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When
I read Letitia Barbauld’s poem “Wash-Day,” written in the eighteenth
century, I was struck by certain similarities between the plight of
the laundresses in the poem and my mother’s struggle to provide clean
laundry for our family of five. Barbauld lived in England;. my mother
lived on a farm near Saltillo
during the twentieth century. Though each of these women lived on
different continents and at different times, there were several similarities
between the tasks of both.
Because World War
II had delayed rural electrification, our farm had no power until
1947. Washing had to be done once a week, summer and winter. There
was no holiday from the chore. My mother did the laundry for our family
without benefit of machine. After she sorted the clothes, she had
to put water in the blackened pot in the backyard. In the early days
of my childhood, she drew water from an underground cistern, but after
my father bought a metal tank, which was placed on a platform under
one of the rain spouts, she used water from the tank.
After the pot had been filled, she tossed a bar of lye soap into the
water. Then she placed firewood around the pot, ignited the wood,
and waited for the water to come to a boil. Next she put the sheets
and other linens, along with white clothing, into the pot. She used
a broomstick to stir the clothing.
Besides carrying pails of water to fill the washpot, my mother needed
to carry water to fill two tubs. She had to carry the water-soaked
sheets, towels, and all the other laundry from the pot to the first
tub. For some of the stained or soiled overalls that my father wore
to the field my mother had to use a rub board made of corrugated metal
in a wooden frame. The second tub of water was used to rinse the soap
out of the clothing and other laundry. Beside the second tub was a
pail of water laced with starch. The Sunday shirts and trousers were
placed in the water and then squeezed before they were hung on the
clothes lines.
For drying the clothing my mother used a wire stretched between two
posts securely placed in the ground. Unlike the women in Barbauld’s
poem “Wash-Day,” she never spread any of the sheets and other linens
over shrubs. Rarely did she drape any of the clothing over the wire
fence, though some of the neighbors who could not afford to buy the
special wire for clothes lines draped their laundry over bushes in
their yards.
After reading the poem by an eighteenth-century British woman who
dreaded doing the laundry and recollecting my mother’s washing the
family’s clothes, I realized that women on two continents whose lives
were separated by two centuries experienced the same kind of drudgery.
© Robert G. Cowser
Guest
Column, April 1, 2010
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