An Escape from Laundry

AN ESCAPE FROM LAUNDRY
AN ATTRACTION OF GLENSIDE PARK TO ITS WOMEN GUESTS

INTRODUCTION

As I have reported in a past installment on this page, it was Ella King Adams, a late nineteenth century upper middle-class woman, who was Glenside Park’s first guest (although Anna Molloy Walsh reported Ella’s stay as that of “a family by the name of Mrs. Frederick Adams”). Based on my research, I believe that Ella wanted the resort to be a sanctuary for a community of her friends and their families, and I imagine that one of her chief aims was to make the resort attractive to the women of her target families. The guests seem to mostly be drawn from Newark or even closer to the resort. Based on everything I have learned about resorts, it is likely that Ella recognized that the women—wives—were the primary movers in selecting the resort as a place to take their families, and stay much or all of the summer and early fall, even as their menfolk might have commuted back and forth to work in one of the cities.

A marketing brochure for the resort from the early twentieth century touts its guest amenities, including many which would appeal to men, such as “reasonable” “weekly commutation rates to and from trains” and “golf, tennis, croquet, baseball, &c.”¹ But there are other amenities clearly meant to entice women guests, including ways to avoid home cooking—i.e. a choice of “table board at the Inn” or “meals served in the cottages,” all for a charge, of course. Of course, it should be noted that there is no mention of in-cottage stoves or kitchen facilities in the brochure, so I have always suspected the resort management were trying to make sure people didn’t do in cottage mean prep. Guests could also occasionally take a carriage ride to the Netherwood Hotel or other nearby facilities for a sometime change of fare.

But I Imagine one enticement, which gets its own separate listing, was of particular interest to women:

LAUNDRY. First class laundry in the Park. Rates reasonable.

No need to do laundry on vacation! As much as being freed from the necessity of meal preparation by meals at or from the Inn, this must have been a major inducement for women, even women with a staff of servants—because laundry was not the simple process afforded by a side-by-side washer and dryer of today. Any time laundry was done in the home, regardless of whether done by the wife or a servant, as seen below, it threw the household into a state of high confusion.

I am thinking that the freedom from cooking and laundry also meant that the vacationing woman need not take a complete staff of servants with her to the resort. Getting more privacy, not having to supervise, not having to listen to the bickering between servants (see the passages from Ella’s letters, in my last post), priceless!

THE TIRESOME BUSINESS OF WASHING CLOTHING

“Laundry is a problem that refuses to go away.” So begins Arwen P. Mohun’s book Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880 -1940.² Mohun’s book describes how laundry has consistently been deemed a domestic chore assigned to women. He charts its move—at least for those with means—from the home to a commercial laundry and then back into the home, in the twentieth century, where a woman could use her side-by-side washer and dryer. Ironically, those without means for home washers and dryers could be still resorting to a commercial laundromat—but now, one where they do their own laundry.

I imagine that many of you readers, men and women alike, have done your own or someone else’s laundry. Why would a woman send some or all of her laundry out in the late nineteenth century? After all, as Mohun notes, hundreds of home “washing machines” were invented and manufactured during this period, all aimed at the woman doing her own laundry at home.

But Mohun also explains:

The tools available for domestic laundry work barely eased the back-breaking nature of the labor. Many housewives loathed this task above all others and actively sought alternatives to doing the wash at home.³

Mohun estimates that laundry at home was an at least two-day process, which had to be repeated again weekly, giving the woman doing the washing (and the household where the laundry was being done) only five days in between the process.

To get a better idea of how complicated and backbreaking doing laundry at home was and why a nineteenth century woman might want to send it out instead, I turned to a nineteenth century book to get a sense of the home laundry process. In 1863, an author identifying himself or herself as “A Professed Launderer”⁴ self-published a book called The Laundry Manual; or, Washing made Easy, Being A Complete and Practical Treatise on the Best Methods of Washing, Bleaching, Starching, Ironing and Polishing.” The author explains the purpose of the book thus:

In presenting this little work to the public our object is to place before our readers a few valuable recipes, in a neat and convenient form, so that they may be at hand whenever desired, and to give such instructions in the various processes of getting up linen as we are able to furnish from many years’ experience in the laundry business, and thus assist not only the wife, mother, and blooming miss, in their (often) rough and tiresome journey of life, but useful to all who will be benefited by the suggestions of others.⁵

The author is confines his/her attention to washing by hand in the home, noting that he/she will not be offering any tips specifically for the use of “washing-machines.” He suggests that the instructions in the book can be used with those machines to produce better results. At the same time, the author clearly prefers hand washing, indicating that it will save “fully one-half in labor and wear of linen.”

