Laura Dean Bennett
Staff Writer
A picture of laundry hanging laundry on a clothesline evokes a memories of bygone era – a simpler time.
But wait. It’s really true. If you wait long enough, everything comes back in style.
I’ll bet a lot of you grew up hanging clothes out on a clothesline, and some of you may still use one.
If you do, congratulations, you’re right in style because clotheslines are back.
Of course, it is way faster and easier to use a clothes dryer, and I do like the way towels come out of a dryer – so soft and fluffy.
But there’s as much benefit to using a clothesline today as there was a hundred years ago – and maybe a bit more.
First, there’s just something special about clothes that have been dried outdoors on a clothesline.
They smell of sunshine and fresh air, without the need for dryer sheet chemicals to make them smell that way. Plus, the sun is a natural deodorizer, sanitizer and bleaching agent – great for keeping whites bright.
Another consideration is that clothes dried in a dryer are subject to more wear and tear than those that are air dried, so clothes hung outside to dry tend to last longer.
Our mothers and grandmothers used a clothesline because it was the only way to dry a load of clothes. Then along came the clothes dryer, and we traded the clothesline for the speed and convenience of yet another miracle appliance.
We rolled our eyes when told that staying on a household budget would be easier if we went back to using the clothesline.
But the fact is, clothes dryers use a lot of energy, and line drying is free.
A friend of mine, who has a large family, tells me that drying her family’s clothes on the clothesline saves between $10 and $20 a month on their electric bill.
In the typical home, the appliance that uses the most energy – besides the heat/ac unit – is the clothes dryer. Recent estimates say that during its lifetime the average dryer costs about $1,500 dollars to operate.
Besides looking for ways to save energy and money, we’re also interested in reducing our carbon footprint.
We’ve stopped rolling our eyes.
And in addition to being good for the household budget and the environment, it’s also good exercise.
Just one more reason to do it the old-fashioned way.
Before clotheslines, laundry day involved a river, a rock and a sturdy bush on which to drape one’s clothes.
We can’t say for sure when the clothesline came into existence, but it probably wasn’t long after humans began making rope (circa 2500 B.C. in Egypt) that someone had the idea to stretch a piece of rope between two trees and voila!
The clothesline was born.
It probably didn’t take long for clothespins, whittled from a single piece of wood, to forever be paired with the clothesline.
It took until 1830 before the word “clothesline” made its first appearance in the Merriam Webster Dictionary.
A clothesline in Virginia even played a fascinating role during the Civil War.
Award-winning children’s author Janet Halfmann tells the true story of freed slaves turned Union spies, Lucy Ann and Dabney Walker, who created a message code using laundry hung on a clothesline.
They used the ingenious laundry-hanging code to send information from Robert E. Lee’s headquarters across the Rappahannock River to a Union army camp.
If you’re interested in reading the story, the book, “The Clothesline Code,” is available at the McClintic Library.
In 1868, Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” was published. In it, Meg comes up with a novel use for the clothespin. She slept with one on her nose in a misguided plan to make it thinner.
Clotheslines have play-ed a significant part in so many of our memories of home.
Pamela Dilley Sharpes reminded me of a clothesline-related story that her mother, Mary Lou Dilley (my mother’s best friend), liked to tell.
My grandmother, Ethyl Phoebe Johnson Bennett, and her best friend, Neva Hester Kennedy Calhoun (Mary Lou’s mother), lived across the street from each other in Cass in the 1920s.
Every Monday, the ladies apparently enjoyed a little race against each other to see who could get their laundry hung first.
As Neva had five children and Ethyl only had two, I don’t really see how it could have been a fair contest. Although, I suppose Ethyl could also have been taking in laundry to help make ends meet.
But certainly, it must have been a way to bring a bit of levity to the weekly drudgery of laundry day.
Before so many of us turned to drying our clothes in the dryer, we hung the laundry out on the line, even in winter. When it was cold enough, the clothes would sometimes freeze on the line and have to be brought in to thaw.
If it was raining or snowing, there was sometimes a line strung under the porch roof, in a breezeway or in the basement which substituted for the outdoor clothesline.
As soon as I was old enough, I helped Mom do the wash. We had a wringer washer in the basement, so it was up the stairs and a healthy walk to the clothesline in the back yard.
When the clothesline was empty, it could be repurposed by us for badminton.
When it held sheets and bedspreads, it made a nice backdrop for amateur neighborhood dramas performed for patient parental audiences and backyard “circus” acts featuring our tolerant pet dogs and cats.
I thought of the clothesline as a relic of my childhood to which I would never need or want to return.
And a clothesline can tell a lot of stories on its own.
A large family would have children’s clothing in many sizes hanging there.
If the family had been entertaining guests, there’d be company tablecloths and extra bedlinen hanging from the line.
When the stork had visited, the clothesline would announce the blessed event with cloth diapers and baby clothes abounding.
My mom was an RN from the “old school,” so when I was growing up, our clothesline was festooned with starched white cotton nurse’s uniforms.
Those cotton uniforms (with three-quarter-length A-line skirts, long sleeves and French cuffs) and the matching “wing-style” cotton nurse’s caps were a bear to wash, starch, put through the wringer and hang on the line.
It was a heavy job – and that was just the beginning.
Let me tell you, just ironing mom’s uniforms took most of a day. And there was a lot of other ironing to do, too.
Yes, I said ironing. I understand that for those of you born in the last 20 or 30 years, ironing is a quaint concept.
But I digress. We’ll have to tackle the subject of ironing another time.
Our mothers taught us that hanging clothes was a careful and deliberate process, an art form of sorts.
Hanging clothes on the line was never done freestyle. My mom, and every other mom I’ve ever heard of, had firm rules about how to hang clothes.
Monday was traditionally laundry day in most households. Laundry would, most certainly, never be done on a Sunday.
But as more and more women began working outside the home, laundry day became any day that there was time to tackle the wash.
As my mom worked during the week, laundry day was usually Saturday.
When I got old enough to be trusted to use the wringer washer without supervision and to hang the clothes properly, the laundry was divided up into small portions which I could tackle after school, before my homework.
On windy days, it could be dried on the line and brought in by bedtime.
Each garment and item had its place on the line, strategically positioned to catch the most sun and breeze.
Whites and darks were hung in different places on the line. Conveniently, they usually came out in two different laundry baskets, as the whites had usually been bleached.
The advent of clothes dryers made hanging clothes on a clothesline an anachronism, and, according to some people, an eyesore. In some states, homeowner associations lobbied to make it illegal.
There are 20 “Right to Dry” States which have protected outdoor clothesline use with laws which take precedence over homeowner restrictions.
In “Right to Dry” states, residents of HOA-restricted neighborhoods can’t be fined by the HOA for putting up and using a clothesline in their backyards regardless of HOA restrictions.
The “Right to Dry” states are: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin.
I’m kind of surprised that West Virginia isn’t on this list. If anyone would want to enshrine the right to hang clothes out on a clothesline, I’d think it would be us Mountaineers.
Whether you’re into saving money, saving the planet, savoring the delightful scent of clothes dried outdoors or all three, it’s time to get with the times and get back to hanging our laundry in the sunshine and fresh air – on the clothesline.
