Before the invention of the electric dryer, how did people in northern climes dry their clothes in the winter? In the summer, a bright sun, a light breeze, and warm temperatures will dry your clothes freshly and cleanly in a matter of hours. But what about when it’s -10F outside with a biting wind? Your shirt will become a block of ice in minutes.
I’m assuming they just hung their laundry inside during colder weather and they took longer to dry. Or am I missing something?
I don’t know for sure, but I assume that folks would hang their wet clothes by the fire/radiator/whatever they used to keep warm.
Inside, and they dry much quicker in Winter, because the wood-burning stove sucks all the humidity out of the air.
In fact, the Summers in Virginia can be so humid that the clothes used to mildew if you didn’t iron them dry. And that was the back-up plan: heat iron in stove, iron clothes until dry.
My grandmother, in northern Michigan, would hang smaller items in the basement. Larger items got hung outside on a sunny day, froze, and dried via sublimation.
Winter heating doesn’t suck the humidity out of the air. There isn’t any water in the air to begin with (cold air doesn’t hold as much water), so when you heat it, it is really dry. The same thing happens with a gas furnace.
people in heated dwellings would dry it indoors.
you can dry it outdoors though it takes longer, even below freezing. the water freezes and the ice sublimes.
Yes, of course. I apologize for not taking the time to type all that out. 
I think that is what Spring cleaning was all about. The washing of large items that wern’t washed in the winter unless absolutely dirty. When spring arrived then the quilts and bedding were washed and aired. Being cold it wouldn’t smell so bad either. I do remember my mom talking about bringing frozen clothes in during the winter, warming them by the fire and then ironing them to finish the drying too. But heavy cotton clothes were the normal then. Even today I don’t have a dryer, still use the solar powered one outside, except for about 3 months of the year when I make trips to a laundry mat to use their dryers, the washing machine was a big help for my grandmother, as I remember helping her with laundry before she talked granddad into one.
I line-dry my clothes indoors. I have a few clotheslines in my basement. I hang them there on Sunday, and even the largest pieces are dry by Tuesday. They get ironed on Thursday.
We hung laundry outside on the line year-round, as long as it wasn’t actually raining. (Southern California, so even winters are not actually freezy usually.)
When raining, we hung wet laundry on a wooden rack like this (photo) on the furnace.
Our furnace was underneath the floor, with a floor-mounted grille into the main room. So we set the rack on top of that.
Today, you can get racks like that in miniature, made of plastic, to hang your bacon in the microwave.
When I was a kid we used to hang clothes out all year round. My mother would put the wet clothes on the line, bring them in when they froze and then pose them akwardly around the house as they melted and then dried. It seemed really inefficient to me and I was very happy when we finally got a dryer.
I have a couple of clothes-drying-racks which I use even though I own a dryer. Avoiding heat from the dryer prolongs life of clothes and saves electricity. For example right now in the living room I have some clothes hung up. (I will put them away when I feel like it, which probably means they’ll likely be there on the rack until I need to wear them. :o)
When I didn’t have a drier, I’d just hang stuff outside. It’d take a while to dry in winter, so you’d really have to plan ahead (no waiting until you are down to your last undies.) The worst was when it was cold and damp. The clothes would be fairly likely to mildew and start smelling, and half the time you’d have to wash them again. Sometimes I’d hang stuff inside during these periods, but it’d make my house quite the obstacle course of clotheslines.
Many homes in the UK don’t have driers. We festoon the radiators and use clothes’ horses/maidens/racks. My house has a good banister in the upstairs hallway for hanging large items on.
Before central heating radiators some people used large sets of drying shelves which could be winched up to the ceiling to keep them out of the way. It’s also common to have a warm airing cupboard to finish off damp stuff. And of course, back in the day, stay at home housewives had more time to keep an eye on washing hung up outside and get it in if it rained.
Same here. All shirts and pants are hung to dry in the basement (no shrinking!). All the dryer is used for is socks, underwear, towels, bedding, and getting wrinkles out of the already dry hung clothes.
So how is that Nehru jacket holding up?
