I remember watching as my grandmother Riggan went about her day, grandpa took care of the animals, except chickens, planting and harvesting of the crops and generally all strenuous manual labor. Granny took care of the house, the cooking, mending, the chickens and the washing among other things and worrying about me. As for me, I got to play and get dirty.
In her day and long onto the 1950's, she washed her dirty clothes by hand. The house hardly had enough electricity to provide light and there was no space for a washer and dryer so she did all of the laundry just as she had been doing it since she was a young girl - by hand.
By the time I came along, her family was grown and out of the house so it was just she and grandpa and me when I visited but there was still a fair amount of washing to be done.
To start with she had to drag out the wash tub and get it on a table or stand so she wouldn't be bent over while scrubbing the clothes. Next was to fill the tub with water, this was done by either fetching several milk pails of water drawn from the well was that about twenty yards into the backyard or during the rainy season she could fill the milk pail with water from the rain barrel outside the door. For those who don't know, a rain barrel is a large barrel that sat at the corner of the house and caught rainwater from the roof. Next she had to heat at least half of the water on the wood burning stove, in the winter, this part was great because the kitchen was nice and warm, in the summer it would get real hot and humid.
After the tub was filled with water, detergent and bleach, dirty clothes were added to soak for a few minutes. Now she drags out the scrubbing board and places it in the tub at an angle, each article was then rubbed hard against the scrubbing board with an up and down motion until all soiled areas were gone or she was satisfied that was the best she could do. As each piece was washed and scrubbed it then had to be wrung out to remove the excess water, this was done by grabbing one end of a piece of clothing in each hand and twisting it in opposite directions till as much excess water was removed as possible the n it was tossed into a basket.
When the basket was full, granny would take it out to the clothesline where each piece was hung up with clothes pins that would hold them in place. Weather would determine how long it would take for the clothes to dry, warm days would quickly dry the clothes, warm breezy days would dry them quicker. Cold damp days took the longest and if the temperature dropped suddenly you could be bringing in clothes that were stiff as boards. Rainy days gave her options, either put off the laundry for another day or two or hang them on a rack or drape them over pieces of furniture in the house.
Either way you looked at it, doing laundry like this was hard especially if you had a large family then you hoped for daughters to help out.
My mother had it better in the 1950's, she did start out like granny Riggan but by the time I was going into the third grade she had modernized. Mom had what was known as a "wringer washer". It was a tub with a built-in agitator and a swing away arm with two rubber coated rollers to squeeze the water out. Mom's was electric although some cheaper models were equipped with a hand crank for turning the rollers.
The operation was somewhat simple in that there was a hose that hooked to the kitchen faucet for filling it with water and another hose to drain the water from the tub either into the sink or down a pipe that drained into the yard. Once the water was added along with the clothes and detergent the electric motor was turned on and the agitator would spin and bounce up and down. If things got out of balance the machine would start bouncing all over the place and rolling across the kitchen on it's roller feet.
Operation of the "washing machine" was fairly simple at least until it got to the wringing point. The electric models could sometimes get away from you and the clothes would get wound around the wringers or worse you could get your fingers caught between the wringers and squeezed hard between them before you knew what was going on. There were horror stories about women who got their hand caught between the wringers all the way to their armpit and if they were alone they would be found passed out with pain and serious damage to their arms.
I started helping mom by the time I was nine and as much as I tried to get out of it, I was almost a teenager. before she got one of the younger ones to help. By then mom had gotten ticked off at dad one day and went to the Western Auto Store and bought a new washer and dryer.
Laundry technology has come a long way since the youth of my grandmother, it has come a long way since my youth. Now days the hardest part is deciding what clothes go together i.e. colors, whites and jeans.
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