Laundry on the North Dakota Prairie

A passage from

Nothing to Do But Stay: My Pioneer Mother by Carrie Young,

from the chapter "The Seedling Years"

"Two days of my mother's week were consumed in doing the laundry for her family of eight. My mother thought she had to boil everything white. Before dawn on Monday morning she brought in the giant oblong washboiler and set it on the stove, filling it with four or five pails of soft water pumped from the cistern. She added soap and put in the bed linens, handkerchiefs, tablecloths, underwear, and white shirts. She brought the whole mess to a boil and kept on boiling and boiling for at least a half an hour, stirring with a long stick. She transferred the clothes with the stick to a washtub, which she had set up on two kitchen chairs pushed together. Rubbing the clothes vigorously up and down on the scrubboard, she was soon wet with perspiration. After wringing the clothes out and putting them through two rinses, one of blueing water, she was finally ready to put them out on the clothesline.


My mother was never fussier about anything than hanging clothes on the line. Anyone driving down the road, she said, could see your entire life hanging on the line for judgement, and a carelessly hung wash was a sure sign of a sjusket kvinne--a slattern. Each garment had to be attached to its neighbor by a common clothespin, and the could not be slack. They must all hang taut. All of the colored clothes, even the men's socks, had to be turned inside out so they wouldn't fade. Even in the coldest part of the winter, my mother always hung out the wash, although it froze solid in a few minutes. She held the opinion that the cold air freshened the clothes and got out at least some of the water. The frozen clothes had to be brought indoors again and hung on wooden clothes-racks to dry around the stove.


My mother spent every Monday from dawn to late afternoon doing the family wash. It was probably no accident that four out of six of her children were born on a Tuesday.


If she wasn't having a baby on Tuesday, my mother ironed. She had three flatirons, which she heated on top of her kitchen range and which she lifted with a detachable handle. She changed irons about every ten minutes as they cooled off. When I awakened on Tuesday morning, I could hear my mother ironing. The handle squeaked as it was pushed against the flatiron moving across the ironing board. One Christmas my father bought her an outsized gasoline iron, which was equipped with a small gas tank on the back; it had to be generated like a gas lamp before being lit. My mother loved that iron. It had such a large smooth surface, she didn't have to heat up the coal range as she did with her old flatirons. But all day the carbon monoxide fumes drifted up in her face, and by the end of the day she had a splitting headache. Still, she refused to give it up; she thought the headaches were worth the time it saved. One Tuesday, however, she was in a hurry, and she didn't generate the iron long enough. It started to puff, and she hurled it out the kitchen door a second before it burst into flames. It couldn't have happened to a nicer piece of equipment."