Two questions. I know that good housekeepers in years past had a weekly schedule for doing things that went something like this: Monday, laundry; Tuesday, ironing; Thursday, bake bread; Friday, general house cleaning/scrubbing. What did they do on Weds., and do I have the rest of these right?
Next: When laundry was removed from the line, some items that had been starched were then sprinkled, then rolled up so the moisture could emanate (or whatever moisture does–emanate is not quite the right term) throughout, so they would be damp for the iron. My grandmother did this, rolling them up, and she would then put them in plastic bags for awhile. But in the 1920s, and I am specifically talking about the year 1929, there wouldn’t have been plastic bags, so what would they have used? My grandmother is no longer around to ask.
Cicada–not a good housekeeper, in this or any other era, who has had eight linen dinner napkins starched, moistened, rolled, and in a plastic bag in the refrigerator for about two months now . . .
Well, I don’t know if this is the saying you were talking about, but I pulled out my copy of Little House in the Big Woods which has a version of that in it:
You might be interested in the PBS series 1900 House, which depicts typical life in a London house in 1900. The series was the first of the “throwback reality” shows that have become popular on PBS.
I don’t go back QUITE to the 20s, and in fact my mother was only a child then, but I recall that we didn’t routinely use plastic bags when I was growing up in the 50s either. The sprinkling & storing was done mostly if you knew you would not have time to iron things right away. It was not really necessary. If my mom was going to store the dampened things, she just rolled them up in towels. Usually what she did was to dampen each item just before she ironed it, or else dampened the number of items she knew she would be able to iron that afternoon.
On the rare occasions when I do iron anything, I use a steam iron and spray starch. I try intensely to avoid buying anything that has to be ironed.
The “laundry on Monday, iron on Tuesday” was necessary, of course, because before you had a washing machine and especially before you had a dryer, the act of washing all the family’s clothes literally took all day. One of our neighbors when I was a child still had an old non-electric monstrosity to do laundry in. It had a big tub in which you sloshed the clothes around with a pole, and then a wringer that you had to pull every individual item through to squeeze the suds out. Repeat for rinse as necessary. She also spend a good deal of time mending, since this process was rough on clothes (Thus the “mend on Wednesday”). Buttons, especially, would often come off in the wash and need to be resewn berfore the garment could be worn again.
Yes, sprinkle and roll up, and the outer items would keep the inner items damp. But if you waited too long, the outer ones would dry out, and the inner ones would start molding (then you would wash, bleach, and start over).
Okay, roll up in towels, that sounds good. I should have said so in the first post but this is a tiny little detail for a novel I’m writing, set in 1929. I’ll put you all in the acknowledgments if I ever sell the book!