Author: Miss Cellania / Source: Neatorama
(Image credit: Luc Melanson)
In the past, making the bed was sort of a nightmare.
I’d like to dedicate this column to the washer-dryer in my building’s basement. You are a magnificent machine, and I’m sorry for taking you for granted. I bow before the genius of your elegant spin-rinse-drain cycle.
You earn those quarters, my friend. I’d also like to give a big shout-out to your pals, the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher.No doubt, modern housework is as pleasant as sitting through your niece’s recorder recital. But compared to housework of the past, we are living the domestic dream. For centuries, chores were unimaginably sweaty, painful, smelly, time-consuming affairs.
Let’s start with laundry. Washing a shirt in Victorian England involved at least eight painstaking steps. In his book At Home, Bill Bryson explains that you had to soak the laundry in smelly lye for several hours, pound it, scrub it, boil it, rinse it, wring it out, haul it outside, and bleach it.
It was surprisingly violent. People literally had to beat the dirt out of clothes with big wooden paddles called beetles. These looked a lot like cricket bats, and legend has it that laundresses’ kids invented cricket by chasing bubbles with them. (But that legend probably needs to be pounded out, too.) The beetles were joined by a shocking number of other bizarre-looking instruments, like wooden sock stretchers and peggy sticks -which resembled hand tillers you used in the garden.
Visiting the laundromat meant schlepping to the nearest stream or pond- even in the winter.
British clergyman Reginald Heber describes women in St. Petersburg, Russia, doing the wash via a hole in a fro-zen lake, where they would “stand for hours on the ice, plunging their bare arms into the freezing water.”Now try complaining about the spotty Wi-Fi at the cleaners. I dare you.
If the cold…
The post Bad Housekeeping appeared first on FeedBox.