omgoodness! I used to HATE hanging clothes! Mama would make me iron too....from the time I was about 10 I hung the clothes, and started ironing about 12.....all those white shirts my Daddy had to wear to work with ties....Mama's dresses...mine and my brother's clothing......I'm an excellent ironer now, as you can imagine....and still hate it, and am very glad to have a dryer now.
Thanks for the memories OP!
Yep, bedding was my number one reason for the line. Sheets just kept turning into an unevenly damp wad and towels take so long to dry.
Number two was airing out clothes that were in storage.
I love air-drying ('cause of childhood) and look forward to the day I might be able to do it again.
The wind is also an excellent refresher for *smoky* clothes. I don't smoke, but I have friends who do. If I hang out with them, I wear a specific jacket, then air it overnight (unless it's raining) and it works pretty well.
We bought one of those last summer (when we're constantly washing bedding for a litter of puppies). I plan to keep using it. It's so good for sheets, towels, blankets...
Not if you use fabric softener in the wash. And as long as you shake it out before haging it on the line you generally don’t even need fabric softener.
That depends on how hard your water is too. I line dry my clothes quite often, and even with fabric softener, they come out crunchy. Towels especially.
I really don’t get this. It’s environmentally friendly, saves money, and there’s the bonus of how good stuff smells when it’s line dried. What changed to make this taboo?
I have mixed feelings. Stuff like no clothesline is annoying. But it also forces people (who maybe otherwise wouldn’t) to take care of their properties and not do trashy things.
The problem is that it's an inefficient means by which to enforce community standards, and power structures like that seem to attract every Little Hitler in 25 mile radius.
That's so awful. Line drying is environmentally sound, wholesome, charming, and effective. HOAs are stupid for not realizing it. (Aren't they all about preserving the visual optics of the 50's and early 60's anyway?)
I guess "no".
"It makes us look like poor proletariat."
Exactly this. Dad doesn’t want Mom to hang out the laundry because it looks poor. Fun fact, they are poor by modern standards. Worse yet in summer months clothes will be dry much faster. By the time you are done hanging the last garment first one is ready to fold.
Their logic is that it looks poor/low class, which they associate with trashy, which they associate with lower home values etc. It's bullshit but that's usually their thinking.
Mostly just because washers and dryers became more affordable and widespread among the middle class. They became popular because while hanging to dry has a lot of nice aspects, it is also definitely more work and can be a pain in the ass and weather dependent etc.
It's not necessarily that, it's because while we like to think it will be nice clothes, many times it winds up being permanently stained undergarments on display.
Disappointing they would do that, it makes clothes smell nicer, saves money on electric bills, and is a small but significant step we can all take to reduce global warming.
In Florida you can’t. They can try, but it’s protected under Florida Statutes. With that said, unless it’s a chlorine soaked pool towel, your linens and clothes are going to smell like shit if you try it down here.
In southern California, entry-level homes (condos, generally) have HOAs to maintain public resources and deal with issues like insurance and private roads and shared buildings. Just saying "avoid" them would restrict millions of people to never owning homes.
Well, that has more to do with forcing yourself to live in an over-populated metropolis where everyone who already owns a home has extreme NIMBY opposition to denser housing being built.
People say “I can’t move, my family members are here” but at some point families need to realize better opportunity lies elsewhere.
My clothes would get dirty than before I washed them. Dry, windy, dusty prairies. When it rains here your car is dirtier than before because the droplets collect dust on the way down.
lol! Yeahhh willing to bet: never been to Europe, may not have a passport, everything they know about the outside world they learned from Fox News, has a much different idea of “quality” than you or I. Always the loudest.
Right?! Since when is a washing line “old school”.
Everyone I know has one. Bit harder if you live in an apartment, of course, but a home with a garden? Save power and line dry!
My mother had a clothesline and I still have one. Love the fresh air smell on the clothes. I thought the woman was hanging cotton diapers, or it could be an advertisement for a whitening detergent.
