Women wash the clothing of cotton field workers and their families who live and work on a large South Carolina plantation, 1874.
Left: migrant family washes clothing in the Rio Grande, Brownsville/Matamoros, 2019 [Pultizer Center photo]. RIght: Mexican day laborers cross into Texas in their daily commute, a common experience during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Many were women who worked as domestic servants.
Left: servicemen traveling through Washington, D.C., who couldn’t afford a hotel room could wash their clothing at this UN facility and also take a shower and shave, Dec. 1943. Right: a US soldier washes his clothing in New Guinea, May 1944.
White House basement laundry room and outdoor clothes line, 1926.
Left: the Tudor City neighborhood of Manhattan, 1930. Right: hanging laundry in New York City, 1940. [Museum of the City of New York photos]
Left: the first US laundromat. Ft. Worth, 1934. RIght: Dana Carvey in a scene from the film, "Wayne's World," (1993).
Left: pink in 1960. Right: avocado in 1970.
Left: advertisement for Kirkman's Borax Soap entitled “Happy Laundry Girls,” 1891. Right: a happy laundry cat from 1914.
Left: Chinese family-owned laundry, California 1910. Right: Chinese laundry, Washington, D.C., 1942.
