Mrs. Fergusen's Laundry

The Library of Congress holds an incredible collection of images taken by Farm Security Administration and Office of War Administration photographers during the 1930s and '40s. Here's a fun little series featuring a West Virginian housewife and her laundry. I'll split them up over a few posts during the next day or two. Enjoy!

Meet the Fergusens. Ann, Nancy, Mother - a.k.a. Mamie, Dad - a.k.a. Bob, and Jimmie. The Fergusens live in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Bob Fergusen is principal at the local junior high school.

This is the Fergusen house:


Mrs. Fergusen must have a lot of laundry with a family of five... Here she is in her basement operating the wringer so the wet clothes will be a little less wet. She may own a Thor washing machine, but check out all those washtubs. It looks like Mrs. Fergusen rinses her clothes by hand. And dries the family dainties indoors. No need to dry everything outside when the neighbors live so close by!

Catch-up Time

It's high time for one of those lil' bit of everything kinda posts - a catch-up post. The Great Housekeeping Experiment has left me curious about lots of things along the way, and I wanted to report on some of the things I've discovered.

First of all, my decision to straighten up the living room just before going to bed at night seems to work really well for me right now. I haven't forgotten to do it in quite some time, and having that extra few minutes in the morning for bedmaking has come in handy. For now, it works nicely. I'm not sure that'll be the case as I add more chores to my housekeeping schedule. The evenings may become a little more busy. Well, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Remember that article on "eating to reduce" in a vintage copy of Good Housekeeping? I was curious about the portions I've been eating and how they compare to 1945 diet advice. According to the magazine, a standard size portion of cereal (suitable only for the men and teenaged boys in your family) was 2/3 cup. Women, teenaged girls and children should have a slightly smaller portion. A few days ago, Malt-O-Meal was on the menu at breakfast, and I prepared one serving according to the instructions on the package. When the cereal was finished cooking, it turned out to be 3/4 cup. Larger than even the serving size recommended for men and growing boys! I think I'll try cutting the size of the portions I'm making by just a smidge and see if I can get the finished servings of cereal down at least to 2/3 cup. I'd love a vintage waistline!

Speaking of cereal, this morning's menu was perfect for a chilly day:

Oatmeal with Prunes

The description is ever-so-slightly different than a similar meal I had a few weeks ago:

Stewed Prunes

Oatmeal

So instead of serving the Prunes on the side, I cut them in pieces and dropped 'em into the pot of oatmeal while it was bubbling away. A subtle twist on words here, but I think the author of the cookbook meant for these to be two different meals. In a vintage magazine article on bringing your family back to the breakfast table, I read that you might make cooked cereals more tempting to Jim or little Patty by adding dried dates, raisins, figs, prunes, or apricots. No doubt.

One of the questions I took up about a month ago was the wardrobe appropriate for a 1940s housewife during the early hours of the morning. Should I be fully dressed and ready for company by the time I start breakfast? Would a housecoat be suitable for morning housework? How 'bout a robe and slippers? Since I head off for work after breakfast, I've been getting dressed before getting things started in the kitchen - but hadn't given up my comfy slippers until yesterday. Let's face it, though. If a '40s housewife went to the trouble of getting fully dressed before breakfast, she probably didn't dumb down her outfit with slippers! So shoes it is. And though I love wearing a pinafore-style apron while I'm working at the stove, it doesn't seem quite right once I'm sitting down to eat. It's funny --- there's nobody here to see what I'm wearing - or not wearing - at the breakfast table, but wardrobe can really have an impact on your state of mind. Breakfast should be a festive meal.

In the homes of workers breakfast always comes at the all-too-brief period between waking and dashing off for the train to the city. It is the unusual commuter who rises early enough to spend much time at table in the morning... Set your table in the sun, if possible. Look out on a garden if you can do so, or, in winter, on a birds' feeding station. It's fun to have breakfast in company with the juncos and blue jays. It's also nice to pull a small table close up to the open fire on chilly mornings, or to set out breakfast on the terrace in summer. Flowers or fruit on the table. Place mats, or a gay peasant cloth. Napkins at left. People should wake up cheerful and breakfast should be serene and gay. Try to manage your household so that your husband enjoys his breakfast and wishes he could stay longer, even as you push him out the door with a kiss on his way to the eight-fourteen.