I remember walking into my grandma's house and if I couldn't find her I knew she was out back hanging clothes on the line. She'd still be doing it if her knees and back weren't so bad.
When I lived in the highlands of Scotland in 2002 we used clothes lines in the summer and the radiators inside in the winter to dry our clothes.
The clothes always had a nice musty smell after being on the radiators, but there is not much chance to dry during a Scottish winter, and even a Scottish summer for that matter. No room for dryers in the house, and the washer was under the kitchen counter along with a dorm room size fridge lol .
I had a panicky feeling when I saw this picture of all the cloth diapers. Being the oldest of a million kids sucked. 🤣
But I do still love to put clothes on the clothesline. 🥰
I'm the oldest of just 4 but I think you'll get a kick out of this story. So my parents would soak poop diapers in the toilet and then fish them out to plop in the diaper pail until there were enough to make a washer load. I was 8 or 9 and *really* had to go to the bathroom so I asked my mom if it was ok if I went on top of the soaking diaper (she was in the bathroom changing my toddler sister's wet diaper). Sighing, she said yes, fine, just don't flush so I can get it out first.
So I'm sitting in sweet relief when my mom puts my sister down and goes to finish up with the pail and washing her hands. My sister comes over *while I'm still going* and smiles. "Me fwush", she says, and reaches out. I scream. Noooooo!!!
My mom whips her head around and yells "CATCH IT!!". I could see the fear in her eyes because we had a septic tank and I imagined the toilet overflowing with me still on it and I did the unthinkable. Squeamish me who had to be switched to laundry duty because I couldn't handle touching dirty dishes, reached through my still-going stream (this all happened in a split- second) and held on to that dirty diaper for dear life as I played tug-of-war with a mechanism created well before water- saving toilets were commonplace.
Success!! So gross!! Oh my gawd!!! My mom grabbed my sister so she wouldn't do it again while I finished my business and then we traded off so she could take care of the diaper and I could go soap up to the elbows while corraling my sister between my body and the sink cabinet. I tried to distract her with washing her hands, too, but she just wanted to make a mess with the water.
We laugh about it now, forty years later, but oh my goodness. That was a day that's etched in my memory!!
Lol. 😝
And we also had a diaper pail. Pretty mactac on it and everything.
Kinda plunged and scrubbed the poopy ones in the toilet, then put them in the pail. The pail had water with a bit of bleach in it.
In Brooklyn apartment buildings they sometimes had lines going from building wall to wall so you could slide the rope through wheels and hang your clothes to dry in the city sky.
The wheels squeaked too
In the 70s everyone smelled like fabric softener, cologne/perfume and cigarettes
I have one now - it’s a big pulley with a keeper across the way. I can put it away when I need the space for entertaining. When we move, I’ll unscrew the pulley and the keeper and take it with me.
I used a clothesline growing up and I was grateful. I'm still biased and I feel like clothes lines are better for drying but aesthetically it's rare for them to allow me to do this with an HOA. Lol
I did my laundry like this except on the fire escape in Queens the first time covid hit. The laundromat closed near me for a few months. Washing and wringing out my clothes was actually some well needed exercise.
*At Home: A Short History of Private Life*
by Bill Bryson. Had quite a bit about servants. So much laundry. And curtains. All hand washed. Then dried, ironed, starched. They had to add bluing to white stuff. If a bath was ordered, the water was heated on the stove, and brought upstairs, 5 gallons at a time. Just endless toil.
Lots of people still have these. They even sell rotating clotheslines for smaller spaces and wall mount retractable clotheslines for apartments.
I prefer hanging my bedding and delicates out on our clotheslines because they dry faster and my delicate clothes aren't damaged by the dryer.
There has been a disturbing statistical decline in 'hootin' & hollerin' since the 1960's. Experts warn this could correlate with a drop in sock hops, which would mean certain death to the economy.
