Irene Rawlings

Everyone washes and dries clothes. Most of us have early memories of clotheslines and of the simpler times they represent. Even people who don’t hang their clothes out have fond feelings for a time when towels hung out on the line smelled like spring.

What is a clothesline? A clothesline can be colorful Amish quilts hanging out on the front porch of an Iowa farmhouse, a decades-old skirted bathing suit drying on a rusty nail in a Maine summer house, wool socks drying on a steam radiator in a tiny New York walk-up, white sheets flapping furiously in that fierce prairie wind that comes just before the rain, or blue jeans frozen still on a wintry line in Montana.

Hanging laundry on a line is one of life’s luxuries. It represents time. Time to be alone. Time to thing, even to meditate, accompanied by the repeated actions of hanging clothes—stooping, straightening, lifting, hanging, breathing, watching the clouds. There is a spirituality in the simple, positive actions of this everyday activity.

Clotheslines—in the backyard, on the front porch, or over the alley–were meeting places for women to share recipes, remedies, and closely held secrets. Before automatic washers and gas dryers, women started their work early and moved quickly to finish the day’s chore’s before dark. At the clothesline, in the safety of familiar daily rituals, women shared questions and concerns, dreams and expectations, and recipes for banana cream pie—all to the rhythm of cleansing and renewing the fabric that clothed their families.

Throughout time, clotheslines have said something about how we lived. Lots of little things hung on the line meant lots of little children. Work shirts and overalls said there was a laborer in the house. White shirts and dozens of white handkerchiefs meant an office worker. A women who hung her laundry by color, by size, and by kind was considered a good woman. A women whose line was hung haphazardly was deemed an indifferent housekeeper. Someone who hung her underwear out for everyone to see was a hussy. Even now, when we pass a full clothesline, we take a furtive glance to see if the underwear is plain, serviceable cotton or frivolous lace.

Women learned to hang laundry “the right way” from their mothers, who operated with the absolute certainty that there was a proper way to hang out the washing.

Today, clotheslines, weighted with wet laundry flapping in the wind, still say something about us. Perhaps we want to conserve energy by not using the dryer or we simply like to sleep on sheets that smell of fresh air and newly cut grass, or we like to dry ourselves with towels that are satisfyingly scratchy.

“I love this book. It has great stories about the very basics of living, laundry and the clothes line.”
”It’s an image that epitomizes summertime: freshly laundered sheets pinned on a clothesline, billowing languidly in a warm breeze.”