Laundry and ironing by hand

About this video

Author

Daniel Lunk

Date created

2009

Duration

2:41

File

Flash Video

License

This video copyright ©2009. Terms of use

See this video in context

• North Carolina in the New South: Primary sources and readings explore North Carolina in the decades after the Civil War (1870–1900). Topics include changes in agriculture, the growth of cities and industry, the experiences of farmers and mill workers, education, cultural changes, politics and political activism, and the Wilmington Race Riot. (Page 5.11)
• North Carolina History: A Sampler: A sample of the more than 800 pages of our digital textbook for North Carolina history, including background readings, various kinds of primary sources, and multimedia. Also includes an overview of the textbook and how to use it. (Page 8.3)

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• Search LEARN NC for ironing and laundry.

In the classroom

Demonstration of the washing, drying, and ironing of clothes by hand.

Transcript

Girl (00:08)

I am washing laundry, and I am using lye soap, which was made over in this ash hopper, and basically they would wash once a month. And then they would take it over to the fire.

Girl 2 (01:03)

Now I’m boiling the clothes to get all the grease stains out of them.

Woman (01:23)

And our final rinsing pot we have to take these bluing balls, and they’re cakes of compressed indigo. We put it in our pot here to rinse. The bluing agent works to counterbalance the yellow, from all the lye soap, it makes our whites very yellow, so we put blue in here to get our really white whites to balance out. Alright, now we’ll just wring it out, and go hang it on the fence to dry.

Girl 1 (02:11)

They would get a hot stove and put the iron on the stove, and wait until it got hot, and then they would take it off, and they would put beeswax on the bottom of it to use as a starch which would keep the clothes from scalding. And before they would do that they would put water on it.