The first chapter of the Laundry Manual, Washing and Bleaching, explains the great importance of ample water, as clean as nature made it. Primitive societies—or even the “Hindoos” of the time of the book’s writing—washed using only water (the author reports that the Hindoos carry their laundry to the Ganges). The author considers washing with water alone to be a lengthy process—presumably longer than the process which he or she is about to outline.

The washing process can be greatly shortened and made more effective by the addition of an alkali with the wash water. Since alkali alone is too harsh and may corrode or injure not only clothing but the hands of those using it, by itself, to do laundry, alkali requires the addition of some oil-based substance to become soap. Soap, made thus, is not so harsh and yet still contains enough alkali to be effective. Oily stains, in particular, are not water soluble, so, water alone will not remove these stains—but after use of water and soap, the stain can be washed away.

The Laundry Manual describes various formulae for soaps, divided into hard or soft soap, depending on whether soda or potash is combined with an oil or fat. The author explains the difference between soft and hard soaps, and describes the subcategories of each kind of soap. These categories and subcategories involve the use of, variously, soda or potash as alkali sources, and tallow, resin, palm oil or other such substances as oil or fat sources. Soap made of soda and tallow is purer, more expensive, and deemed by the author to be more effective. The author continues with some details on the ingredients for making various kinds of soap, all of which involve making lye, which is highly corrosive. The author tells us that lye must be strong enough to float an egg in order to be effective for soap making—although this test alone does not seem to guarantee the effectiveness of the lye and resulting soap. The author includes various “receipts” (recipes) of sorts for soaps—more a description of processes and materials without exact ingredient amounts. One of these will make a “Family Soap Good and Cheap.” Weirdly, this recipe starts with melting “good bar soap”—presumably purchased—and mixing sal soda into enough water to dissolve the soap. At the end of this recipe the author hastens to explain that the resulting soap should be left to cure and dry slowly, rather than used right away.

After explaining the various possible ingredients of an effective soap, the author notes that all washing should commence with soaking of dirty items, preferably in sufficient lukewarm soapy water to allow the clothes to be relatively uncrowded and preferably starting the afternoon before the day when washing will occur and left to soak overnight. If using cold water, soaking needs to be even longer, from twelve to twenty-four hours.

Later in the book there is a whole section on removing stains, but here in the description of the steps for washing; the author only notes that many stains can be removed by rubbing a little soap on them prior to soaking. Soaked items need to be rinsed when taken out of the soaking water. Then the person doing the laundry can move on to boiling clothes.

For the boiling step, soapy water needs to be heated to boiling. Once at boiling, clothing is inserted and boiled for twenty or thirty minutes. One can reuse the boiling water for successive groups of items, moving each batch of items from the soapy boiling water into clear boiling water, and scalding them in the clean water for a few minutes. At this point, the items can be taken out and looked over, and most dirt can be washed out “without the use of a washboard” [emphasis in original]. After a rinse in warm or cold water, the items “will be white as snow.”

The Laundry Manual has language that confirms the odiousness that Mohun attributed to laundry day:

Washing-day is too often a day of wretchedness, ill-temper, and gloom. Everything is upset; the house is all disorder, and damp, and ill-temper over slop and confusion.

However, the author of the Laundry Manual assures us that if one properly follows the book’s steps, “laborious rubbing” will be avoided, and one can “complete a heavy wash in a few hours, and with very little fatigue.” The author notes that he or she has tried many methods suggested to make washing day easier, and the one set out in the book is the only one which is effective:

By [these methods] one person can do the washing for a family of ten or fifteen persons before breakfast, have the clothes out to dry, and the house kept in good order, and the gentlemen of the family, as well as all about the house, free from washing-day annoyances, and all without rubbing or machinery. Who would not wish to have such comforts?

