How did people do laundry during winter in the old days?

The older I get with time to muse about these things, the more I can't fathom how our forebears did all the chores they did just to survive. I know women had to wash clothes with lye and churn it themselves, then put it through a mangle that they turned by hand, then hang it out and maybe it falls off in the wind or gets smog on it from open fires. Jeez. How did they stay clean? Maybe our forebears kind of stank.

100 years from now this same discussion will be held and people will wonder how we ever managed.

I got so angry the other night when I hit a button on the remote and it failed to instantaneously change the channel. LOL. You're right, R2, it's always the worst of times!

My mom used to hang the laundry on the two clotheslines lines outside our window. When it was freezing or below she would hang them in makeshift clotheslines we had in the basement.

If it's cold enough the laundry does dry--well free dry

They used ceiling mounted “pulley maids.”

On cold, wet days, you hung your clothes out to dry in the cellar. If you didn't have one, then you line dried them in the bathroom or out in the living area.

People used wringer washers from 1900-1950 which washed the clothes by circulating them in a tub but the water had to be wrung out of them by a separate process. Before that, it was done manually with huge tubs, the washboards now used as instruments by zydeco musicians, and vats of hot water.

The laundress came twice a week: Mondays and Thursdays.

Special items were sent to the Chinese launderers.

"Ancient Chinese Secret"

I grew up in India. We don't have severe winters but we do have monsoons, two months of intense rains. When I was in undergrad and, later, even when I was working, I (or my maid) washed clothes by hand. During monsoon months, we hung them out to dry in a covered balcony or put them on couches and dining tables inside the apartment or room and directly under the ceiling fan.

You just hung them up indoors, OP. Duhh. Some of us still hang dry clothes.

I lived with an older couple in Italy who told me they don't do laundry in the winter.

I don’t know OP. Why don’t you tell us.

CollegeBoy is University of Alabama Class of 1927.

We would hang out clothes outside in below freezing temps. You could cut bread with the frozen jeans.

My grandma used to hang the clthes in the basement in freezing weather. Otherwise put your ittes on and get outside. IF THE SUN WAS SHIINING.

And if the birds weren't migrating, R15.

Wet clothes will still dry when it is below freezing. The process is called sublimation, and it happens when matter changes state from solid to gas without going through the liquid state.

I studied for a second degree and couldn't imagine (remember) how we got through school without the internet. Ditto for planning and executing European vacations.

Doing laundry, in general, was a shitty chore, in the old days. I watch a couple of YouTube channels involving people who live off the land & use solar energy, etc. The one thing that looks like a total turn-off is how they do laundry (big tub, stick agitator, and a manual wringer). The modern washing machine is really something to be grateful for.

R18, we used to call travel agents and they'd act as brokers to find and arrange the best transportation and lodging to accommodate our goals for our trips. They were paid commissions by the hotels and other businesses that they signed us up for. A knowledgeable, honest travel agent with lots of contacts was a wonderful resource for those who travelled often and widely.

Yeah, I remember my grandma hanging clothes to dry in the freezing Canadian cold. Stuff got stiff but seemed to dry. I loved how everything smelled so fresh, but it was all hella scratchy.

[quote]The process is called sublimation, and it happens when matter changes state from solid to gas without going through the liquid state

Yeah... except heat is required to cause solids to become gaseous. Absence of heat has the opposite effect.

True Hell comes on you slow and steady, like a line of wet winter sheets, and before you know it, those sheets stretch out 20 years.

I'm an 80s baby but grew up up in a 2up 2 down house in Liverpool, UK. We didn't have space or money for dishwashers or tumble dryers. In winter we just tried to time washing with the weather and do a wash on days when rain was not forecast. As long as it didn't rain then even though it was cold the clothes would get some drying out on the line, even better if it was windy. Then you'd bring them in the evening still damp and put them in front of the fireplace and they'd be dry by bedtime.

R20 Travel agents are still a thing in the UK and much of Europe. Starting to die out now with Thomson and Thomas Cook closing high street stores but a lot of people will still go straight to a travel agent to book their 2 weeks in Spain or their 2 weeks in Orlando. They are not necessarily cheaper and they certainly don't have any great knowledge. High street travel agencies are staffed with young working class people who are earning 17,000 per year and haven't been to the places they advertise. The higher end agencies like Trailfinders and Hayes and Jarvis have more experienced agents but they tend to focus on honeymooners and well off retirees selling mostly escorted tours and destinations like Mauritius, the Caribbean and cruises as opposed to the all inclusives in Europe that are the bread and butter of the less upmarket agents. The reason people chose them is familiarity, the ability to pay off your holiday in installments over months and for protections. Brits still have a real fear of being stranded abroad if something goes wrong and with credit cards still not as popular in the UK (and much of Europe) people like the idea of the middle man to call if something goes wrong.

