Wash Day is Fun Day

by Alexander Lee, Reprinted with permission

For Ma and other pioneer women, each day had
its own proper chores. Ma used to say,

 

"Wash on Monday,

Iron on Tuesday,

Mend on Wednesday,

Churn on Thursday,

Clean on Friday,

Bake on Saturday,

Rest on Sunday."

 

-Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods

 

 Since 1945, General Electric and other large appliance manufacturers have spun a myth that all new appliances will liberate you from the drudgery of housework and make your life easier.[1] Today, Americans work harder and take less vacation than any of the nations to which we normally compare ourselves.[2] Groups like the Center for a New American Dream and my organization, Project Laundry List, have been questioning this for over a decade and offering an alternative perspective.

 

An ad from GE (part of which is pictured here) tantalized women of the post-World War II era, "Wash day is fun day. In go the dirty clothes...and out they come, cottons ready for ironing; synthetics ready to wear!" One can imagine Rosie the Riveter stretching her feet out in a 1948 Levittown home and imagining that the long, grueling war of housework was finally over. Alas, this is not the case.

 

A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that we view all sorts of gadgets as necessities which we recently regarded as luxury items—the microwave, the dishwasher, and home air-conditioner, for example. They found, "more than eight-in-ten (83%) now think of a clothes dryer as a necessity, up from six-in-ten (62%) who said the same a decade ago..."[3] These statistics are staggering and tell an interesting story.

 

For twelve years, I have dedicated my life to becoming what one Portland, Oregon, newspaper writer termed "the laundry mensch." I have fashioned myself into the world's most tireless, dedicated clothesline promoter. These are my reflections on some of the things that I have learned.

 

Clotheslines are for Lovers

 

At country fairs, energy conferences, and green product expositions, people have passed the Project Laundry List booth or approached me and peppered me, rhetorically and rapid-fire, with an edge of indignation, "How many kids do you have? Are you married? Who does the laundry in your household?" The implication is that I am misogynist who wants to strap women back into an olden era of churning butter and rubbing their knuckles raw on a washboard. That could not be further from the truth. I want our lives to be richer and healthier. I do not want to go back. I want to go forward.

 

I am, in fact, an eligible bachelor who uses the clothesline about ninety-five percent of the time.[4] I do not have a gaggle of small children to adorn in fresh looking outfits, but I do my own laundry almost weekly at the local Laundromat for the excellent price of $1.25 per load. (I only wish that the coin-op machine allowed the business owner to charge less to his customers who wash with cold water. Such a technology is on the market from Speed Queen's Net Master^TM.[5])

 

There is understandable consternation that housework, particularly "doing the laundry," remains the provenance of women in most households. Talking with the likes of Barbara Ehrenrich, Elizabeth Edwards, and Kate Michelman, I have tried to jumpstart a national conversation about the culture of overwork. A culture of families dependent on two incomes, where one sex does most of the housework and a great deal of the breadwinning, cannot long endure.

 

There is little evidence that the culture at large is taking this conversation very seriously, though. When I recently Googled "gender housework laundry," the first result was an article from CBS, entitled "Men: Want More Sex? Do The Laundry!"[6] No comment.

 

I met one woman's icy battery of interrogatories at a New Hampshire conference with a question of my own, "Do you want to make a series of accusations or do you want to have a rational conversation about clotheslines?" Disarmed by my rebuke, we thereafter had a productive conversation. We concluded that the clothesline is not a solution for everybody (a conclusion which I pretended not to have reached long ago), but that if you want to save energy and money you ought to be permitted. You see, millions of Americans are not even allowed to use a clothesline, but I am coming to that topic in a bit.

 

The clothesline really is not for everybody

 

Never mind that the Asians and the Europeans are laughing at us for our inability to conserve energy in meaningful and simple ways. German and Korean television stations have both been in my Concord, NH, living room recording six-minute segments that poke fun at our cultural attachment to the dryer. Articles in Austrian papers, on a Spanish website, and in a New Zealand hardware catalogue have all ridiculed our prohibition on drying. Still, the clothesline is not for everyone.

