In Catalan, to do the laundry means to gossip
Across Europe, villages that could afford it built a lavoir, a wash-house fed by a stream, where women beat and rinsed their families' clothes every week. It became a women-only meeting place for news and chat, so firmly that the Catalan phrase fer safareig, literally doing the laundry, came to mean gossiping.
Washing clothes is as old as wearing them. The first laundries were rivers, where flowing water carried off whatever caused stains and smells, and people still wash this way in poor rural regions. Because agitation loosens dirt, garments were rubbed, twisted or slapped against flat stones, or pounded with a wooden bat called a beetle or battling stick. Scrubbing rocks gave way to portable rub boards and finally corrugated metal or glass washboards. A typical lavoir offered two constantly flowing basins, one to wash and one to rinse, sometimes under nothing more than a roof.
Ancient Rome had professionals called fullones. They stood in tubs of water mixed with alkaline chemicals, sometimes including urine, and trampled cloth to work the agents into grease and fat. Their treading stalls are so distinctive that archaeologists use them to identify fullers' workshops. Elsewhere, soaproot and yucca root served Native American peoples, and Europeans once soaked laundry in ash lye.
Who did the washing varied. In most cultures it fell to women, but in India washermen called dhobis did it, leaving place names such as Dhoby Ghaut in Singapore. In nineteenth-century Natal, Zulu men laundered for Boers and British and organised a guild that became one of the colony's most powerful groups of African workers. Around 1900, one in four Chinese men in the United States worked in a laundry. When New York tried in 1933 to restrict laundry ownership to citizens, the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance successfully fought the rule.
Machines arrived in stages. The nineteenth-century mangle squeezed water out between two cranked rollers far faster than wringing by hand. Hand-turned paddles in tubs replaced the washboard, electric agitators came in the early twentieth century, and a perforated spinning drum eventually replaced the mangle. Henry Altorfer patented an electric dryer in 1937, and today more than 80 percent of homes in the United States and Canada have one. The historian Christina Hardyment has argued that such domestic machinery drove women's liberation.
Source: Laundry
