I ’d wish to commit this to the washer - dryer in my building ’s basement . You are a splendid machine , and I ’m drear for taking you for granted . I bow before the genius of your elegant spin - rinsing - waste pipe cycle . You clear those fourth part , my friend . I ’d also like to give a big vociferation - out to your pals , the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher .
No doubt , modern housework is as pleasant as sit through your niece ’s recorder recital . But equate to housework of the past tense , we are live on the domestic ambition . For century , chore were unimaginably sweaty , painful , smelly , time - consuming affair .
1. LAUNDRY TOOK ALL DAY …
Let ’s start up with laundry . launder a shirt in Victorian England involved at least eight painstaking steps . In his bookAt Home , Bill Bryson explains that you had to soak the washing in smelly lye for several hours , pound it , scrub it , moil it , rinse it , squeeze it out , cart it outside , and bleach out it .
2. … AND REQUIRED VIOLENCE.
People literally had to beat the dirt out of dress with big wooden paddle called mallet . These look a muckle like cricket bats , and caption has it that laundresses ’ shaver invented cricket by chasing bubbles with them . ( But that legend probably needs to be pounded out , too . ) The mallet were unite by a shocking number of other bizarre - face instrument , like wooden sock stretchers and peggy sticks — which resembled hand tillers you used in the garden .
3. YOU HAD TO DO YOUR LAUNDRY OUTSIDE—EVEN IN THE WINTER.
visit the laundromat mean schlepping to the nearest stream or pool — even in the wintertime . British man of the cloth Reginald Heber trace women in St. Petersburg , Russia , doing the wash via a kettle of fish in a frozen lake , where they would “ stand for hour on the ice , plunging their bare munition into the freeze water . ”
Now try complaining about the scratchy Wi - Fi at the cleaners . I dare you .
4. IRONS WERE MADE OF IRON.
If doing your washables in the frigidity did n’t make you fall back a fingerbreadth , there was always blaze away heat . For days , irons were in reality made of iron — lump of metallic element that weighed as much as 9 pounds and had to be incessantly reheat in front of a fire , not to observe cleaned , svelte , and sandpapered .
In Robert Caro ’s masterful biography of Lyndon Johnson , he devotes two full chapters to the workout that wash twenty-four hour period and iron Clarence Shepard Day Jr. provided . He quotes Johnson ’s cousin as saying , “ I will never forget how my back injury on backwash days . " ( We also learn that LBJ was an expert at shirking chores . )
5. URINE WAS A PRIMARY STAIN-FIGHTER.
And lest we forget , there was no bloom - scented detergent . Among the most democratic stain removers ? Urine . InIf Walls Could babble , Lucy Worsley tells of a Samuel Butler who take the housemaids to salve a pail of piss to help fight fox - hunt stain . People doing the washables also had to apply starch , which made their already peeing - soaked hands raw and blistered .
6. CUTLERY GOT THE ROYAL TREATMENT.
clean looker was just as much of an trial by ordeal . Bryson explains that in nineteenth - one C Europe , people cleaned brand forks and knife with the phrenetic preciseness of Adrian Monk : “ It was n’t enough to wash away and round off them ; they had to be smartly strop against a piece of leather on which had been smudge a library paste of emery powder , glass , brick dust , crocus , or hartshorn munificently sundry with lard . Before being put off , knife were greased with mouton fatness ( to vote out rust ) and enfold in brown newspaper publisher , and so had to be unwrapped , washed , and dry before they could be used again . ”
7. MAKING THE BED WAS A COMPLICATED WEB …
As for progress to the bed ? Until metal springs were invented , in the tardy 19th 100 , many bed were support by a mesh of rophy . These ropes had to be periodically tightened .
8. … AND UNMAKING IT WAS WORSE.
And let ’s take a moment of silence for the puritanical maid who had to “ air ” her mistress ’s bed . As Worsley explain , this mean despoil and hanging up the horsehair mattress , feather mattress , underblanket , undersheet , bottom sheet , top bed sheet , three or four blankets , continental quilt , and pillow covert . Every day .
9. EVEN LIGHT TOOK WORK.
We should also be grateful for the humble lightness switch . To get read luminousness in the 19th century , your average citizen perch candles made of sheep and cow tallow ( which was more low-cost than beeswax ) . Not only did these stink like a McDonald ’s after an incendiarism flak , but they also ask constant attention , since you oft had to trim the wick with special scissors .
Now exempt me . I ’m off to build my shrine to Josephine Cochrane , inventor of the dishwashing machine .