The benefit of hang-dry clothes and sheets is that they last longer rather than when you use a clothes dryer.

R22, there is still heat in the air when it is below freezing. Unless it gets down to absolute zero. I've never been to Canada, but I don't think it gets quite that cold there.

R22: there is enough heat in the atmosphere to change water crystals to water vapor when drying clothes.

I’ve been hanging wet laundry in freezing temperatures for years and a load is usually dry by noon if there is low humidity in the air and a gentle breeze.

Fellow DL line dryers can attest to this.

R27 - I’ve endured -50 Celsius in the winter, but not absolute zero, although -50 sure as hell feels like it. I’ve also experienced +50 Celsius where I live when the humidex was high. Either extreme temp takes your breath away. Anyway, laundry...

[quote] As long as it didn't rain then even though it was cold the clothes would get some drying out on the line, even better if it was windy. Then you'd bring them in the evening still damp and put them in front of the fireplace and they'd be dry by bedtime.

R24, I don't use a dryer and that's what we do in the winter too -- though we're in Calif so Winter isn't much different than Spring and Fall unless it rains. The clothes and towels and sheets that have been hung in front of the fireplace or heater or oven are so warm and cuddly if we use them as soon as they're dry, and we're not paying to run an extra appliance just to dry laundry. Luxurious!

OP, these are the post that I live for here on DL! Just completely random, but totally ponder-worthy! Thank you!

R10 yup! I DON'T miss that nonsense AT ALL!

R20 and R25 are you on the right thread? Your posts seem very odd for this thread.

Luxurious!

Yay, Bobby Trendy is posting at the DL.

I was in Paris a few years ago and rented a small studio. There was a washer in the unit but no dryer. You would use a drying rack placed at the window. It seemed to work but the jeans took a long while to dry.

R31, see R18 (who started all the mad digression!).

They dried clothes in the living room.

If you lived in a large town or city in the UK you could use the public Wash House, it wasn't free but it was low cost and had boiling tubs, spin dryers, high speed drying racks, presses and calenders to roll you linens through, They usually had a complex of swimming pools also. One survived close to where I used to live until the late 1980's.

The strangest thing is that we hardly have and Launderettes (Laundromats) in the UK these days as almost everyone has a washing machine at home, most people also have a dryer.

In Spain dryers are quite uncommon - not as uncommon as these 30 year old statistics suggest (5%) but it's quite an unusual thing.

In southern Spain there is so little rain and freezing all but unknown that it is not a problem. People hang clothes to dry on their roof terraces (unless they live in the country or have a garden.) In summer I have hung clothes and the heat and sun are such that some things dry in a few minutes: by the time I have hung the last of a small load of washed clothes, many of the clothes I hung first are already dry.

It was hard doing heavy woolen clothing in wintertime because the clothes would often become mildewed before they dried. Eg, the neck or the ends of sweater sleeves took longer to dry and would get a musty smell.

I suppose it’s faster if you use a fan. But on those long stretches of rainy days, even a fan wouldn’t dry them well enough.

[quote] The strangest thing is that we hardly have and Launderettes (Laundromats) in the UK these days as almost everyone has a washing machine at home, most people also have a dryer.

We had a rickety old laundromat in my town. It shut down & was an empty eyesore for years. Someone came along, bought the site and also bought an empty lot and an old realty office next to it. They build a huge laundromat with lots of parking. It’s PACKED. We now have a large population of illegal immigrants who live crammed together in housing with no washer dryers. I took slip covers there at the beginning of the pandemic when my cat peed on my sofa. It’s really modern & fast. They have a separate seating area where you can read, use your phone or eat a packed lunch while doing laundry.

I wish I had clothes.

I broke the transmission on an old washer I once had when I tried to wash a heavy quilt in it.

Now I take my quilts and matelasse spreads to the laundromat and use their big Huebsch washers.