But wait—we are not done yet! The clothes still have to be dried, starched, and ironed.

Weirdly, on the question of drying, after spending so much time on the description of the other steps in the process, the author doesn’t provide any details about hanging the wash out to dry or how long drying may take.

Before going on from the very brief mention of dying to starching and ironing, the book offers specific instructions for flannels and woolens—woolen dresses “should usually be taken apart before washing.” If this means all the seams ripped out, then any woolen garment will have to be sewn back together after washing, which would surely add to an already long process, and make one not want to wash that dress very often. Perhaps woolen garments of the time had several pieces, which simply had to be separated from each other. There is also a whole section on bleaching, which I rather skipped over, before the author moves on to “Starching, Ironing, Polishing, Etc.”

Starching has its own multiple steps, and is undertaken after items are dried, which suggests that it cannot be the same day as the washing steps. Starch must first be mixed with cold water to remove lumps, then mixed with hot water, and then boiled in water for fifteen or twenty minutes. The author thoughtfully provides a list of the best types of pots for boiling starchy water. But I could not find details on how to apply starch to clothing in general. The author does suggest starch need not be used everywhere on all items, and he or she explains that “The parts of linen and other articles of dress that require to be starched are too well known to demand enumeration, and even these vary somewhat with fashion.” The reader is left to some supposed general knowledge.

The next step, ironing is also extremely complicated—one needs to sprinkle articles to be ironed to just the right amount of dampness—and it is better to dampen previously starched clothing, and fold it overnight, in a damp state, with cloth between starched surfaces, for ironing the next day. I’m counting at least four days now. Ironing, of course, requires the “proper degree of heat” which can only be learned by trial and error. The author helpfully says that scorching a garment is “reducing a portion of the surface to charcoal,” clearly something to be avoided. Moreover, a “Bad ironing is known by the creases left, and inaccurate folding, and sometimes by the marks left by ill-cleaned irons.”

If all this were not complicated enough, one can go on to plait and crimp or “mangle” an item. Mangling gives “a more even and beautiful gloss than can be effected by ironing” and apparently is faster than ironing. The mangle is a large square box with weights and rollers. The models featured in the 1897 Sears catalog, of which I have included two pictures, are described as follows:

Hand power mangles have been in use in European countries for many years, and are considered as much a household necessity as a sewing machine.

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Fully two-thirds of the week’s washing [emphasis in original] can be put through these mangles, such as table and bed linens, towels, handkerchiefs spreads, blankets, underwear and all plain articles. (They are not suitable for starched shirts or clothes with hard buttons.) These mangles will same 20 per cent of the household labor, and in hotels and institutes where our machines are used, they enable the proprietors to save the wages and board of from 1 to 5 helpers in the laundry.

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The work is done by pressure. And they give a gloss and finish to linens and all plain articles far superior to that possible to attain by any other method. Laces of all kinds are finished beautifully on these mangles.

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It requires but little experience to become thoroughly familiar with the operation of these mangles and how to properly prepare the goods for them, and when well understood the results obtained are so superior and satisfactory that they would not be dispensed with for many times their cost.⁶

Mohun’s minimum of two days for completing laundry, noted at the beginning of this post, begins to seem very aspirational. With all the steps required a household might seem to always be somewhere in the laundry process.

As noted, the Laundry Manual has a lengthy section on treating various kinds of stains. This includes instructions for stains on carpets and “boards.” The author has also thoughtfully included a section on baking bread at the end of the book—which includes instructions for various kinds of cakes and rolls as well.

I have presented these details provided by the author (skipping over some), so that you understand that this book is a sort of “laundry for dummies,” or maybe especially for those ”blooming misses,” who perhaps have not yet had to undertake the process. Of course, the detail the author goes into on some steps puts into relief the parts of the process that the author seems to expect the reader to know without explanation, such as how and where to apply starch.

STEAM LAUNDRIES

Mohun says: “In both American and Western European cultures, laundry work was traditionally one of the most powerfully gendered of domestic tasks.”⁷ But while laundry would clearly have been one of the tasks on the to do list of Ella King Adams as the woman of the house, it is certain that she was not doing her own laundry. Any laundry done in her East Orange home would have been done by servants. But as Ella King Adams’ home was in a city, it may have been harder to do laundry at home than in a more rural area; certainly Mohun indicates that the migration of many people into cities and other urbanizing areas brought them into degraded places where the traditional methods of washing were made much harder.⁸ He mentions sooty air which might stain clothing drying on the line and polluted water, or at least more difficulty getting adequately clean water. Ella was probably quite ready to send at least the biggest items, such as sheets, out to a laundry, as her means allowed it.