Lily Haxworth Wallace, ed., The New American Etiquette
(New York: Books, 1941)

Here's my last bit of catch-up for the day. A glimpse of my favorite vintage tablecloth, which probably dates to the WWII years. It makes my table so bright and cheery. Even on days with a menu like the infamous Tomato Juice and Waffles with Butterscotch Sauce.

A Taste of the Tropics

My 1945 breakfast menu this morning was a little more exotic than usual:

Pineapple Juice

Poached Free Range Eggs on

Whole-wheat Toast

I've never been a big fan of canned Pineapple Juice - there's something a little off about the flavor and it separates real quickly with a sediment sinking to the bottom of your glass. But, like tomato juice, it's a quintessential 1940s beverage. Canned and bottled juices were just beginning to be inexpensive enough for middle-class pocketbooks, and it was still an open playing field in the '40s as to which juices would reign supreme on the American breakfast table. We know how it turned out. Orange, apple, and grape juice became wildly popular, while grapefruit, pineapple, and tomato grew less so over the years. The only place I usually find pineapple juice today is in blended juices. Sixty years ago, though, it was anyone's guess...

Note to self: Be sure not to try and poach eggs in water that's boiling too hard. Exploding egg whites can be hard to clean up!

Blue Monday

When I was growing up, we used to spend a couple weeks every summer visiting grandparents and other extended family in a little town in northern Maine where my parents were raised. Laundry Day at my grandmother's house was a big event. I remember marveling as she wheeled this appliance out from the corner of the kitchen. Six days a week, it blended into the woodwork - but on Laundry Day it became the star of the show. My grandmother's washing machine must have been at least thirty years old. It didn't have an internal water supply. Grammie would connect it by a hose to the kitchen sink and fill the machine with water twice for each load of laundry. I suppose the first time for a wash cycle and the second time for a rinse. When all the laundry had been carried off in baskets to be hung outdoors on the clothesline, the machine was rolled back into its corner where it lurked about until Laundry Day came around again.

The washers of the 1940s - and even the washers of my grandmother's day - were a far cry from the miracle workers of today. Today, we drop our clothes inside, dash a bit of liquid in the proper reservoir, and go. The machine takes it from there and we open it up about a half hour later to clean, well-wrung clothes ready to be whisked into another machine for drying. My '40s counterpart would have marveled at the convenience. Her washer did some, but very little of the work for her. In fact, it was only one step up from handwashing clothes. My manual spends almost as much time making suggestions for washing the laundry by hand as it does for washing it by machine, which tells me that probably only half of its readers were lucky enough to own a washing machine.

In just 1 hour and 18 minutes, my two loads of laundry this morning were clean and dry. And on a rainy day to boot. To contrast, here is a sampling of the instructions required to run a washing machine, circa 1945:

1. Fill washer to the water line with water of correct temperature (130 degrees F. for white cottons and linens; 110 degrees F. for colored fabrics).

2. Add water softener if necessary.

3. Add measured mild soap (in flake, chip, powder or bead form, or shaved bar soap) in the amount necessary to make standing suds.

4. Operate the washer until the soap is completely dissolved and there is a topping of suds 2-3 inches deep.

This is all before the clothes are even placed in the washer, mind you!

5. Add the correct load of clothes as suggested by the manufacturer.

6. Wash rumpled or lightly soiled white articles first, then more heavily soiled pieces. Colored articles are washed in this same order.