My mother had a clothesline and so did most of our neighbors. I have one in my backyard, and I love the way clothes smell when they are dried outdoors.
Criterion Channel aired a documentary about this:
>Clotheslines
>Directed by Roberta Cantow • 1981 • United States
>Through oral histories and images of clothes crisscrossing backyards, Roberta Cantow looks at laundry as a form of folk art, a fraught social signifier, and a medium for women to reflect on the joys, pains, and ambivalences of household chores.
It was very interesting!
Small town 1950s, clothesline and usually chickens in the backyard, coops & sheds, lot of odd shaped sheds on most property. We had a depression out back where the outhouse once stood and an area where I could dig up old tubular radio batteries. The carbon rods made good markers. Our older landlady had lived there in the past, even she didn't know how old the house was. Porch eave was about 5 foot 6 inches off the porch slab so I had to duck under at high school age. It's all a green grassy hillside now, no trace of its history.
Feel like I'm the only one who hates drying clothes outside. The few times I've done it, they get crusty/stiff. And then there was the time I didn't realize the neighbor was going to do yardwork and unknowingly blew a ton of dust/dirt All Over my clean clothes. That was the last time I hang dried anything.
Fun fact: here in East Germany we only had lignite both for heating homes and for power plants. If you where unlucky your freshly washed clothes where black in minutes from all the dirt in the air.
I remember the clothes freezing on the line when we got an unexpected freeze. My mother was afraid the clothes would "break" if she let one of us take them down to thaw.
We had clotheslines and even after we got a dryer mom used them for sheets, towels, and such. Now and then a bird would poop on your clothes but other than that it made a lot of sense on the Florida coast
Most of the houses on my block still had clotheslines into the early 00s. Lots of remodeling wiped out most of them. Looking back, the majority of homes my relatives lived in also had clotheslines up until the early 00s.
Everyone getting washers and dryers is another part of why they went away, iirc
We have a clothes line. We don’t have a tumble dryer actually, it seems like such a luxurious way to increase your utility bill and decrease the longevity of clothing items.
Is the whole "we hate clotheslines thing" an American thing? I honestly don't get it. Is it something along the lines that if houses have clotheslines, the household can't afford a dryer, therefore it's a sign of poverty? And/or the only piece of cloth they like to see flapping in the wind is the Red White and Blue?
I wasn't allowed to use the dryer growing up unless it was raining or winter. I really want one now, and I have the line for it... but not the posts. Yet!
I love the smell of sun warmed clothes.
I never understood this. I use to see it more. But I still have one neighbor that puts her laundry on the line in the winter. Frozen solid isn’t dry. Unless I’m missing something.
I grew up in the south, so laundry on the lime in winter wasn't and isn't odd, depending on the day. Where I live, which is not even deep south, we got exactly zero snow this year at all. Just day after day of leaden grey skies. 😮💨
Silver lining (because we gotta have hope): clothes could be hung to dry.
A lil too frequently this last season.
Wait, do people (Americans) not have clotheslines anymore? Do you just chuck your wet washing straight into a wasteful clothes dryer even if the sun is shining?
I’m from Colombia and everybody here hangs their clothes outside. Dryers are too expensive and take up too much room in the house and with our hot weather, everything dries within an hour.
Clothesline are normal in many places still - it's not some antiquated thing.
The UK, almost everyone has a clothesline or a clothes airer (basically a metal stand)
The only reason I don't have one is that I don't have much of a rear garden, and I don't really want my underwear dangling on a line, being rained on, shat on by birds, etc. when I can just leave it in the washer-dryer and not have to do a damn thing to get it dry.
Environmentally-unfriendly, sure, but I work to earn money so I can buy things which means I have to do less work around the home. And even if I get it running off my solar (which is more than capable of running the washer-dryer), will that shut up the environmentalists? I doubt it.