The air is so dry in the New England winter that clothes can sometimes dry even faster than in summer. And in summer, you can’t leave clothes out in the evening or they might attract dew, getting even wetter!

Why do clothes need to be dry? Why not just walk around all day in moist fabrics?

[quote] smog

During the turn of the 19th/20th century, clothes left hanging on those lines probably absorbed a lot of the smell of soot/coal smoke/etc. It was a rather 'fragrant' time though, so maybe people didn't notice or mind as much.

I once discovered that putting slightly damp sheets on the bed before a night of drinking, results in less dehydration and a lighter hangover in the following morning.

New England had a tradition of laundry day being Mondays.

I think Mondays were also “house moving” day. I recall in the 1960s that people actually put their houses on flatbed trucks, and moved them to another lot, on occasion.

Monday is a day of work here in the Mid-West too.

R44 - I don't expect you to believe me, but for some reason I don't understand, smoke wafting from my BBQ drill does not get into my laundry hanging 10 feet away.

Maybe it's possible that the departing water vapor takes from the fabric any smoke molecules that have landed? I surely don't know.

My point being that I don't worry about smoking my line drying laundry when I want to make BBQ and do some washing at the same time.

Somewhat off topic but doing laundry was actually quite dangerous for washerwomen before washing machines became commonplace. Often they would lose their footing at the riverside and the heavy gowns they wore would quickly become waterlogged and drag them under. Also most couldn’t swim.

R49, that is what I call my boyfriend while I'm fucking him: Washerwoman.

r6, the 1930s Queens NYC apartment we lived in had a drying rack on the kitchen ceiling, next to the window. It was a metal frame about 24 x 48 inches , with maybe 6 or 8 metal wire lines running the length of it. In its lowered position, it was about 5 or 6 feet above the floor. It always reminded me of the scene in Frankenstein where the monster was raised to the roof of the laboratory.

My mom would use clothespins to hang stuff on it and then raise it up to the ceiling again. We had one of those old-fashioned washers with a wringer, and you could get a good part of the wash on the rack, and it dried rather quickly. It seems like such an unusual thing these days, I wish I had taken a photo of it when I was a kid.

A laundromat opened up across the street in the mid 1960s, and that was the end of the old washer and drying rack in the kitchen. After that , it was only used in the days before holiday dinners, to dry out slices of white bread for making turkey stuffing!

R28, there is probably plenty of time to go to the local bus station and suck off three or four guys.

We did have smoky clothes sometimes from the coal smoke coming from chimneys but most people worked and wouldn't light the fire until around 6pm so as long as you brought in the washing before that you would usually be okay. We'd spritz some aftershave and perfume on clothes but if it was bedsheets they'd have to be washed again.

My sister had a dryer now but the only space for it is in the kitchen and she says when it's on you can't stay in the room because it makes the air hot, humid and hard to breathe. Her local petrol station has installed big washer/dryer units and she has started doing sheets and curtains down there rather than at home. Apparently it's proved very popular as she often has to swing by a few ties to get a free machine. Since moving to the US the biggest treat for me is having the space to but things without worrying if they'll fit. It's still a novelty for me to have a bug American fridge with ice makes, to have a separate room for the washer/dryer and I'm still fascinated that I have a switch on my wall that will make the room icy cold or warm and toasty and hot water any time. No more emersions! That emersion was the bane of our childhood. Anytime we left the house dad would panic 'did we leave the emersion on'

WTF is an "emersion"?

Immersion heater? R53

R54 Yes immersion. My US phone autocorrected that because I know it's stamped in my brain at this point in life!

I have to admit I don't think I understand the sublimation process--you mean the cold water in the jeans, for example, in a heated room, becomes steam (of a sort) and therefore the stuff dries?

I DID pay attention in science, I just couldn't get it sometimes. Now when it comes to psychology I can tell you all about sublimation and could make a gerbil understand it.

Consuela! It’s for you!

Three physical states: solid, liquid, gaseous.

Sublimation in temperatures below freezing occurs when the frozen water in the fabric skips the liquid state and leaves the fabric as a gas (water vapor).

Thank you, R59, this gerbil got it! Sounds like an awesome miracle, which is the way most science sounds to me, lol.

When line drying on a below freezing day, albeit a sunny and breezy day, you know your laundry is dry when it transforms from frozen stiff to flapping on the breeze.

Your winter time line dried laundry smells clean, fresh, and importantly, artificial scent-free. Can't be beat!