 

Everything in moderation, quipped Socrates and George Bernard Shaw. Walk in balance, admonish certain indigenous traditions of North America. And so, I refuse to be an absolutist on the question of the necessity of the dryer. As Descartes might say, if he were alive today, "Eighty-three percent of Americans think the dryer is a necessity, therefore it is."

 

Allergists instruct their patients, correctly, to hang inside (where air quality is generally worse, but pollen and allergens are in shorter supply) or to use a dryer, which leads to an electric plant causing asthma not necessarily in their backyard.[7] Lack of time, insect manifestations and bumble-bee nests are a potential hazard that come up frequently in the litany of excuses for not drying outside. The clothesline is not for every busy bee.

 

On the other hand, one woman reports that her eczema disappeared upon discontinuing the use of her dryer and erecting a clothesline.

 

While shit happens, for every blueberry-laced turd that stains a sheet, a dozen laundresses have taken joy in the sight of a robin or a hummingbird that they would never have spotted in the swirl of their Whirlpool's Plexiglas window.

 

Some medical doctors have instructed elderly patients with heart trouble to avoid lifting their arms above their head and a study "of women in their sixties determined that they recover more slowly than men form heart surgery because they resume their household duties too soon after coming home form the hospital."[8]

 

When I explained that there are racks on the market that would work for somebody unable to lift his arms, one disabled man recently reminded me "all you have to do is push a button to run the dryer." True enough. The clothesline is not for everybody.

 

On the other hand, my mother, herself the daughter of an old-fashioned general practitioner, claims that after her mastectomy in 1988, hanging clothes on the line was the best therapy she could find. Old wives tale? Be careful what you call my mother. She calls herself Mrs. Tiggywinkle after the Beatrix Potter laundress who hung out the clothes of Cock Robin and Peter Rabbit.

 

A failure of imagination, but also a failure of architectural design, means that many people and places cannot find the space to hang a drying apparatus. We are lucky that communities like Vancouver, British Columbia, and London, Ontario, are considering making space for drying a required design consideration for all new housing.[9] A new student housing project in Denmark incorporated drying space, paving the way for students all over the world to call, as two Middlebury College students have in their aptly named and popular Facebook group, for a "Laundry Revamp."[10]

 

Unfortunately, cities like Poughkeepsie, New York, are heading in the wrong direction.[11] Eager to sell her city as a gentrifying gem of the Hudson River Valley, the Democratic mayor, in September 2007, broke a tie of her city council, and declared, in overbroad terms, that thou shalt hang thy clothes in the backyard only. After the local paper published a story, Fox News had a field day.

 

It is true that she lost her primary less than a week later. I will not speculate about why, but I will hazard a guess that many of the low-income families there, who could stand to save $100/year or more on their electric bill, may not have a backyard at all.

 

The mayor has won the public opinion war, though. The clothesline is officially deemed ugly and now their city will be beautiful. Right?

 

Clothesline as Art: "She is said to hang a beautiful line"

 

An Italian-American woman from Newton, MA, who has many paintings and photographs of clotheslines, wrote to the mayor of Poughkeepsie.

 

Dear Mayor Cozean,

 

I know that I have no right to write this letter but it is on a matter that is important to me, and so overlooked by so many. It’s a simple matter.

 

I travel through your area, along the Hudson for visits with friends. I grew up in a working neighborhood of Boston with industry and shipyards. Though life has taken me into a very different neighborhood, with one of the highest real estate values in the country, I have retained my right to (yes, you guessed it!) a clothesline. I have a clothesline, a glorious, colorful, swinging, fresh smelling clothesline sparkling against the sky. I am also a painter who finds clothesline to be amongst my most favorite and well received subjects. I have been told by my Chinese artist friends that clotheslines are now being prohibited by mayors in China. Somehow I expect that where communism has always dictated every detail of approved lifestyle. But in Poughkeepsie? In 2007? In the USA? A simple clothesline? Please tell me it’s not so.

