“Water Fit for a Christian Woman”: The Gendered and Racial Politics of Water in the Wash, 1865–1921 (2022)
This article examines the ways in which water was used both practically and rhetorically by rural women, urban laundresses, and commercial laundrymen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While their experiences differed in important ways, all launders grappled with hard water, which decomposed soap and left unsightly residue on clean clothes. Water’s mineral makeup seriously affected the work of getting clothes clean and necessitated water-softening techniques and technologies. Whether they worked in a free-standing home, a tenement, or commercial establishment, launderers constantly wrestled with the materiality of water, which in turn fostered an environmental knowledge of water’s nuances. An examination of the language they employed to describe that knowledge, however, reveals the ways that people imparted cultural beliefs and values on nonhuman nature. Launderers used water in discourses of race and gender to empower themselves and disempower their competitors. A focus on water in the laundry, and on the language that surrounded it, underscores the ways in which people have long understood both labor and nature in gendered and racial terms.
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