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Here we are at Thursday again, hang on it is Friday I am a day late this week anyway I am sitting here drenched in sweat yet again like the fourth time this morning but that has nothing to do with this post.
Couldn't find anything about Christmas in Australia in the late 1800's so we have just another post from my information book.
One of the biggest and most time consuming tasks in that era was the washing of clothes, it was also the hardest of physical tasks a servant would have to do.
If they were lucky the home may have had one of the new-fangled washing machines, which ran on water power. Some even had gas fired hot water on tap.
Generally speaking though things went like this bed linen, tablecloths, and other such white things, had to be boiled in a wood fired copper. This meant that the poor servant girl had to stirred the clothes with a cooper-stick, can you imagine how hot it would have been hanging over a hot steamy copper in summer as well as winter but may not have felt as bad in the colder months.
She had to then remove these extremely heavy items into a trough or bowl for rinsing and starching as well as lifting them and putting through some kind of mangle or wringer. After that was done she then had to hang the washing out on a line to dry.
Once dried the washing would have to be ironed not with the type we use now days but an old flat iron that was heated on the coals of the stove or they may have had a box-iron which had red-hot coals contained in the iron, these were the most common types used.
It would have not been an easy task to judge how hot an iron was and it wasn't uncommon for either the servant or the daughter of the servant to burn themselves. If something was scorched the servants wages may have been docked.
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I wouldn't have wanted to deal with any of that, Jo-Anne. So thankful to live in these modern times!
ReplyDeleteSame here
DeleteOhhh... yes...
ReplyDeletewhen I was younger, my mother did our laundry in a similar way. There was a separate small laundry room next to the house, a fire was made under a kettle and the laundry was cooked in it... but there was another house for ironing.. . that was called the ironer... and all the laundry could be ironed there within an hour. I'm very happy that we have washing machines today and I have to say, I no longer see washing clothes for home use as work... it just happens on the side...
Fortunately.
Happy Advent greetings to you ... in the summer.
Hug
Can you imagine asking a 20yr old today to do a load of laundry using such methods, hell I can't imagine doing laundry in such way
DeleteI have thought about that hundreds of times even watching fictional shows on TV like wagon train, and others depicting that old frontier time and all the hardships. No wonder no one was overweight. At least toe women. They went through it 365 days a year, year in and year out.
ReplyDeleteHell yeah back in those days most women were too busy to be overweight working from dawn to dusk and then some
Delete