 

I love clotheslines and all that they stand for: beautiful and proud, art installations with clothes, the flags of our life. So join me as I hang my clothes. Save energy, take time to whiff the blue breezes, feel the sparkling yellow sunshine, beautify Poughkeepsie and hang a clothesline. In Venice, when one woman wants to compliment another it is said: "She hangs a beautiful line".

 

Thank you for hearing me out,

 

Marian Dioguardi

 

This artist and gifted correspondent finds herself in good company. A year ago, I found myself in the company of the Poet Laureate of Ireland as he read celebratory laundry poems at a photography show where the subject of each piece was a clothesline. The late wife, Jane Kenyon, of the 2006-2007 Poet Laureate of the United States, Donald Hall, had no less than three clothesline and clothespin poems.[12]

 

The wit of John Prine, who sings in We Are The Lonely, "She hangs her clothes out on the line/They're hanging there right next to mine/And if the wind should blow just right/She could be in my arms tonight" is matched only by the humor of The Bobs in Why Don't We Both Share a Load?: "I've got too many colors/ And I wouldn't want your underwear to turn all pink/But it seems I've left all my change at home/If I asked you for some quarters/What would you think?"

 

Norman Rockwell included a clothesline in his "Homecoming GI" painting for The Saturday Evening Post in May, 1945. Unquestionably, it was a nod to the quiet domestic life and the mother that the returning soldier had missed. It was also a commonplace device sixty years ago.

 

Anybody who has been to Philadelphia was annoyed or ecstatic at the site of Claes Oldenburg's giant bronze sculpture of a clothespin—so mundane, so luminous, yet casting such a long shadow.

 

Mary Azarian and Sabra Field—famous Vermont artists—both have fine woodcuts of clotheslines. Annalisa Parent has filled galleries all over Vermont with her photographs of withered hands pinning clothespins upon the line, French alleyways bedecked with bright clothes, and the humble clothesline of a Romanian peasant, to describe but a few.[13]

 

Colorful, organic, and sentimental, the clothesline is the perfect subject for painters and photographers. So, too, a washerwoman seems to have been either an object of longing or a subject of admiration for both Pietro Longhi in Die Wäscherinnen (c. 1740) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir in his Wäscherinnen (c. 1912). Something there is that loves the mundane, cherishes the simplicity of this repetitive task and the people who do it.

 

Give Us This Day, Our Daily Laundry

 

Poet Kathleen Norris, most famous perhaps for her prose memoir Dakota, published a little book, called The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and "Women's Work”. In it she reflects on her relationship to laundry and housework. She writes,

 

Laundry is universal—we all must do it, or figure out a way to get it done...Laundry, liturgy, and women's work all serve to ground us in the world, and they need not grind us down. Our daily tasks, whether we perceive them as drudgery or essential, life-supporting work, do not define who we are as women or as human beings. But they have considerable spiritual import.

 

It is a marvelous published lecture that I whole-heartedly suggest for anybody who finds daily existence harried by the requirements of modern culture. She reflects upon dishwashing and laundry as daily practices that deepen her faith.

 

Maria Rodale, of Rodale Press, teamed up with Betty Faust a few years back to produce Betty's Book of Laundry, now out of print. Kelly Crespin in her review for Eclectic Homeschool Online writes,

 

Who ever thought that someone could write a book that talked about laundry secrets? I thought, "How difficult is it to do the laundry? You put in the soap, you turn on the water, put in the clothes and let it happen"! So I was intrigued when I received this book because I really couldn't imagine how much information someone could come up with relating [to] laundry. Well, I started reading this book and couldn't put it down. Betty believes in ecologically friendly products and includes a list of earth-friendly cleaners and where you can find them."[14]

 

Laundry—quotidian as it may be—gets people excited. Competing with Faust's book is Fine Lines: A Celebration of Clothesline Culture, published in Nova Scotia, Canada, by Cindy Etter-Turnbull. Her somewhat hyperbolic introduction starts, "Clotheslines are the most practical tools ever created."[15] Her chapters include folksy retellings of laundry mishaps and classic tips about how to hang. Make sure you attach shirts by the tails, as more than one reader of Sierra magazine berated me after a recent posed photograph showed me standing in front of shirts clipped to the line by their shoulders.[16]

 

Perhaps nobody gets more excited about laundry than Andrea van Steenhouse and Irene Rawlings, though. Their coffee table hardback, The Clothesline Book, which can compete with the best of the genre, is gorgeously illustrated and full of the same sort of useful how-to information.

