Vintage Maytag washing machine ad
I was converted a long time ago—one of the possibilities of privilege—to the belief that we women have more important things to do than the laundry.
After the introduction of so-called labor-saving devices in the 1950’s, a host of studies revealed that they didn’t really save us labor: women with automatic washers and dryers simply did more laundry, sheets and towels twice a week instead of once, for example. So despite the cruelty of the old way, amply recorded in the second volume of a recent biography of Lyndon Johnson, where the stooped shoulders of women living in the Texas Panhandle before rural electrification were laid down to the yokes they used to carry buckets of water from springs or wells, I remain convinced that for most of us, if we have the option, doing the laundry is a vast waste of time.
Well, I learned my lesson. By chance I became responsible for an enormous pile of dirty clothes accumulated by a dear male friend, and, after initial hesitation and resentment, bent to the task of washing his jeans, underwear, socks and shirts, all bearing the nearly ineradicable stains of a hard-working life.
It took almost all day. And yet, when the first load came out of my automatic dryer, smelling of summer fields, soft and begging to be carefully folded, I realized I was enjoying myself—although I certainly wouldn’t want to repeat the task every day, as many women do by necessity.
I was reminded, first, of the regressive Nazi prescription for German women during World War 11: “Kinder, Küche, Kirche—children, kitchen, church—and stay out of trouble, politics being trouble by another name.
But beyond that baleful sentence, I remembered how good we all are at humble tasks—or, at least, a great many of us: a perfectly turned shirt collar, an ironed neckerchief, blue jeans rolled into a tidy sausage. And what we are good at, we tend to enjoy.
How fortunate I was, I realized, to be released for the day from the laborious work of my mind, the short stories to be edited, the research for my next book contemplated if not yet planned or begun, the weekend post written. Instead I had the loud hum and rattle of my machines doing their duty and the sweet smell of newly washed clothes.
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