result, there were far fewer garments to wash.
I tried to estimate how many articles of clothing I own off the top of my head, but I can’t do it. There are too many for me to even come up with an approximation without going to the closet and actually counting.
There are three kinds of lice that can infest humans: Pubic “crab” lice, Pthirus pubis, head lice, Pediculus humanus capitis, and body lice, Pediculus humanus humanus. All three live only on humans, and only one, human body lice, can transmit disease.7 While head lice and pubic lice continue to be relatively common worldwide, body lice are only found in conditions of extreme poverty—among those living in refugee camps and occasionally in encampments of homeless populations. Among those who have any kind of building to live in, body lice are rare—even in the world’s poorest countries. This is because body lice are very particular about their living circumstances, and abandon clothing they’ve infested if it’s off a warm human body for too long. Having multiple sets of clothes that can be washed, as well as having access to water for washing, keeps body lice at bay for almost all of the world’s people today.
As recently as 80 years ago—when my grandmother was washing my mother’s diapers and making her clothing—body lice were so common that tens of millions of people every year were infected with relapsing fever (Borrellia recurrentis) and epidemic typhus (Rickettsia prowazekii), infections that can only be transmitted via infected body lice—a rate of about 5 cases per 1000 population per year. For comparison, this is about double the current annual incidence for all kinds of cancer worldwide today. Treatments were not available for either of these infections until the 1940s. Untreated, relapsing fever was reported to kill 10% to 40% of those it infected, and epidemic typhus 1% to 60%, depending on the age of the patient.8
We have antibiotics for both of these infections now, but it is very rare that we have to use them, and our abundance of clean laundry is the reason why.
Before he was executed, Jesus of Nazareth told a story:
For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.
I grumble at my unbalanced washing machine, imagining myself to be a laborer who worked all day, only to be paid the same as those who showed up at closing time. But of course, I am not: I am one of the ones who showed up after all the hard work had already been done, so deeply ignorant of the essential labor that has gone before that I can’t even properly take it for granted.
Howard Taylor Ricketts and Stanislaus Josef von Prowazek died of typhus in their pursuit of knowledge about it, which is why the bacteria causing this disease is named after them. My grandmother, like Hans Rosling’s, hauled water and washed laundry by hand. Through no merit of my own, I live in a world free from body lice and am clothed more richly than a queen. This world was bequeathed to me by others, through sacrifices I’m barely aware of. The existence of that gift is independent of my understanding of it. It is a undeserved boon I get, whether or not I believe in it.
I never even said “thank you” to my grandmother, whom I knew, let alone all those I don’t even know the names of who died making a world I can take for granted. By my very rough estimate, at least 60% of the world’s population still lives below Dr. Rosling’s “washing machine line,” with incomes of $10-20 per day. They disproportionately live in the tropics, with all that entails about the difficulty of laundry.9 And I, instead of helping, bought for myself another dress.
Through my fault, through my most grievous fault. For what I have done, and what I have failed to do. Like any adult, I have hurt others in ways I regret but will never be able to rectify. My charmed existence on its own is a debt I can never repay.
There are stains that I will never be able to get out, even with a washing machine.
When Jesus of Nazareth was executed, the soldiers who crucified him kept his clothes.
This Sunday, like every Sunday, I will do the laundry. I will wear a pretty dress to Easter service. And despite how very little I have done to deserve any of this, it will be clean.
Data from time use survey reported on by Dinkelman and Ngai, (2022) “Time Use and Gender in Africa in Times of Structural Transformation,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 36(1): 57 - 80. Their sourcing and methodology for calculating time spent on household activities in the United States and in Africa in different decades can be found in their supplementary materials. Thank you to Dr.
at for calling this study to my attention.Or “work around the work.” I learned this term and its definition from this delightful essay by S.E. Reid at
—although there it’s about art, not drudgery.Shehan and Moras, (2006) “Deconstructing Laundry: Gendered Technologies and the Reluctant Redesign of Household Labor,” Michigan Family Review 11(1): 39 - 54.
See, for instance, Robin Mark Phillips (2014), “Why Household Appliances Haven’t Made Life Easier For Women,” or, for an earlier example, Ellen Goodman writing in The Washington Post (1983), “Appliances Don't Do the Housework.”
A brief description with some nice pictures can be found at the website for a museum dedicated to this loom. Mechanical looms are the basis for computing technology, and their widespread adoption led to the riots that allow people to call me a Luddite for my deep antipathy towards AI, and they’re not wrong.
As
writes, “Picturing historical women as producers requires a change of attitude. Even today, after decades of feminist influence, we too often assume that making important things is a male domain….Yet from the Renaissance until the 19th century, European art represented the idea of “industry” not with smokestacks but with spinning women.” Originally in the New York Times, but republished at here.P. h. humanus is also known as P. h. corporis. The head and body lice clades are considered genetically distinct members of the same species. Most of the information I’m reporting here on lice comes from Fu et al., (2022) “Human pediculosis, a global public health problem,” Infectious Diseases of Poverty 11(58) and Amanzougaghene et al. (2020), “Where Are We With Human Lice? A Review of the Current State of Knowledge,” Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology 9.
Badiaga and Brouqui, (2012), “Human louse-transmitted infectious diseases,” Clinical Microbiology and Infection, 18: 332–337. Note that while humans can, in rare cases, get R. prowazekii infections from squirrels, this is not transmitted by lice.
I estimated this by correlating Gapminder’s Dollar Street images for “washing clothes” with their data on global population by income. But if you haven’t clicked on the link in the main text above to see how people do their laundry around the world, you should do that. It’s eye-opening.
Wow - I thought it was challenging moving from the Arizona desert to soggy Florida, but now realize that what I thought was humidity was relatively quite mild.
I am so grateful to be living when I do; we have no idea just how luxurious our lives are, even when we think we have a hint. God is so very good.
something deeply calm about washing machines