Making Soft Water: Women, Class, and Water in the Household Wash, 1849–1920

This presentation explores the role of hard water, and the processes of softening it, in the act of washing clothes in the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not all water is created equally, neither chemically nor culturally. Water with high amounts of calcium and magnesium, dissolved naturally from soil or limestone, precipitated with soap molecules to create an insoluble soap scum on clothing. Women deemed this type of water bad and impure. Their cultural interpretation of water galvanized the use of homemade chemical softeners. Looking specifically at the evolution of these techniques, from homemade remedies to the growth of consumer markets dedicated to commercial products, this presentation explores the gendered, classed, and environmental implications of water softening.

An examination of the production of clean clothes presents a portrait of the distinct relationship that women had with the water they used for this task. Historians have explored how other forms of feminized work in the early nineteenth-century frontier America, such as dairying, raising chickens, and planting gardens, have influenced the environment. Some historians argue that middle class women became distanced from the environment. Yet laundry work kept women close to the environment throughout this period. The production of clean clothes is a task intrinsically tied to nonhuman nature because of its reliance on water. Examining water softening reveals a gendered relationship to water, one based on a distinctively feminized form of environmental control. To do laundry, women needed to not only be able to identify hard water, but also to chemically soften water. Water softening eventually took a toll on the bodies of lower class laundresses and working women. At the same time, the proliferation of domestic science introduced middle class women to water softening in the laboratory. Softening was used as a lesson in water chemistry.