 

WARNING: Dryers are Dangerous

 

I sound a little bit crazy when I explain to people that dryers are dangerous. They are not inherently dangerous, but we are inherently lazy. "Failure to clean" (the leading cause of dryer-related fires) and other dryer maladies lead to 15,600 structure fires each year and nearly $99 million of property value damage.[17] The real danger that these machines pose, though, is not house fires, but wildfires, hurricanes, and sea-level rise. And our profligate use of electricity contributes to climate change.

 

The Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA) collects data on appliance use. The electric dryer accounts for 5.8% of residential electricity use, which is to say nothing of the 16% of American households with gas dryers or the millions of Americans who traipse to the laundromat or down the stairs to a landlord's "commercial" facility.

 

The EIA keeps no verifiable statistics on the megawatts (equivalent to millions of tons of carbon dioxide) consumed by the drying facilities at Laundromats, hospitals, prisons, restaurants, fish piers, and other commercial endeavors.

 

Project Laundry List erected a 400-foot clothesline outside of Hydro-Quebec's headquarters in Montreal to drive home the point that our demand for electric power drives the destruction of the Cree homeland and leads to new power source construction.

 

It is not only eliminating the particulates and greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere by King Coal and his brothers Prince Natural Gas and Count Nuclear, which make the clothesline more appealing. Your clothes last longer and smell better when line-dried, saving you money on your wardrobe and your electricity bill.

 

Sun-Dried Clothes Smell Better and Last Longer

 

If people did not adore the smell, why else would Yankee Candle have an array of scented products meant to conjure up the fragrance of the breeze in your sheets? Hundreds of thousands of elderly women, sentenced to retirement communities (which, incidentally, are also supposed to make the lives of our industrious middle-aged population more liberated and luxurious), long for the smell of those sheets. I receive postcards from grandmothers pining for the smell of the outdoors and the twitter of birds.

 

There is no better bleaching agent than sunlight. Rays from the sun can kill bacteria just as well as your leading brand with none of the chlorine—a toxic chemical. Want your whites white? Hang 'em out.

 

I ask you to think about where, exactly, you think lint comes from?  As you ponder this and contemplate your navel, do not reach the wrong conclusion. It comes from your clothes breaking apart in the heat of the dryer, of course. Those infernal machines!

 

Dryers are Expensive

 

It is expensive to buy a dryer. Staber which probably has the best American-manufactured product on the market. Even before you buy their 3 or 4 Wire Electric Dryer Power Cord or an LP conversion kit, you will be shelling out somewhere between $799 (electric model) and $874 (gas model).[18] That is a lot of money.

 

One-hundred feet of clothesline and a couple of sturdy hooks will cost less than five dollars. As with dryers, there are higher-end products that sell for much more. Some people balk at $210 for the Stewi "First Lady" which is a Swiss-made product that will last a lifetime and does not need to be replaced after an average of thirteen years, like the electric dryer.[19] It is available from Stenic Products in the North American markets. If this seems like too much, for half the price, you can probably buy something that will last half as long.

 

Hills, which is the household brand name of rotary clotheslines in Australia, will be bringing their products to market in the United States early in 2008. Their website brags, "In 1946 when Lance Hill developed the Hills hoist it was more than a means of drying clothes - it was a very clever piece of practical thinking." Their clever ad campaign includes an image of a wonderful hillside chock full of their Fixed Head Hoists. This kind of creativity and energy for promoting a clothes drying product in America has been reserved to the Maytag Man, since he first appeared on the scene in 1967.[20] Now, the Maytag plants have moved to Mexico largely and he has become a symbol of the fix-it-man, needed to shepherd us through the travails of planned obsolescence.[21]