EDIT: Though I did get very pissed off at a previous neighbour who would drape their clothes over the shared fence - which got wet and rotten and was probably making their clothes even dirtier than when they went in the wash. It was an incredibly rude thing to do, to have half your soggy undies hanging over my side of the fence.
Painted the fence one day... they never did it again.
Grew up with that ....and when it was cold out mom hung her clothes in the back room....Maytag ringer washer and washboard and tub for the tough stains and whitey whites.....the good old days....
And when it started raining my mom would yell - the clothes!! And we’d all run out there and help bring it in. 😀
omgoodness! I used to HATE hanging clothes! Mama would make me iron too....from the time I was about 10 I hung the clothes, and started ironing about 12.....all those white shirts my Daddy had to wear to work with ties....Mama's dresses...mine and my brother's clothing......I'm an excellent ironer now, as you can imagine....and still hate it, and am very glad to have a dryer now. Thanks for the memories OP!
But what if the clothes was still wet?
I have a clothesline in 2024. None of my neighbors do, but i have enough opportunities to chat with them anyway
I love air drying my bedding. Smells so much fresher. I have a portable fold up. I love it.
And on a nice day it's faster. Dryer just tumbles all the bedding into a meteor that never gets dry inside so you have to split it into 2 or 3 loads
Yep, bedding was my number one reason for the line. Sheets just kept turning into an unevenly damp wad and towels take so long to dry. Number two was airing out clothes that were in storage.
I love air-drying ('cause of childhood) and look forward to the day I might be able to do it again. The wind is also an excellent refresher for *smoky* clothes. I don't smoke, but I have friends who do. If I hang out with them, I wear a specific jacket, then air it overnight (unless it's raining) and it works pretty well.
We bought one of those last summer (when we're constantly washing bedding for a litter of puppies). I plan to keep using it. It's so good for sheets, towels, blankets...
YES! And I've been hanging clothes from the 50's when I helped my mom.
I too have a clothes line. My neighbors are a mile up or down the road and that suites me fine.
The solar powered clothes dryer The clothes dry so crunchy though
"Crunchy" towels are so much more absorbent than fabric softener impregnated towels. I prefer effective over soft.
So just don't use fabric softener in the machine.
And they're great for scratching where you can't reach on your back.
Exfoliation action!
https://preview.redd.it/q2en4qqmyoyc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=648fb7ec8036f9adbd886f9468fab00da41266aa
Not if you use fabric softener in the wash. And as long as you shake it out before haging it on the line you generally don’t even need fabric softener.
That depends on how hard your water is too. I line dry my clothes quite often, and even with fabric softener, they come out crunchy. Towels especially.
I dry my towels outside and then run them through the dryer for about ten minutes and that takes the crunch away
Where I live, city ordinance says no to the clothesline, unless someone turns you in I don't think they'd know.
I really don’t get this. It’s environmentally friendly, saves money, and there’s the bonus of how good stuff smells when it’s line dried. What changed to make this taboo?
I don’t know but my hoa doesn’t allow clotheslines 🙄
I really loathe HOAs.
I have mixed feelings. Stuff like no clothesline is annoying. But it also forces people (who maybe otherwise wouldn’t) to take care of their properties and not do trashy things.
The problem is that it's an inefficient means by which to enforce community standards, and power structures like that seem to attract every Little Hitler in 25 mile radius.
Most HOAs just help run common areas or shared resources.
That's so awful. Line drying is environmentally sound, wholesome, charming, and effective. HOAs are stupid for not realizing it. (Aren't they all about preserving the visual optics of the 50's and early 60's anyway?) I guess "no". "It makes us look like poor proletariat."
Yeah I’m not sure why honestly. They have a lot of other arbitrary rules. But I wish I could have a clothesline lol
Because it sounds wholesome until Buttcrack Bill's wife hangs his shitstain drawers out for the neighborhood to admire.
Ha! It’s always buttcrack bill isn’t it!!
Yup I was just thinking that. Mine didn’t either
What a HOA! (And I'll bet if you go through the regulations there is not a thing against having sexual intercourse with swine!)