But I can imagine Ella wanting to send out more items. After all, the clothing, especially women’s clothing of the time, involved yards and yards of fabric. Washing fashionable dresses in the home, drying them, starching any necessary spots, and ironing them was likely a daunting task. As we have seen above, heaven forbid that one be seen in clothing with wrinkles, demonstrating an inexpert control of the iron.

Returning for a moment to the subject of in-home washing machines, Mohun directs the reader’s attention to a book published by the U.S. Government celebrating the centennial of the U.S. Patent office, The Growth of Industry, which contains pictures of selected inventions which received patents through the patent office. One full page is dedicated to “Washing Machines,” and contains twelve drawings.⁹ The first drawing depicts primitive washing being done by natives, apparently on the shores of some location with palm trees. The second (one of my favorites) depicts “colonial” washing, with two women outside a small home. Each women is standing in a round wooden tub, agitating laundry with her feet (surely it will remind at least one of you out there of the famous I Love Lucy wine making episode, as it did for me). The women are apparently conversing convivially across the distance between the tubs. The third depicts “hand” washing, in two big tubs on a broad bench, with another smaller wooden bucket next to the bench. The one woman doing the washing is standing with her back to a fireplace, and at the left of the picture is a clothesline with some laundry already hanging. The inclusion of the clothesline would seem to place the washing outdoors.

The remaining nine pictures are various models of presumably patented and mostly hand powered washing machines. Item five, the second washing machine has a pipe at the back, and its caption reads “Boiler,” apparently the only one of the machines depicted which is commercial, and not operated by hand. Seven of the eight hand washing machines show a woman operating them, as with the colonial and hand washing illustrations. It is difficult to determine the gender of the natives, but no other men (if some of the natives are men) are shown doing any washing. Mohun takes the fact that only women are pictured with the washing machines as further evidence of the gendering of laundry.

A review of the steps for hand washing of laundry, above, has already demonstrated how onerous and disruptive this method of doing laundry must have been. But, as noted above, neither the author of The Laundry Manual nor Mohun in his cultural history examination of the steam laundry see use of any of the hand powered home washing machines as saving effort or time. So what was a woman to do?

Mohun says that one solution was to hire a washerwoman—or perhaps to send the washing out to a washerwoman. A Chinese laundry was another option—Chinese immigrants of the time were “unemployable,” so some of them operated laundries in order to make a living.

Then, there was the steam laundry, typically more expensive than a Chinese laundry, and probably more than a washerwoman. Why would this be the choice of Ella or any other woman with means?

Particularly in urban areas, a number of factors conspired to prompt the growth of out-of-home steam laundries. Standards of cleanliness were rising, and urban conditions—unpaved streets with manure or garbage in them—initially made staying clean harder. As the nineteenth century progressed into the early twentieth century, the growing demand for cleaner conditions would mean that the ubiquitous street filth disappeared or was greatly diminished, vermin no longer were so prevalent and disease promoting conditions abated. During this same period, in terms of clothing and personal cleanliness, Mohun says starkly that “overwhelming clouds of body odor that had hung over public gatherings became an experience of the past.”¹⁰ “The habit,” he says, “of wearing clean clothes was one of its most visible and personal manifestations.” With the adoption of cotton underclothing, people took to changing their underwear once a week, often making this change in time to face God with fresh underwear at Sunday services.¹¹ Clean clothing came to be associated with both class and morality—another means of distinguishing the poor and looking down on them.¹² Steam laundries paid for piped water and had drying closets which kept clothing away from sooty air or other pollution—making the laundry a way to assure that you had the clean clothing and linens that social norms were demanding.

