My husband often suggests metal siding for its no-maintenance qualities, but clients often respond, “That’s for poor people.” While hanging laundry recently, I thought with amusement about how using a clothesline, drying your laundry without mechanical means, is also “for poor people.”
When we moved to Ilwaco, Wash., in 1993, I remember more laundry drying on lines and more wood ricks in back yards than there is now. Perhaps it’s an inverse measure of economic growth, a certain type of prosperity index: The more “prosperous” a community, the less laundry you’ll see in public.
A while back, a visitor happened to stop by while I was hanging sheets. In such situations, I always feel in a bit of a double bind; I love hanging laundry, but I know it’s lowbrow. A little embarrassed, I wisecracked that the clothesline was probably the oldest household appliance, unless you counted bushes. He looked puzzled, but probably had forgotten the photos in National Geographic of “poor” women drying clothes on bushes in some developing nation.
My visitor asked if I used a clothesline instead of a dryer to save money. “No,” I responded, “I like the process.” I actually get pleasure out of solving the problem of how to hang clothes and linens in an aesthetically satisfying way. I like the smell of sun-dried laundry. I’m not fond of ironing, so I’ve learned to carefully hang items so they come off the line smooth and straight. Even linen napkins or 100-percent cotton sheets that would come out of a dryer in a rumpled ball are relatively unwrinkled, crisp as if they’d been run through a mangle.
There’s another more complex, global issue underlying the “dryer or clothesline” issue. It’s a question of sustainability.
In simple terms, my clothesline, clothespins, and a combination of wind and sun approach to drying clothes can go on pretty much forever with very little effort beyond my own time and energy. Like the bicycle, it’s a simple technology that, if widely adopted in America, could have major global impact. This is because a clothes dryer is one of the biggest energy-consuming appliances in a home, and for most of the USA, directly or indirectly, we’re using fossil fuels to dry our clothes. In Ilwaco, dryers run on electricity from the Bonneville dam system, but in the rest of the country, dryers run on natural gas or on electricity from coal or oil fueled generating plants – oil to electricity to the dryer. We all know the international mayhem that’s resulted from wanting more oil than we as a country happen to own ourselves.
When my visitor asked about my motivation for hanging clothes outside, I added a social commentary: My husband and I are able to live on one income, and that allows me to spend time on domestic chores I happen to enjoy. If both of us were working full time, five days a week, and had to commute to work, the opportunity to deal with domestic chores would be severely limited and mostly available after dark. Even in the days when I did work full time and commuted 15 minutes to my job, I still managed to hang laundry out before going to work – but I was also the boss and could control my schedule. Another good argument for flex time!
You’d think, then, that schedules and the press for time would be the major impediments to using a clothesline, but I think there’s a bigger one: cultural expectations. Clotheslines are okay in a picturesque Naples tenement. They’re charming at a Danish farmhouse with its interior courtyard. However, they’re not okay in the average American housing development, where CC&Rs prohibit clotheslines, wood ricks, open garage doors, and sometimes even non-green garden hoses. They’re regulated out of possibility by attitudes about what’s socially acceptable and aesthetically appropriate.
Yes, they can be very untidy, and they’re usually relegated to backyards for that reason. But they’re also part of an ancient and sustainable way of life.
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