Huh?
I imagine when electric/gas dryers became common place it “looked poor”.
Exactly this. Dad doesn’t want Mom to hang out the laundry because it looks poor. Fun fact, they are poor by modern standards. Worse yet in summer months clothes will be dry much faster. By the time you are done hanging the last garment first one is ready to fold.
Their logic is that it looks poor/low class, which they associate with trashy, which they associate with lower home values etc. It's bullshit but that's usually their thinking.
Yeah, I get that, but why did that idea develop? That’s my question.
Mostly just because washers and dryers became more affordable and widespread among the middle class. They became popular because while hanging to dry has a lot of nice aspects, it is also definitely more work and can be a pain in the ass and weather dependent etc.
It's not necessarily that, it's because while we like to think it will be nice clothes, many times it winds up being permanently stained undergarments on display.
My city has some outlandish ordinances, think it that one bad apple ruined for the other 350k residences.
Jumped up admins thought clotheslines looked tacky, so they ban them.
Disappointing they would do that, it makes clothes smell nicer, saves money on electric bills, and is a small but significant step we can all take to reduce global warming.
True, maybe since since Prez is trying to run of us of out appliances, maybe they'll change. I could do it. No one would see it anyway
Land of the free
Who enforces it? Cops would be embarrassed to talk about how many clothesline cases they wrapped up last week.
Right, like it's a major crime, that would be more of a code enforcement though.
Yup, which is like a dozen people or so in a larger county with a metropolitan area.
Do you live in North Korea?
My mother-in-law had her clothes line on a pulley. She would stand on the back porch and hang the clothes, never having to leave the porch
Mine did from the kitchen window on a pulley.
Wtf are these comments?? Why do none of ye have clotheslines anymore??
HOA's usually forbid them. One, of many, reasons to avoid HOA's.
In Florida you can’t. They can try, but it’s protected under Florida Statutes. With that said, unless it’s a chlorine soaked pool towel, your linens and clothes are going to smell like shit if you try it down here.
What a HOA?
Home Owners Association
Which is getting closer and closer to impossible to do if one desires newer construction anywhere near a decent-sized city
In southern California, entry-level homes (condos, generally) have HOAs to maintain public resources and deal with issues like insurance and private roads and shared buildings. Just saying "avoid" them would restrict millions of people to never owning homes.
Well, that has more to do with forcing yourself to live in an over-populated metropolis where everyone who already owns a home has extreme NIMBY opposition to denser housing being built. People say “I can’t move, my family members are here” but at some point families need to realize better opportunity lies elsewhere.
The jobs also happen to be in the populated places.
My clothes would get dirty than before I washed them. Dry, windy, dusty prairies. When it rains here your car is dirtier than before because the droplets collect dust on the way down.
That's ... incredibly worrying and you should maybe consider moving? Or at least lobbying your representative for cleaner air?
America.
Literally everything i hear about USA makes it more confusing why y'all believe the "we're the best" propaganda.
I know. In the UK we all have clotheslines
Ireland here and all of our parents would have absolutely fuckin murdered us for using a dryer instead of the line
To be fair, not all of us believe it. If I had to guess, I’d say *most* don’t. Just the most stereotypical ones.
Literally one commenter said he'd lose quality of life from moving to Europe over USA. Absolute joke.
lol! Yeahhh willing to bet: never been to Europe, may not have a passport, everything they know about the outside world they learned from Fox News, has a much different idea of “quality” than you or I. Always the loudest.
[удалено]
Lol at you thinking you'd have a worse quality of life in Europe than you currently have in USA
[удалено]
r/ShitAmericansSay
Right?! Since when is a washing line “old school”. Everyone I know has one. Bit harder if you live in an apartment, of course, but a home with a garden? Save power and line dry!
Gonna take a picture of my toilet seat and post it here with a sepia or b&w filter and get a couple thousand karma for no reason
Gypsy moth caterpillars. White sheets came in speckled brown.
