Doing the Laundry: A Middle-class Woman's Fantasy?

As historian Tera W. Hunter has observed, doing the laundry "was the single most onerous chore in the life of a nineteenth-century woman, and the first chore she would hire someone else to perform whenever the slightest bit of discretionary income was available" (Hunter 56). Furthermore, while new products such as the sewing machine may have made some aspects of homemaking easier, "laundry work became more dreadful as a result of industrialization. Manufactured cloth not only increased the amount of clothing people obtained, but the production of washable fabric such as cotton increased the need for washing" (Hunter 56).

This advertising card for "Chemically Pure Borax" laundry soap, like many advertisements today, probably represents more an idealized version of middle-class women's domestic management than the real-life reality of laundry work in the second half of the nineteenth century. For one thing, unlike the African-American woman who is depicted here with her arms immersed in a laundry tub that apparently stands in her employer's kitchen, the vast majority of African-American women laundresses did their washing in their own homes or in shared outdoor collaborative sites. By picking up loads of wash and taking it to their own homes, laundresses maintained a degree of authority over their labor that far exceeded that of maids and nannies working inside their employers' homes. For instance, whereas housemaids often spent from early morning through late evening with their activities closely monitored in their employers' houses, laundresses could schedule their work time around their own home responsibilities, including supervision of children. Although their work was certainly very demanding physically, it was at least less likely to infringe so much on their own family time (See Sterling 216). So, as Hunter observes, "laundry work was the optimal choice for a black woman who wanted to create a life of her own" (57).

The fact that they often did their washing in outdoor common areas encouraged African-American laundresses to develop a tangible sense of community, which in turn encouraged them to share ideas for improving their situations. Hunter and Dorothy Sterling point to a series of strikes for higher wages around the post-Civil War South as a sign that local groups of laundresses tended to develop a strong sense of solidarity, even when such campaigns failed to secure substantial increases in wages (Sterling 356-58; Hunter 92-95).

In such a context, from the point of view of the white, middle-class lady employer, having laundresses take the washing outside the middle-class home was far from ideal. Besides their resulting inability to monitor the actual work time of laundresses, middle-class women also worried about issues of sanitation, especially given unfair stereotypes associating black women with shiftlessness. So, though they were loathe to do the wash themselves, some middle-class women fretted about where and how their clothes were being handled. When we consider these ongoing concerns, elements in the advertising card for Borax laundry soap—e.g., the perfectly white wash hanging safely inside the lady's kitchen—take on enhanced resonance.

And yet, even if one could persuade a laundress to do the washing inside one's own home, there was the risk that introducing an additional worker into the household might cause friction. Harriet Beecher Stowe's satirical essay on "The Lady Who Does Her Own Work" underscores this ever-present challenge of keeping the peace among a cluster of women working within one's household. Although, in Stowe's essay, the fight that disrupts the main character's home is between a seamstress and a cook, we can read her narrative as a sign of how remarkable the harmony in this Borax-purified kitchen might truly have been. In contrast with the turmoil Stowe described, the advertising card gives no indication of tension between the (apparently) Irish cook and the African-American laundress, or between either of those two and the seemingly higher-ranking woman conferring with the mistress of the house about the perfectly white and pressed look of the tablecloth.

Another of Stowe's Household Papers and Stories serves as a counterpoint to the advertisement's glorification of lady-like home management. In Stowe's "Trials of a Housekeeper," the narrator, a young newlywed, struggles so much over how to direct the labors of her "help" that she ends her piece by suggesting that doing the housework on her own might be less stressful than guiding the labor of others. ("I did almost as much work, with twice as much anxiety, as when there was nobody there; and yet everything went wrong besides"—491). In one hilarious scene, the narrator describes her frustrated efforts to introduce an ineffectual immigrant cook to the kitchen's tin oven, then caps off the scene with the equally muddled housemaid bringing guests through the back (rather than the front) door and into the kitchen, where they are amazed to see the narrator brandishing a spit of meat in her own hands, rather than supervising the hapless hired chef. In contrast to Stowe's satirical sketch, of course, the lady of the house in the Borax advertisement is able to guide the complicated labors of three women workers all at once. With nary a hair out of place, she confidently supervises the work going on around her—so that her work is more in the managing than the doing.