 

Barack Obama, with frequency, repeats this story, "A while back, I went to a Maytag plant in Galesburg, Illinois that was moving to Mexico. And I met workers who were having to compete with their own children for jobs that pay seven bucks an hour. A few months ago, I traveled to Newton, where Maytag was shutting its doors after 114 years."[22]

 

A Kentucky paper reports, "The last washers and dryers rolled off Maytag assembly lines in Newton, Iowa, yesterday and the 550 workers who built them left the 2 million-square-foot factory for the last time, ending a century of appliance manufacturing there under the iconic brand name."[23] Indeed, the end of an era, but the most maddening part is that these jobs are not going away...instead, they are going away. The world is still building more dryers for an up-and-coming Chinese middle class, but they are now being built south of the border or across the Pacific.

 

An outside clothesline necessitates awareness of weather and requires time out-of-doors. It forces you to slow down for the methodical task of clipping pins, unless, of course, you have the Cord-o-Clip, which promises to overcome the barrier of laziness by attaching the clothespins automatically as you push your clothes past the pulley.

 

The Right to Dry

 

Theodore Roosevelt said, "The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it."

 

Project Laundry List believes that the best solution to the problem of community bylaws, covenants, and other rules restricting or banning the use of outdoor clotheslines and/or outdoor clothes drying is through periodic and transparent review of the rules by members of the community. Nevertheless, we also believe that saving energy is an overwhelming public policy concern and that the state government needs to step in to prevent local governments and community associations from overbroadly restricting or banning the use of clotheslines.

 

We agree with the Community Association Institute's Frank Rathbun, "A rule that made sense 20 years ago may not make sense today. A rule that most residents wanted 15 years ago they may no longer want today. So we urge boards to conduct a periodic and transparent review of their rules. By transparent I mean this should involve the board and the residents in the community.”[24]

 

Not just about clotheslines

 

Right to dry legislation is not just about clotheslines, it is about America, and specifically New Hampshire, taking new calls for behavior and lifestyle change seriously. One conservationist posited that we need to stop screwing in light bulbs or setting up clotheslines and just spend the day on the phone, calling on Congress and our state legislatures to do something. A group of conservation psychologists responded to this false dichotomy,

 

"Small behaviors are important not only for the direct environmental impact they have, but because they often lead to more and more pro-environmental behaviors over time... Numerous psychological studies have shown that people are more likely to agree to take a big action if they've previously agreed to smaller, similar actions. Thus, changing a light bulb may lead to higher impact behaviors like giving up plastic water bottles, insulating one's house, living closer to work, reducing meat consumption, and actively supporting legislation that will likely require personal sacrifice... People reject scary messages like the danger of global warming if they don't think there is anything feasible they can do to fix it."[25]

 

Right to dry legislation is not just about clotheslines. Anti-clothesline covenants are an example of a larger problem. Here are excerpts, taken directly from HOA covenants, which illustrate the kinds of anti-environmental prohibitions being enforced across the country:

 

• Westerley subdivision in Sterling, Va.: "Solar panels and solar collectors are prohibited."

 

• Camelot in Cottleville, Mo.: "Exterior solar collection systems, wind generator systems or other similar appliances are prohibited."

 

• Peach Creek in Lisle, Ill.: "Compost piles may not be created on any properties ... A window fan is never allowed to be placed in the front windows of a home."

 

• Quail Cove in Tucson, Ariz.: "Outdoor clotheslines are not permitted." (in a region where the great outdoors is like the inside of a clothes dryer!)

 

• Crest Mountain in Asheville, N.C.: "The following are precluded: Outside clotheslines or clothes drying ... window air conditioning units ... vegetable gardens ..."

 

• Tavistock Farms in Leesburg, Va.: "Vegetable gardens must not exceed 64 square feet." (With no more than 8 feet by 8 feet for growing vegetables, should they really be calling this place "farms"?)

 

• Sun Valley in Waldorf, Md.: "No awnings in the front of the house will be allowed."[26]

 

Failure of the Right to Dry bill would have broad ramifications upon the government's ability to regulate a range of critical behavior and lifestyle modifications.