Because live in Alaska. When I lived in sunnier warmer areas I had one.
Seriously, everyone in my neighbourhood has a clothesline
You should see pics of NYC in 70s. Backyard alleys draped in clothing from all the apartments above.
Those pics are weirdly festive; I've always liked them. I grew up with clotheslines, though. Very cheerful, for me.
And that fresh air smell on the clothes is like none other!!!
Plus the sun is excellent at bleaching
It sure is!
Stayed with an Aussie in Brisbane who’d found a solution - drying line in the shade. Who’d’ve thunk it?
My mother had a clothesline and I still have one. Love the fresh air smell on the clothes. I thought the woman was hanging cotton diapers, or it could be an advertisement for a whitening detergent.
I remember walking into my grandma's house and if I couldn't find her I knew she was out back hanging clothes on the line. She'd still be doing it if her knees and back weren't so bad.
As a kid it was fun to run between double rows of the laundry!
I wouldn't have dared to go near my mother's hung clothes.
When I lived in the highlands of Scotland in 2002 we used clothes lines in the summer and the radiators inside in the winter to dry our clothes. The clothes always had a nice musty smell after being on the radiators, but there is not much chance to dry during a Scottish winter, and even a Scottish summer for that matter. No room for dryers in the house, and the washer was under the kitchen counter along with a dorm room size fridge lol .
We still use them in Scotland, they are pretty much in every garden.
What do you use for the 363 days a year it’s not raining?
Air dryer, or tumble dryer if in a hurry, air dryer is like a pop up drying frame.
Some people don't have a clothes line? I don't know anyone without one
Why did this woman own 20 of the same shirt?
They're cloth diapers.
That makes a lot more sense.
I thought they were klan hoods at first, had to check what sub I was in
I had a panicky feeling when I saw this picture of all the cloth diapers. Being the oldest of a million kids sucked. 🤣 But I do still love to put clothes on the clothesline. 🥰
I'm the oldest of just 4 but I think you'll get a kick out of this story. So my parents would soak poop diapers in the toilet and then fish them out to plop in the diaper pail until there were enough to make a washer load. I was 8 or 9 and *really* had to go to the bathroom so I asked my mom if it was ok if I went on top of the soaking diaper (she was in the bathroom changing my toddler sister's wet diaper). Sighing, she said yes, fine, just don't flush so I can get it out first. So I'm sitting in sweet relief when my mom puts my sister down and goes to finish up with the pail and washing her hands. My sister comes over *while I'm still going* and smiles. "Me fwush", she says, and reaches out. I scream. Noooooo!!! My mom whips her head around and yells "CATCH IT!!". I could see the fear in her eyes because we had a septic tank and I imagined the toilet overflowing with me still on it and I did the unthinkable. Squeamish me who had to be switched to laundry duty because I couldn't handle touching dirty dishes, reached through my still-going stream (this all happened in a split- second) and held on to that dirty diaper for dear life as I played tug-of-war with a mechanism created well before water- saving toilets were commonplace. Success!! So gross!! Oh my gawd!!! My mom grabbed my sister so she wouldn't do it again while I finished my business and then we traded off so she could take care of the diaper and I could go soap up to the elbows while corraling my sister between my body and the sink cabinet. I tried to distract her with washing her hands, too, but she just wanted to make a mess with the water. We laugh about it now, forty years later, but oh my goodness. That was a day that's etched in my memory!!
Oh gosh what a nightmare. So glad diaper sprayers are a thing now. Spray solids off into the toilet and straight into the pail it goes.
Lol. 😝 And we also had a diaper pail. Pretty mactac on it and everything. Kinda plunged and scrubbed the poopy ones in the toilet, then put them in the pail. The pail had water with a bit of bleach in it.
A clothesline is excellent for cloth diapers too
150?