Urban settings also concentrated sufficient customers to assure that out-of-home steam laundries could be financially viable. Development of urban water systems provided the copious water necessary, although the water leaving the laundry certainly posed problems to any receiving waterbodies. Of course, those same water systems may have allowed homes to procure enough water for in home washing; Mohun indicated that steam laundry owners recognized that women—or female servants—doing their own laundry were among their prime competitors. In order to induce women to send their laundry to a steam laundry rather than have it washed in the home, women had to be assured that clothing would not come home frayed and worn from the industrial scale laundry equipment and chemical formulations used at the professional laundry.

Steam laundries also grew as part of the industrialization of the nineteenth century. There was an active sharing back and forth between America and Europe of ideas and technology design for steam laundries. The growth of a factory model, where efficiency was created by having workers repetitiously perform only one step of the process on one machine, was applied to steam laundries along with other industries. The various workers washed, dried, starched and ironed (and did other laundry functions) in what Mohun calls “increasingly minute divisions of labor, factory style.” ¹³ The gendering of laundry continued in a new way in these laundries—steam laundry owners were almost exclusively male, as were those working with the heavier equipment. Women had only the lowest paid jobs, a mark, Mohun concludes, of the devaluation of domestic—female—work in general.

The process at a steam laundry used steam as power, not as part of the washing process. A steam laundry used industrial scale washing machines which were essentially large drums. Detergent was not introduced until the 1930s, so steam laundries used somewhat similar kinds of soap, created using fats and an alkali source, as in home washing. After the initial soaping, the laundry was rinsed in multiple baths of clean water. Excess water was typically removed using a centrifugal extractor, called a tumbler. Then the clothing or other items had to have the worst of any twists it had developed during washing shaken out by machine or by hand—often an entry level job for young girls at low wages.¹⁴

Industrial Washing Machine from Catalog of the Troy Laundry Machinery Co. Limited, Eighth Edition, 1891.

Industrial Tumbler from Catalog of the Troy Laundry Machinery Co. Limited, Eighth Edition, 1891.

From there, the clothing could go into an industrial scale mangle, which both pressed out wrinkles and dried things simultaneously. Or the clothing went through a wringer and into a steam drying closet, and on to starching and ironing.

Industrial Mangle from Catalog of the Troy Laundry Machinery Co. Limited, Eighth Edition, 1891.

Industrial Drying Room from Catalog of the Troy Laundry Machinery Co. Limited, Eighth Edition, 1891.

Sending laundry out to a steam laundry did potentially expose clothing and other items to both harsher chemicals and potentially excessive machine wear that might not be expected at home. Additionally, Mohun notes that some people were squeamish about their delicate items, and many laundries responded by hiring women to wash these in a separate process.

GLENSIDE PARK’S STEAM LAUNDRY

My research has turned up few details about the particulars of the steam laundry at Glenside Park. Daniel Bernier, Director of Park Planning and Environmental Services for Union County, and caretaker for the Village, says that the laundry is believed to have been operated by someone known as “the hermit,” and its very existence was made possible by the introduction of steam power to the village during the resort period.

Regardless of details, as this post illustrates, the existence of the laundry would have been a powerful inducement to women who might be considering a stay at the village. Neither they, nor the men and children they brought with them, would have wanted the bother and mess of doing laundry in the vacation cottages at Glenside Park. As previously noted, this might also allow bringing fewer servants along, which would result in increased privacy on vacation, and probably a reduced cost for wages.

UPCOMING PRESENTATIONS ON ROBERTO DE LA SELVA

The next two months bring opportunities to hear about the developing research on Nicaraguan artist Roberto de la Selva, a sculptor, who did the only murals he is ever known to have done at the Deserted Village of Feltville.

On September 25, 2025, at 7 p.m. EST, Ron Burkard and I will be speaking at Summit Public Library (Ron will be speaking via Zoom). See https://summitlibrary.libcal.com/event/15100900 for more information; you can attend either in person or via Zoom.

On October 18 and 19, 2025, there will be two more presentations on de la Selva, during the annual Union County “Four Centuries in a Weekend,” at the Deserted Village of Feltville. The presentations will take place at 2 p.m. each day, and will feature Dan Bernier and myself on the 18^th, and Ron Burkard (in person) and myself, on the 19^th.

As I prep for the presentations, I expect to have less time for posting during the next two months—but rest assured, you will love the shorter post on speakeasies that I do for next month and my annual post on Four Centuries in October.