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Lots of kids mean lots of clothes
The Vatican praises the washing machine, but not birth control
Jun. 22, 2009
(Dreamstime)
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PDF versionWhen L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, marked International Women’s Day by declaring the washing machine the great liberator of modern women, I went to my mother, who was born during the last summer of World War I. Granted, she doesn’t have a dog in the birth control fight, as her oldest child was born in the midst of the Great Depression, in 1938, and her youngest, me, was born in the midst of the baby boom, in 1952. In my mother’s case, nature took its course (and took its course and took its course and took its course, if you follow me) until nature called it a day. I do remember an evening in the late ’60s or early ’70s when my oldest sister was discussing with my mother -- sotto voce -- various artificial contraceptives coming on the market. My father, irritated with the subject, exploded when he heard the letters “IUD.”
“Well, damn it,” he snapped, “I’m not an idiot. You don’t have to spell around me.”
So, while my mother is perhaps not the best woman to make the real-life comparison of benefits between the automatic rinse and spin and the Enovid-10 oral contraceptive pill, she will testify that the washing machine did, in fact, change her life, and for the better. She suspects someone in the Vatican has been talking to his mother.
Monday was washday, every Monday. (Tuesday was ironing day. Wednesday was probably something lighthearted, like clean the windows day.) It took all day long to do a wash, so long that there was even a particular menu for supper, comprised of dishes that could be prepared early in the morning and left to sit until evening. Monday supper was red beans, cornbread and onions sliced thin and soaked in vinegar. After the beans were on the stove and the onions cut and the cornbread batter made, then came the heavy work.
My mother remembers her older brothers gathering wood and building a fire outside the house. She remembers them carrying the black iron pot to the fire and hauling water to fill the pot. She remembers her mother scrubbing the worst stains on a washboard before dumping the clothes in the pot. She remembers the sight of her mother standing, mixing and stirring the clothes in the hot water and homemade lye soap with a long wooden stick, a real-life agitator.
My mother can’t decide if washing in summer or winter was worse. In summer, she remembers her mother standing above the acrid steam, the steam scalding her face and the sun burning her back. In the winter, the warmth of the fire and the water was welcome, but it offered little protection against the raw north winds frosting the plains. And to wash in a dust storm was to risk trading grime for mud, the whole day’s work ruined.
My paternal grandmother used to say of Tuesdays that she worked with her “sad iron.” When I asked her why she called it a “sad iron,” she said, “Because, honey, I’d just iron and cry and cry and iron.” Now this was the same woman who went out and milked all the cows before going back inside to finish labor and deliver my father, but I never heard her speak of birth and child-rearing as being equal to the misery of laundry.
When my mother married in the 1930s, she had two twin washtubs, one for washing and one for rinsing, set on the back porch. She heated the water on the stove and she used a washboard to scrub the clothes clean. She boiled the diapers, but diapers, she says, don’t really count as a wash, since they had to be boiled daily. She no longer had to kindle a fire and she had some protection from the weather, but the job still took all day. And the washday menu remained the same.
It wasn’t until the 1940s that my mother got her first washing machine, a Maytag wringer, complete with a hose for filling the tub. By the end of that decade she had a front-loader with a glass door. This one had a spin cycle. No more wringing sodden sheets by hand or by crank. My mother says she used to stand in front of the machine and gaze at the wet clothes through the glass door. She says, “I’d watch everything go round, and I’d think, ‘This is the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen.’ ”
When my parents sold that house, my father included the washer in the purchase price. My mother says she begged him not to; she says she cried.
Mother is siding with Rome on this one. After all, she speaks of us, her children, with real affection. Memory has softened most of the sharp edges. But when the talk turns to washdays, she shakes her head and grows silent. She isn’t happy to go back there. Then she says softly, “It was hard. It was really hard.”
Melissa Musick Nussbaum is a freelance writer who lives in Colorado Springs, Colo. This is reprinted from the July 2009 issue of Celebration, NCR's sister publication.
It may well have been hard
It may well have been hard but how much easier could it have been if they'd only had one or two children? Less diapers, less clothing and bedding.
I just read a magazine my sister sent me with an article on birth control and how it turns women into sex objects for their husbands since there is no worry about a child being conceived. Does that mean that I, a woman in menopause am now a sex object? I don't need birth control but the end result is the same.