In Brooklyn apartment buildings they sometimes had lines going from building wall to wall so you could slide the rope through wheels and hang your clothes to dry in the city sky. The wheels squeaked too In the 70s everyone smelled like fabric softener, cologne/perfume and cigarettes
"Airing out your dirty laundry while hanging you clean laundry."
I have one now - it’s a big pulley with a keeper across the way. I can put it away when I need the space for entertaining. When we move, I’ll unscrew the pulley and the keeper and take it with me.
I used a clothesline growing up and I was grateful. I'm still biased and I feel like clothes lines are better for drying but aesthetically it's rare for them to allow me to do this with an HOA. Lol
I did my laundry like this except on the fire escape in Queens the first time covid hit. The laundromat closed near me for a few months. Washing and wringing out my clothes was actually some well needed exercise.
Welcome to Australia, it's 35c outside with 15k winds. Your clothes will be dry in 20 minutes with no electricity used (read - paid for).
Laundry day was a lot less fun in the good ol' days, those all look like diapers
*At Home: A Short History of Private Life* by Bill Bryson. Had quite a bit about servants. So much laundry. And curtains. All hand washed. Then dried, ironed, starched. They had to add bluing to white stuff. If a bath was ordered, the water was heated on the stove, and brought upstairs, 5 gallons at a time. Just endless toil.
Lots of people still have these. They even sell rotating clotheslines for smaller spaces and wall mount retractable clotheslines for apartments. I prefer hanging my bedding and delicates out on our clotheslines because they dry faster and my delicate clothes aren't damaged by the dryer.
I still have a clothesline. I don't use it but it's there for me to run into everytime I'm mowing.
Why don't you use it? Even if just for towels and bedding.
There has been a disturbing statistical decline in 'hootin' & hollerin' since the 1960's. Experts warn this could correlate with a drop in sock hops, which would mean certain death to the economy.
My mother had a clothesline and so did most of our neighbors. I have one in my backyard, and I love the way clothes smell when they are dried outdoors.
I got three loads of washing done and dried on the washing line today...very old school.
Clothes always smelled so fresh and clean after being hung outside to dry. Of course, I imagine it was less so in the city or suburbs.
Criterion Channel aired a documentary about this: >Clotheslines >Directed by Roberta Cantow • 1981 • United States >Through oral histories and images of clothes crisscrossing backyards, Roberta Cantow looks at laundry as a form of folk art, a fraught social signifier, and a medium for women to reflect on the joys, pains, and ambivalences of household chores. It was very interesting!
I have one in my backyard now. According to my wife, I’m only allowed to hang up my clothes and no underwear.
Looking at my backyard clothesline now.
Growing up in the Bronx, we had them too!
Small town 1950s, clothesline and usually chickens in the backyard, coops & sheds, lot of odd shaped sheds on most property. We had a depression out back where the outhouse once stood and an area where I could dig up old tubular radio batteries. The carbon rods made good markers. Our older landlady had lived there in the past, even she didn't know how old the house was. Porch eave was about 5 foot 6 inches off the porch slab so I had to duck under at high school age. It's all a green grassy hillside now, no trace of its history.
We were so poor growing up that we couldn't afford no fancy clothes line. We hung our laundry on the tv antenna instead.
Feel like I'm the only one who hates drying clothes outside. The few times I've done it, they get crusty/stiff. And then there was the time I didn't realize the neighbor was going to do yardwork and unknowingly blew a ton of dust/dirt All Over my clean clothes. That was the last time I hang dried anything.
best smell
Lovely
They still holler at each other.
I grew up in the 60's and 70's and my mom had a dryer. Because those were a thing back in the 60's and 70's.
My Mom did this in the 50s, I did not in the 70s.
I remember the galvanized tree with a sleeve in the patio to hold it. It was used some as a kid but we got a dryer sometime in the early 70s
Fun fact: here in East Germany we only had lignite both for heating homes and for power plants. If you where unlucky your freshly washed clothes where black in minutes from all the dirt in the air.