 

Project Laundry List has begun working in conjunction with the Community Association Institute and several national environmental organizations and leaders to develop a "laundry list" of rule changes and initiatives that community association boards can implement to be more conserving of energy and the environment. This critical work could help American communities change direction.

 

Are There Any Good Clothesline Restrictions?

 

Picture a typical 12-unit block house or condominium where half of the units face the street and half face the woods. In an effort to avoid "unsightly" clotheslines on the street-side, the developer or landlord inserts a restrictive clause that treats all owners and tenants in the same way, despite the possibility that the families on the backside of the unit could erect a clothesline with no or fewer aesthetic objections. This is done to be fair and equitable. In fact, it fails to recognize the individuality of each piece of property and has untoward consequences for the environment.

 

At Beaver Meadow, a Concord community featured in a Time magazine story about the struggle of Mary Lou Sayer to hang out her clothes, the local board voted 6-0 to keep the restriction on clotheslines in place. Why? Because they did not have the imagination to deal with a design flaw which, they felt, would mean any clothesline would have to be erected in the front of a dwelling unit. In truth, the three or four elderly individuals who might opt to use a clothesline may have been willing to travel with their basket to a location that was not directly abutting their personal dwelling unit and which was more "appropriately" sited.

 

The now famous story of Awbrey Butte in Bend, OR, where Susan Taylor's neighbors objected to her clothesline is another example of an overbroad restriction.

 

An Overwhelming Public Policy Concern: The Clothesline

 

Project Laundry List believes that saving energy and consumer dollars is "an overwhelming public policy concern." Undesired, excessive, or unnecessary consumption of energy is injurious to the public welfare.

 

The IPCC and the Secretary General of the United Nations have stated that changes in lifestyle and behavior patterns can contribute to climate change mitigation across all sectors. Management practices can also have a positive role.[27]

 

"Public policy is a legal principle which declares that no one can lawfully do that which has a tendency to be injurious to the public welfare. Chickerneo v. Society Natl. Bank (1979), 58 Ohio St.2d 315, 320. The principle of public policy must be applied with caution and is limited to those circumstances patently within the reasons upon which the doctrine rests.  Id."[28]

 

The most famous case of the government using its power to fix contracts was during the civil rights era. People used to claim that when a black family moved in next door property values declined. It was, unfortunately, true and created "white flight," but the justices of the Supreme Court, the Congress, and the legislatures of more enlightened states recognized that this was wrong. They fixed the problem by making discrimination in the housing, rental, and labor markets illegal, through such laws as the Fair Housing Act. Like civil rights a half century ago, environmental protection and energy conservation are the critical issues of our time.

 

In California, where they do have newspapers and radio stations, some time in the 1990's the state passed a law that invalidated covenants, codes, and restrictions to the extent that they prohibited the installation of satellite dishes that were, at the time, 15" in diameter or less. The dubious argument that an informed electorate required access to an array of television stations was sufficient grounds to undo preexisting contracts and agreements that prohibited dishes.

 

Originally satellite dishes were quite large and most community associations prohibited their installation within common interest developments. As the technology reduced the size of the dishes, the telecommunications lobby was able to get a law passed in California that completely invalidated the satellite dish prohibitions so long as the dish was 15" or less in diameter. If you look at the current California Civil Code section 1376 you can see the language invalidating CC&R's to the extent that they prohibit antennas or satellite dishes with a diagonal measurement of 36" or less.

 

The Need for Government Involvement in My Backyard

 

Some people claim that the government ought to not to be getting involved in regulating whether or not communities may restrict or ban the use of the clothesline. The truth is the government is already involved in such places as the historic districts of Columbus, OH, and the whole city of Poughkeepsie, NY, where rafts of people are restricted in their use of a clothesline. We cannot allow such municipal restrictions to come to New Hampshire. It is contrary to the "Live Free and Dry" ethic of the frugal Yankee.