7. Time the washing period:

5 minutes for rumpled or lightly soiled articles

10-15 minutes for heavily soiled articles

8. If clothes are not clean at the end of this time, wash them a second time for 4-6 minutes in fresh, clean suds.

9. If stubborn soil remains on certain areas, scrub gently with a soft brush and thick suds until clean.

10. If the water is soiled after one load of clothes is washed, drain it off and prepare fresh suds for the second load.

11. Extract the wash water thoroughly by wringing or spinning before putting the clothes in the first rinse water.

And that's just the wash cycle. Three rinse cycles were recommended for each load of laundry, and every one of these cycles required draining the washer and refilling it. The laundress had to prepare a pot of starch on a stovetop for everything from children's clothes to blouses, shirts, and slacks. And each piece of laundry had to be pressed through the wringer before being hung to dry. What a project! It's hard for me to fathom having to spend so much time on laundry. And for many women, their washing machines were located in unfinished basements. Not a particularly bright or cheery place to work. No wonder this day earned the moniker Blue Monday.

The Ugly Side

This is a bit of an aside from my journey into the vintage world of laundry.

I've been sharing my 1945 breakfast menus with a friend from work. So I was telling her today about the yummy Buckwheat Griddlecakes I made for breakfast yesterday morning and how surprised I was by their color. That they were the color of gingerbread or chocolate pancakes, but had about the same flavor as your regular, everyday pancakes. All of a sudden, something dreadful occurred to me.

Do you remember the Little Rascals films that were popular during the Depression era? One of the characters was a little African American boy nicknamed Buckwheat. Yikes. This must be how the character got his nickname. Just thinking of my breakfast yesterday (and the leftovers I ate this morning) makes me feel smarmy.

This isn't the first time I've come up against racial prejudice since beginning The Great Housekeeping Experiment. Just the other day, I was writing up a little post on this darling canister set I saw when I was antiquing in Connecticut last week. You know the type: Coffee, Sugar, Flour, etc. I giggled when I realized the set included a canister marked "Farina." (That's one family who enjoyed lots of Cream of Wheat at the breakfast table!) Well, I was looking around online for a Cream of Wheat advertisement from the '40s and was disappointed when the only things I could find were these dreadfully racist cartoons then used to advertise the product. All those cringeworthy mammy/pickaninny images. I gave up the search in disgust.

I guess it just makes me think about the barrage of racist images out there during the 1940s. Even the white middle-class housewife - somebody you think of as leading a fairly insulated existence - would have regularly come across these images, whether on the cereal boxes in her pantry, in her women's magazines, or at the movie theater. They were part of the common dialogue among the white men, women, and children who bought these products or lined up on Saturday mornings to buy tickets to the matinee. That the name "Buckwheat" would have been a kind of inside joke to people of the era makes me shudder.

While racism is certainly still present today, we've made long strides as a culture since the '40s. This is one aspect of the good ol' days that I'm very happy to leave behind.

Sorting and Subdividing

The 1940s housewife had lots to do before she even set to work with her washing machine, so I sat down this evening to sort my dirty laundry. Here are the steps my manual recommends for sorting:

1. Separate clothes into piles according to type and color:
Table linen - white and colored
Bed linen and towels - white and colored
White and colorfast cotton and linen garments
Colored cotton and linen garments, not colorfast
White silks and rayons
Colored silks and rayons
White woolens
Colored woolens

2. Subdivide these piles, if necessary, into lightly soiled and heavily soiled pieces.

3. As you sort the clothes, watch for spots and stains that have escaped notice, and remove them before the articles are washed.

4. Mend rips and tears before washing (except in undergarments and stockings) to save time and stitches later on.

5. Remove pins and clips.

6. Empty pockets.

7. If you are not absolutely sure that any new article is colorfast to washing, put it aside and wash it separately the first time.

8. Handkerchiefs that have been used by persons suffering from colds or sinusitis should never be put in the hamper, and should be laundered separately. (The use of soft paper tissues by these sufferers is to be highly recommended, as they may be disposed of quickly after use, lessening danger of infection.)