Freedom comes in many ways and I am glad I don't have to wash clothes the hard way but I am also glad I didn't have a dozen children.
and if you'd had a dozen
and if you'd had a dozen children I'm sure you would have loved them, and glad you had them & they recipricate such feelings. God never gives us more then we can handle; besides, children are blessings.
I have one and wish the Lord would grant me a dozen but it was a mircle to just have this one... and he is a blessing.
Hooray for all mothers who
Hooray for all mothers who had to do the same thing, week after week, year after year. They are the unacclaimed saints of the contemporary Church. And as for diapers, perhaps the inventor of Pampers should be put on the same list as the inventor of the washing-machine. Here's to all moms, they are national heroes!
This essay brings to mind the
This essay brings to mind the story my mother would tell. She and my father were married in the mid-thirties. They had three children before his untimely death in 1942. When she asked my father to buy her a washing machine (this would be the wringer type), his response was to inquire what she would do then with all her free time! He did, however, buy her the washer.
My husband works and does all
My husband works and does all the laundry. He has a gift for it. And yes, I love him all the more for it. I pay the bills and clean. And yes, I have a gift for it. Over the course of the years in our marriage, our "roles" shook out according to our gifts, talents and inclinations.
Doing the laundry is not necessarily a "gender specific" role. When the Vatican learns this, it will not issue these humiliating, weird declarations about washing machines being the sign of "liberation for women" and it may be more open toward women priests or women deacons or women in any role besides washer woman (or pew polisher or ironer of the sacred communion cloths.)
The washer, though, is what
The washer, though, is what has liberated both you and your husband to be able to do that for which you have the greater gift. If washing takes all day and constant effort and attention, then the person who is not out plowing, or working in the factory or whatever else, gets stuck with that job whether or not he or she has the gift.
This recounting of washday is exactly what I experienced when I visited my relatives in Germany in 1960, except that we also had to hand pump the water that went into the tub (and all the water we drank, used for cooking, and for doing dishes). The laundry was not done as often as it is nowadays, however. Things would be worn multiple times before they went into the wash basket. Bath day was just as much work and as infrequent as wash day, too.
Yes, birth control should
Yes, birth control should definitely be on the shortlist as the "great liberator." Also, ahem, maybe the right to vote? or the right to serve on a jury? or entrance into colleges, including graduate programs? oh, the list goes on and on......
Having married in 1948 and
Having married in 1948 and having my first child 11 months later, I can attest
to the joys of a big family. Never having used any kind of birth control (the
pill came along almost simultaneously with my seventh child), I wouldn't trade
my blessings for the world. My husband was not a Catholic but of course agreed to having the children raised in the faith. When the Korean war came
along, he joined the reserves as a source of additional income. During the
course of his compulsory two months stint at active duty, he met a young man,
a Catholic, who advised him to join the Church, which he did. He was a wonderful man who never once suggested that I use any kind of birth control,
even working three jobs for a while to make ends meet.
I have to laugh(at the
I have to laugh(at the article, not the comments)--otherwise I'd cry.
The Washing Machine?!? --Yes, I've grown up with the horror-stories of labor intensive scrubbing and ironing--but why don't they try some other gender-sterotyping apliances--say, for example, the microwave? Or something that is more private but important, like the bra (before we burned the bras we thanked God for them because they got us out of those awful corsets).
Could there also be any declaration that is more biased towards the West/North/Developed World? Millions of women are STILL scrubbing their family's laundry on riverbanks.
And as someone above stated, what about education? The right to vote? The right to decide medical decisions in private, for ourselves, despite religious or social taboos?
I'd recomend reading Ruth Schwartz Cowan's book: More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave.
The great liberator of modern women? We still have a long road ahead.
I find it ironic that so many
I find it ironic that so many women find the church's teaching on artificial contraception so burdensome. I am the mother of four beautiful. My work inside and outside the home is sometimes tedious but who ever said that life was meant to be an endless stream of gratifying and pleasurable experiences. I thank God for inventions like the clotheswasher but I still manage to tread water when it comes to keeping house and all the other hats I wear in life. As for being a mother, it was once remarked that although Notre Dame in France is breath taking, the soul of a child knit within its mother's womb surpasses its dignity beyond measure, his or her existence being eternal. May God Bless all women everywhere.
I am still trying to find out
I am still trying to find out WHO told the men in the Vatican about the washing machine? Could it have been some habit-wearing, woman religious in a community NOT under investigation by Cardinals Rode and Levada?
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