Washing Without Worrying
The Economist & Sun
Jan 16, 1919
Vol 64 No 8
Next to high prices as a topic for conversation, the scarcity of labor takes rank. Competent farm labor, always hard to secure, has about reached the vanishing point so far as the fields are concerned and the housekeeper no longer even dreams of getting her washing done, to say nothing securing other help. The work is all up to the house-mother and she must “live or die, sink or swim, survive or perish” unaided by human hands.
The situation in the cities is the same. Employment bureaus long ago hung out the “No Domestic Help" sign. There are no girls seeking domestic employment, with factories offering three timers the wages. Housekeepers in the town, have for some time been facing the situation and adjusting their lives to the change. Their solution of the question is one which many farm women, can adopt—power appliances to do much of the work formerly done by hand. Motor power washing machines have forever supplanted the washwoman in hundreds of homes.
They are always on the job, never late, quiet, efficient, courteous if treated well, never demand ten o’clock lunch, and don't tear the clothes.
The electric machine is perhaps most convenient if you have electric power, but it is by no means the only thing. There are water power machines, dog power machines, a working out of the old familiar treadmill where your household pet furnishes the power which does your washing, and machines which are run by the gas engine. As to types of machine, they are legion. The best known are the cylinder machines where clothes are put in a cylinder which revolve through a tub of hot suds.
Whatever the type or whatever the power employed, the power machine is something which every woman who can afford it should buy. The wringer is also operated by the same power which washes the clothes so that the hardest part of washing is carrying the wet clothes out to dry. Not only do you save muscle but you save time. Could you for instance wash nineteen blankets in the old way in one afternoon? This is what one farm woman did. Another on the same day did a two weeks’ washing for a family of six, and threw in two blankets and the curtains for twenty windows, then baked and put up her picnic lunch and was fresh as a daisy in the afternoon.