So my bedroom floor is now covered in piles of clothes:

Table linen - colored
Bed linen and towels - white and colored
White and colorfast cotton and linen garments
Colored cotton and linen garments, not colorfast

The sixth pile is a heap of garments made from substances not yet invented at the time the manual was written. All but two of them are a blend of cotton and spandex - which I've just learned was invented in 1959. Two items are made from blends of Modal with cotton or spandex. Apparently, this is a variety of rayon made from the cellulose of beech trees. It's been around since 1965, but is only now becoming a popular clothing textile. My manual doesn't give me any guidance about what to do with items made from a blend of fibers, so I'm going to sort them with the fiber that makes up the majority of the garment... Okay, my sixth pile now contains only one piece:

Colored silks and rayons

I'm reading a little farther on in the manual and it turns out that the only special washing directions apply to non-colorfast cotton and linen, silks and rayons, and woolens. Would the authors frown on me for combining the rest of my items - sorting only for color? That brings me down to just four piles, one of which contains only a single "rayon" item and that can probably be washed by hand. Two of the three remaining piles are big enough for the washer. I'd like to use a bleach with the whites, so I think I'll save that pile for next Monday.

Thank goodness my breakfast this morning gave me fuel for all this decision making!

Orange Juice
Buckwheat Griddlecakes
Sirup

If you've never had Buckwheat Griddlecakes before - like me! - you'll probably be pleasantly surprised. They tasted just like your basic Griddlecake, but they were as dark as gingerbread - and much, much moister and lighter than the Griddlecakes I've been able to make using the recipe in my 1945 cookbook. Must be the molasses. I made enough for leftovers, so that should make tomorrow's breakfast a little easier on the washerwoman. Off to soak some stains!

Week Eight: The Mission

Wash on Monday,

Iron on Tuesday,
Mend on Wednesday,

Churn on Thursday,

Clean on Friday,

Bake on Saturday,

Rest on Sunday.

In this sing-song fashion, Caroline Ingalls taught her daughters in the 1870s how to assign each housekeeping task to a different day of the week. She must have been among countless 19th-century women who used the same saying to guide themselves in planning their housework. And though I'm not sure how long the saying has been around - probably in some fashion for centuries - this is the way Laura Ingalls Wilder remembered it when she wrote her first book, Little House in the Big Woods (1932).

For the '40s housewife raised in this tradition, Monday was Wash Day. This was rapidly becoming subject to debate, however:

It used to be a matter of pride to get the wash on the line as early Monday morning as possible. Now we wash on any day of the week and at any hour that is convenient. Sunday leaves an accumulation of work that must be done on Monday, and washing on that day is often too much of an extra burden. Tuesday is a far more sensible choice. And if weather, temperaments and schedules so dictate we can stretch washday over several days.

The 1947 Good Housekeeping manual also mentions the inconvenience of devoting Monday to the wash. Its authors suggest doing the laundry that requires ironing on Tuesday mornings - ironing it that very afternoon - and doing the laundry that doesn't require ironing (towels, underwear, etc.) on Thursdays. Despite all the debate - and despite their own misgivings - the authors of the 1945 manual end up including the wash on their "skeleton housekeeping schedule" for Mondays.

Late Forenoon (say between 10:00 a.m. and noon)

Washing, if done at home; if not, send laundry out.

Early Afternoon (between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m.)

Finish washing.

So that's my first mission for 2009. To add the Monday Wash to my housekeeping routine. Even though I'm not home during the day on Mondays, I'd like to share in this tradition in some way. I don't own a washer or dryer. There's a small laundromat in my apartment complex, but it's in high demand on weekday evenings, so I'm going to get up an hour earlier than normal on Monday mornings and get my laundry done before the sun comes up. This is something I started doing several months ago and the time of day has worked pretty well for me. No standing around waiting for others to come back and get their clean laundry. No washer stalking. (Those of you who've used a laundromat know exactly what I'm talking about!) It will definitely be a matter of discipline to get myself out of bed on a particular day every week.

The Streamlined Bed

I've found another cereal that ranks right up there for me with Wheatena. Weetabix. At least when it's prepared with heated milk to make Weetabix Hot. Here's my 1945 breakfast menu for the day:

Mixed Fruit Juices (combined leftovers with lemon juice)

Cooked Whole-wheat Cereal

Since I hit the grocery store yesterday, I had three different kinds of fruit juices to mix together. And what thrifty '40s housewife wouldn't love a chance to get rid of the dregs of juice still remaining in several bottles? It's killer to get that fridge space back. Especially if you're headed out to do your marketing later that day. My glass of Mixed Fruit Juices was made up from equal parts orange juice, pineapple juice (should have stopped here), and tomato juice. With a squeeze of lemon which - perhaps not surprisingly - did nothing to improve the taste of the concoction. It was edible, but that's all.