 

Community associations are quasi-governments where "boards of directors are usually elected by residents, but their architectural review committees often are not. They have sweeping powers to enforce so-called restrictive covenants, which can control almost any aspect of the property, from the size of the house or garage down to details like changes in paint color or placement of basketball hoops. When a house is sold, the covenant goes with it."[29]

 

We do not expect that many people will make a decision about where they want to live based upon a covenant restricting clotheslines. It is our well-considered conjecture that most people are unwilling to rock the boat or are sufficiently uninformed about their legal right to negotiate changes to covenants, bylaws, and other contractual agreements.

 

The Property-Value Myth

 

"The Community Associations Institute cites polls showing that 78 percent of homeowners belonging to HOAs believe the rules they live under 'protect and enhance' property values."[30]

 

To our knowledge, there are no empirical data correlating clothesline use and property values. It is a fear-driven, self-perpetuating myth of realtors and the like that property values are affected negatively by clotheslines. It is up to us to declare clotheslines as pennants of the eco-chic and to say that a community that is not sterile and in which people appear to be living is actually a more desirable place to live.

 

Project Laundry List believes that there are three major objections to the clothesline. All three are related to aesthetics, but also involve other social pressures. First is a socio-economic aesthetic objection (e.g. "Clotheslines are for poor, rural folks." "Clotheslines make a place look a 19^th Century immigrant tenement."). Second is a privacy or moral aesthetic objection, sometimes referred to as prudery (e.g. "I don't want to see her bloomers or bra." "I don't want people to see my underwear."). Third is a market-driven objection ("My real estate value will decline if neighbors hang out their clothes!" "Property values can sink by as much as 15% if neighbors are hanging out their clothes."). Please note that this last statement is not backed up by fact.

 

If we take these aesthetic objections one at time, there are a number of points to be made. First of all, wealthy individuals do use a clothesline and there is a broad array of clothesline artwork, some of which reinforces this first stereotype, but most of which is beautiful. People flock to Venice and all of Europe, snapping photographs of clotheslines in alley ways and byways. Clothesline usage is nearly ubiquitous across Asia. We cannot preach temperance from a bar stool.

 

Clothesline Energy Savings

 

The federal government only segregates the residential electricity used by electric clothes dryers, which is 5.8%. There are no segregated data on the potential energy savings from the 16% of American households who use more efficient gas dryers. There are no data on commercial laundry operations, such as Laundromats, or multifamily housing laundry operations, such as laundry drying appliances shared by condominium owners. There are also no data on the energy used by commercial establishments, such as restaurants, jails, prisons, hospitals, fish piers, and hotels. Finally, there is no accounting for the energy involved in the manufacture, retail, maintenance, and disposal (dryers last an average of 12 years) of white goods used in the drying of clothes, to say nothing of the expenditures on materials extraction or marketing of the products.

 

Conclusion

 

Everybody has to have a dream. Mine is that we will redesign our communities to accommodate clotheslines. Weathermen will announce, "Today is a good day to dry" during their morning reports. Textile manufacturers will instruct customers, through labels, to wash in cold water and line dry their clothes. People will see the intrinsic beauty of a clothesline, properly hung. Communities will challenge each other to see who can get the most clotheslines and racks to replace dryers, making National Hanging Out Day (April 19) into a celebration of sane living. Rich and poor alike will stop buying into the mythology of appliance liberation, wasting their dollars on machines that wear out and wear out their clothes. The litany of excuses that Americans give for not using the clothesline, will give way to a new ethic that recognizes a pressing need for lifestyle and behavior change. We will lead by example, as we ask the rest of the world to live in harmony. Clothespins will become a symbol of peace and ecological concern. Next year, failure to clean the lint trap will not leave families homeless and mourning. The sun will rise and as I look out my window and down the street, children will be dancing in the sheets, as their parents—mothers and fathers, alike—pin their hopes on a better and brighter future. 

 

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[1] Town-builder Levitt previews the new 9 ½-foot wonder kitchen by General Electric, GE ad, http://server1.fandm.edu/levittown/images/lg_jpegs/GE-ad.jpg (last visited October 30, 2007).