Life was harder for our forebears. If you ever get the chance...look at the program linked of silent films of everyday life in the first decade of the twentieth century. People looked older than they were because of the drudgery of everyday life.

R51, I wish you'd taken a picture of your ceiling drying rack too! I've never seen such a thing, despite all of the 1930s movies I've watched most of my life. It sounds as if it must have been installed in your place by a previous occupant rather than being a standard feature of the times, or it would have shown up in old movies and magazine pictures. Seems like a good idea!

r63, Every apartment in the building had one, and the building next door (they were built at the same time). It must have been a common feature , and growing up I never thought of it as something unusual.

Gitchuwon. They sell them on eBay.

Ohh, OP: They stuck a bar of soap up their butts, waded fully clothed into a nearby creek, farted and made suds, and bobbed up and down to launder, rinse and deodorize!

My grandmother hung the wash outside during winter. I know because I helped her. This was in Galveston County, so it was probably only in the 40s F, but it still wasn't fun. My grandparents never had a dryer.

My family didn't buy a clothes dryer till the late '60s.

We did, however, have a natural gas floor furnace in our old house, if DL knows what those appliances are.

It helped out in a pinch if the weather had not been cooperating in cold weather.

Clothes dry pretty fast indoors. The dry winter air pulls the moisture right out of them.

R62, thanks for that link -- it was very interesting.

Ha, r33, I rented a place in the 17th arrondissement (I later found out that the place was valued at $1 million) back in 2017, that advertised a washer and dryer. The owner showed me around the place, pointed out the washer and when I asked about the dryer, he escorted me to the bathroom and showed me the drying rack. Quelle horreur! I did notice there were a ton of laveries around the neighborhood.

Homes and apartments in Europe are generally smaller even new builds so there’s just less space for stuff. We had a thread here once about the difference between US and EU salaries and how Europeans gets by on such comparitavely small salaries when housing costs are not much lower than the US. The point was made that there’s simple less space to hold “stuff” which limits how much people spend. I grew up in the U.K. where your 3 bed semi detached house is about 900sq ft and that’s not considered a particularly small house either it’s a perfectly average family home and probably 30% of the population live in these. The size of the home limited how big your furniture could be, how big your appliances could be and how much stuff you could fit in. We frequently window shopped when I was a kid not so much because we couldn’t afford to buy anything but because we couldn’t fit anymore stuff in the house not even clothes. I remember my mother looking at exercise bikes and while she had the cash where would it go?

New Yorkers get this and New Yorkers have told me that they are fine with not having some of those huge, cheap chain stores in the city because where would they for 50 rolls of kitchen paper? Where would they put mountains of cheap fast fashion. And funny enough when they’ve told me about going out of the city to a Target or a Walmart it’s usually for the day out rather than to do major shopping.

Watching TV as kids we were fascinated with basements and garages and imagined all the things we’d have if we had one or both of those. As an adult I imagine if I had a garage the temptation to keep buying junk and throwing it in there would cost be a bunch of money.

All the neighbors looking at your nasty, cheap underpants.

R28 is correct. My parents did not purchase a dryer until I was a freshman in HS. My mother hung clothes for six kids outdoors all the time.

I knew a family who still had a big wooden tub and a wheel outside operated by hand would move the clothes inside the tub filled with water and some washing powder. They also had a wash board for the more dirty clothes. Very labor intensive process. They were very poor people in the village where I grew up. Both their children became doctors.

Wet clothes still dry outside when it's freezing because cold air contains less moisture than warm air.

That's an inspiring story, R75. What country?

Sounded like a lot of work.

Weren't there awful problems with damp and mould, drying wet clothes indoors? They didn't have dehumidifiers back then, either.

Must have been why so many more people died of pneumonia, and the like.

R78 The vast majority of adults in my working class area of the UK smoked like chimneys in the house. The house was heated by coal or turf fire. So the air quality was fairly pants anyway but yes you would get mould on the walls sometimes. We also had single pane wooden windows and my brother and I used to scrape the ice of the inside of the window and throw it at other in the morning when we were little! My parents got a grant to put in double glazed windows when I was 15 and that did make a big difference. But bottom line a bit of mould was the least of our problems. Don't know how we survived, but we were happy out and didn't know any different.

[quote] So the air quality was fairly pants

I never get tired of these quaint Britishisms.