Laundry, the Good Old Fashioned Way

I always thought that women in the 50's had a pretty routine way of divvying up their work for the week. I bet many women could even recite the same work schedule, or some variation of it - it's what their mothers and grandmothers did. The one I'm familiar with goes like this:

Monday: Wash day
Tuesday: Ironing day
Wednesday: Sewing day
Thursday: Market day
Friday: Cleaning day
Saturday: Baking day
Sunday: Day of rest

Please understand that I could definitely be making this up...I don't have a source on this, I just thought that's how they did things back then. Maybe I heard it from my mom or read it somewhere and just liked the idea of it. Most likely, I saw that cleaning was only one day of the week and a whole day was dedicated to rest and thought: what a great idea!

Well, Ms. Vanderbilt has recently informed me otherwise, and as much as I long to hold fast to the work schedule I like, that's not the 50's way of doing it...and besides, what would June think of me if I were to cheat? Tisk, tisk. So I'm trading my ways for those of Amy once again. On the subject of laundry, she writes:

First chore after breakfast is over, is to load and start the washing machine.
It takes approximately 25 minutes for 1 load of wash to run through an automatic laundry.

FALSE. I'm going to have to stop you right there, Am-ster. My "normal" cycle takes 54 minutes...so now I'm wondering was anything really getting clean back in the day or are we just wasting an ungodly amount of time and water with our new-fangled washing contraptions?

And if laundry is done at home, it is easier to do some laundry each day than to allow it to collect so that a whole morning must be devoted to the laundry project.

Alright, alright I get the picture. Some laundry every day. Got it. Ugh, that probably means there's goign to be some cleaning every day, too, doesn't it? By now you're getting the picture I wasn't a born homemaker!

If there are hanging facilities in the cellar or elsewhere, it is not necessary to wait for sunshine. In large households where there is insufficient indoor drying space it is often a great saving of work to have an electric or gas clothes dryer (p. 377).

Now that's good news! For a minute there, I thought we were going to have a real problem. Waiting for sunshine, especially in the Northeast, especially in February, especially in the snowiest winter on record was just not going to happen. Although I do like the idea of a clothes-line outside in the spring and summer.

However, even Amy agrees (thank you Amy, and also...God) that the easiest way to dry clothes is with a good old-fashioned electric clothes dryer. Or new-fashioned. Or whatever...