[2] Don Mekrund, Americans Work Harder and Go Without Vacations, http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0728-02.htm (last visited October 30, 2007).

[3]Pew Research Center, Luxury or Necessity? Things We Can’t Live Without: The List Has Grown in the Past Decade, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/323/luxury-or-necessity (last visited October 30, 2007).

[4] Match.com, http://www.match.com (last visited about five minutes ago).

[5] http://www.speedqueen.com/route/adv_pdf/am00-106.pdf (last visited October 30, 2007).

[6] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/12/opinion/garver/main3253246.shtml (last visited November 14, 2007).

[7] Project Laundry List is an IMBY group in as far as we encourage the use of a clothesline in the backyard, but we also encourage its use wherever practical.

[8] Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and "Women's Work, p. 4 (Paulist Press, 1998).

[9] EcoDensity, Suggested Tools and Actions- DRAFT (May, 2007), http://www.vancouver-ecodensity.ca/webupload/File/Sample%20Tools%20and%20Actions_FINAL.pdf (last visited October 30, 2007).

[10] Facebook, Students for Laundry Revamp, http://middlebury.facebook.com/group.php?gid=14523390373 (last visited October 30, 2007).

[11] Don't Air Your (Clean) Laundry in Poughkeepsie, MyFoxNY News, http://www.myfoxny.com/myfox/pages/Home/Detail;jsessionid=58706F097EAF0730DE0BDAC9970C2458?contentId=4342363&version=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=VSTY&pageId=1.1.1&sflg=1 (Sept 13, 2007).

[12] "Wash", "Wash Day", and "The Clothes Pin" all by Jane Kenyon in Otherwise (Graywolf Press, 1997).

[13] http://parentstudios.com/Laundry/index.html (last visited November 14, 2007).

[14] See Betty's Book of Laundry, http://www.eclectichomeschool.org/reviews/individualprint.asp?revid=456 (last visited Nov. 1, 2007)

[15] Cindy Etter-Turnbull, Fine Lines (Pottersfield Press, Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia, CANADA, 2006).

[16] "One Small Step: The Answer, My Friend" in Sierra (Sept./Oct. 2007). See http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200709/one_small_step.asp.

[17] National Fire Prevention Association, Dryer & Washing Machine Safety Fact Sheet, http://www.nfpa.org  FEMA's US Fire Administration, Clothes Dryer Fires in Residential Buildings  (last visited October 30, 2007).

[18] Ibid.

[19] See Stenic Products, Inc., http://www.stenicproducts.com and Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, Average Useful Life of Major Home Appliances National Family Opinion, Inc. (NFO), 1996 Survey http://www.aham.org/ht/a/GetDocumentAction/i/5271 (last visited October 30, 2007).

[20] Wikipedia, "Maytag, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maytag (last visited October 30, 2007).

[21] "Unfortunately, the value of dependability in selling Maytag appliances was minimized by the generally good level of dependability delivered by all of the major brands." http://www.characterweb.com/maytag.html (last viewed on November 14, 2007).

[22] Remarks of Senator Barack Obama as prepared for delivery, UAW Conference, Dubuque, Iowa (Tuesday, November 13, 2007).

[23] http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071026/BUSINESS/710260405/1003 (last viewed on November 14, 2007).

[24] http://realtytimes.com/rtpages/20070528_laundryhung.htm.

[25] The Power of Voluntary Actions, Grist (Sept. 11, 2007). http://gristmill.grist.org/print/2007/9/11/13338/9554?show_comments=no

[26] The Property Cops: Homeowner Associations Ban Eco-Friendly Practices, by Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted April 26, 2007.

[27] The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change (IPCC).

[28] http://www.rbfh.de/gopher.fcgi?server=CPEL.cpl.org&port=7077&type=file&plain=1&query=
0%5B_1998%5D_72040.

[29] The Property Cops: Homeowner Associations Ban Eco-Friendly Practices, by Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted April 26, 2007.

[30] The Property Cops: Homeowner Associations Ban Eco-Friendly Practices, by Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted April 26, 2007.