I also picked up some Weetabix yesterday and found a recipe online for Weetabix Hot. It's a Whole-wheat Cereal, so I thought it would fit the bill nicely... unfortunately, it tasted like cereal that was already partially digested. Happily, I've just learned that Weetabix wasn't introduced to U.S. markets until 1968, so it's well past my timeframe. I think I'll try this stuff cold next time a Prepared Cereal is on the menu and see if it's a little more palatable.

Today was Day Three of bedmaking-by-the-book. Because of the warm weather in this corner of the world, I don't keep much in the way of covers on my bed: a fitted sheet, a flat sheet, a thin quilt, and a throw blanket. So making my bed doesn't take nearly as long as it must have for somebody following the instructions in the manual. The authors expected their readers to have two sheets (bottom and top), at least two blankets, a third sheet or blanket cover, and a bedspread. The blankets and blanket cover were all expected to be tucked in at the foot of the bed with mitered corners. It was even suggested that the bedspread have mitered corners if it wasn't already a fitted piece. A streamlined bed, I guess you could say. A design choice right in keeping with some of the latest architecture, vehicles, dinnerware, and clothing.

One of the questions I had early on during this experiment came up when I read the list of bed linens recommended for the new bride in a 1941 etiquette book. The author mentioned a "night spread" and, just now, I found a reference online at the website for Pioneer Linens, a company established in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1912:

Blanket covers are traditionally called a night spread, and used to decorate the bed when the bedspread is removed... Blanket covers are light in weight and can be finished in a pique, seersucker, and matelasse or percale... Use over a thermal weave blanket for added warmth during the winter months.

I had no idea! So it sounds like bedspreads were not used during the night - just folded down to the foot of the bed. The blanket cover and top sheet, which could both be more easily washed, protected heavy woolen "winter blankets" and fancy bedspreads alike from wear or soiling.

Bed Sweet Bed

What is it about human beings that makes us such creatures of routine? I never sleep quite as good as I do in my own bed - on my own pillows - and what a relief to get home last night and fall asleep under my own covers! I slept better than I had in several nights. Haven't quite caught up with the jetlag, but I'm feeling glad to be in my own little nest with a few more days before going back to work on Monday.

I used the 1945 instructions on "How to Make a Bed" the last day before my trip - Christmas Eve - and tried 'em out again this morning after eating my first vintage breakfast in a week. It was a blessedly simple menu, thank goodness!

Tomato Juice

Malt-O-Meal

Bedmaking is a decidedly easier task in 2009 it was in 1945 B.F.S. (Before Fitted Sheets). Back in the day, the only kind of sheet you could buy was a flat sheet. They were sold in sets of six and tied up with ribbons. And so the authors of my housekeeping manual tell me to make mitered ("hospital") corners at each corner of the "bottom sheet." The "top sheet" - what we'd call today the "flat sheet" - should be mitered at the foot of the bed only. I did indeed use a ruler to make my hospital corners and discovered that the 15 inches suggested for the fold is about the length from my elbow to the tip of my thumb. The '40s housewife probably wasn't toting a ruler about from bedroom to bedroom, so I should now be able to use my new rule of thumb (pun intended) to decide where to fold up each corner.

I vividly remember my mother teaching me when I was a little girl that the flat sheet should be spread on the bed with the hemmed side facing down. I couldn't understand why the pretty side shouldn't be facing up and protested. So she spread out the blankets and showed me how, when you turned the top of that sheet down over the blanket, the pretty side of was turned over, too - for all the world to admire! I wasn't surprised to see these directions also printed up in the manual. The authors even add italics to make sure that the reader remembers to spread the top sheet right side down before turning it down over the blankets.

It's time for me to make a grocery list and do a little unpacking. Happy New Year, dear readers!