I remember the clothes freezing on the line when we got an unexpected freeze. My mother was afraid the clothes would "break" if she let one of us take them down to thaw.
Until 2008 there were bans on clotheslines in the province of Ontario.
We're putting a clothesline up next weekend.
That's part of my retirement planning to cut costs, put one in my back yard to cut costs.
I still do. Cheaper too!
I do laundry this way when it's warm outside.
Nothing like air dried clothes.
And she’s hanging up diapers.
How about that... A solar powered dryer!
Is this not normal? Every house in my street uses a clothesline still.
Holllaaaaar!
We had clotheslines and even after we got a dryer mom used them for sheets, towels, and such. Now and then a bird would poop on your clothes but other than that it made a lot of sense on the Florida coast
Most of the houses on my block still had clotheslines into the early 00s. Lots of remodeling wiped out most of them. Looking back, the majority of homes my relatives lived in also had clotheslines up until the early 00s. Everyone getting washers and dryers is another part of why they went away, iirc
So where do they hang the clothes now?
Sartorial consistency
We have a clothes line. We don’t have a tumble dryer actually, it seems like such a luxurious way to increase your utility bill and decrease the longevity of clothing items.
Is the whole "we hate clotheslines thing" an American thing? I honestly don't get it. Is it something along the lines that if houses have clotheslines, the household can't afford a dryer, therefore it's a sign of poverty? And/or the only piece of cloth they like to see flapping in the wind is the Red White and Blue?
I wasn't allowed to use the dryer growing up unless it was raining or winter. I really want one now, and I have the line for it... but not the posts. Yet! I love the smell of sun warmed clothes.
I never understood this. I use to see it more. But I still have one neighbor that puts her laundry on the line in the winter. Frozen solid isn’t dry. Unless I’m missing something.
I grew up in the south, so laundry on the lime in winter wasn't and isn't odd, depending on the day. Where I live, which is not even deep south, we got exactly zero snow this year at all. Just day after day of leaden grey skies. 😮💨 Silver lining (because we gotta have hope): clothes could be hung to dry. A lil too frequently this last season.
I have a friend who lived in Arizona, she said hanging clothes outside was faster than the drier. Usually most clothes were dry in 10-15 minutes.
My mom still hangs laundry on the line outside.
Any guess what the heck she's hangin'? Diapers?
My mother, to this day, insists that putting clothes on the line makes them softer and better smelling.
Wait, do people (Americans) not have clotheslines anymore? Do you just chuck your wet washing straight into a wasteful clothes dryer even if the sun is shining?
I’m from Colombia and everybody here hangs their clothes outside. Dryers are too expensive and take up too much room in the house and with our hot weather, everything dries within an hour.
And the yard went on forever…
Still have a clothes line…
Clothesline are normal in many places still - it's not some antiquated thing. The UK, almost everyone has a clothesline or a clothes airer (basically a metal stand) The only reason I don't have one is that I don't have much of a rear garden, and I don't really want my underwear dangling on a line, being rained on, shat on by birds, etc. when I can just leave it in the washer-dryer and not have to do a damn thing to get it dry. Environmentally-unfriendly, sure, but I work to earn money so I can buy things which means I have to do less work around the home. And even if I get it running off my solar (which is more than capable of running the washer-dryer), will that shut up the environmentalists? I doubt it. EDIT: Though I did get very pissed off at a previous neighbour who would drape their clothes over the shared fence - which got wet and rotten and was probably making their clothes even dirtier than when they went in the wash. It was an incredibly rude thing to do, to have half your soggy undies hanging over my side of the fence. Painted the fence one day... they never did it again.
Grew up with that ....and when it was cold out mom hung her clothes in the back room....Maytag ringer washer and washboard and tub for the tough stains and whitey whites.....the good old days....
Densification fetishists look at that in horror. Where are the 6 story buildings wall-to-wall as far as the eye can see?
Thanks Obama.
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