Laundering Identities in the Americas: The Production of Individuals and Class in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Looking at work that bridged public fountains and lavaderos and private interior rooms and patios where ironing and drying was done, this paper compares this hybrid housework sector in different settings, focusing on what the work produced.  Census manuscripts, literature, newspaper articles and advertisements, and private letters from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico and Argentina in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contribute to an understanding of laundresses as cultural producers.  Washerwomen contributed to the social construction of individual men and women whose clothing they cared for as marriageable and employable and as citizens, as well as to their own gendered individual and collective identities.  The ethnicity of largely self-employed laundresses differed across North and South America over time.  Depending on time and place, these working women were American-born Spanish, Indian, mestiza, and African/mulata, as well as Irish, Italian, and Galician immigrants.  They were privy to middle-class and elite male and female clients’ secrets that public personas in bleached and starched linens often belied.  The analysis considers different economic and political contexts for this cultural production crossing domestic and public boundaries, as well as comparisons to other simultaneously work done in and out of the home, such as cooking and sewing.