Wash Day Blues

Monday started on Sunday night.

That was when you shaved the soap — a bar of lye or naphtha, cut thin into a pan of water and set on the back of the stove to soften overnight. You filled the copper boiler and put it on to warm, because heating water from cold on a Monday morning meant losing an hour you didn’t have. You sorted the clothes: whites first, then colors, then the heavy things — work shirts, kitchen rags, the linens you’d been putting off. By the time you went to bed, the next day’s labor was already laid out across the apartment like a map of everything it would cost you.

In a tenement on the east side of Harlem in 1919, a woman like Lucie Santoro’s mother would have woken to a kitchen already claimed by the wash. The boiler on the stove. The washtub pulled to the center of the room — because in a three-room apartment shared by six or eight people, there was no laundry room, no separate space for the work. The work lived where you lived. It ate the kitchen table, the floor, every surface. Lines strung wall to wall held yesterday’s damp, and in winter the moisture never fully left. It lived in the plaster, in the mattress, in the wool of your good dress.

The process itself was punishing. Water had to be hauled — up from the yard pump or the hallway tap, basin by basin, trip after trip on narrow stairs. Fifty gallons for a full wash. Four hundred pounds of water, carried by hand, before you’d scrubbed a single collar. You boiled the whites, stirring them with a stick in water hot enough to scald, soap and lye eating into the cracks in your hands. You scrubbed each piece against the washboard — small circles, firm pressure, the ridged metal pushing back against your knuckles. You wrung everything through the mangle, feeding wet fabric between the rollers, cranking with one hand and guiding with the other, careful of your fingers because the wringer didn’t care what it caught.

Then the rinsing. Each piece rinsed twice — once to pull the soap, once with bluing to keep the whites from yellowing — and wrung again. Then the starching. Then the hanging.

The hanging was its own ordeal. In tenement buildings, clotheslines ran between the buildings on pulleys, five stories of laundry stacked over the courtyard and the airshaft. If you lived on a lower floor, you had fewer stairs to climb with your heavy basket — but someone above you might hang a colored wash over your whites, and if the dye dripped, you did the whole load again. Sheets froze stiff on winter lines. In summer, the stove had to stay lit for the boiler, and you spent the day bending over tubs in a room that trapped heat like a box.

By the time the last piece was pinned to the line, you still had to empty the tubs — basin by basin, the same stairs, the same weight, but now the water was gray and cold and your hands were raw from lye. The equipment went away. The kitchen became a kitchen again. And you hadn’t cooked. Monday’s dinner was whatever was left from Sunday — cold meat, bread, broth stretched thin — because wash day didn’t leave room for anything else.

That was one day. Tuesday was ironing — the heavy flatirons heated on the stove, tested against a damp rag, pressed until they cooled and then swapped for a hot one, piece after piece until the pile was done. Wednesday was mending: seams, tears, patches, darning. Thursday you carried the clean, pressed, mended clothes upstairs and turned the mattresses. Friday you baked. Saturday you scrubbed the floors. Sunday you went to church, and Sunday night you shaved the soap.

The week was a wheel, and Monday was where the weight pressed hardest.

What the weight meant

I think about this when I write. Not as background — not as period detail to dress a scene — but as the thing that makes a character’s choices legible. Because if you don’t understand what it took to keep a household running in 1919, you don’t understand what it meant for a woman to choose anything else.

When Lucie tells her family she wants to become a teacher, she isn’t just choosing a career. She’s choosing to stop being the person who carries the water. In her mother’s eyes, that choice is a betrayal — not because Mamma Santoro doesn’t love her daughter, but because she’s spent twenty years at the washtub so that her family could be clean, fed, and respected in a neighborhood where reputation was survival. Lucie’s ambition doesn’t just threaten the family’s plans for her future. It threatens the value of everything her mother has already given.

That tension — between gratitude and ambition, between a daughter’s dream and a mother’s sacrifice — is one I keep returning to across all the women I write about, women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America. The weight is always there. It just takes different forms.

When Maggie Barnes from the Bootleggers’ Chronicles series takes in boarders in 1920s Philadelphia, every extra body in her house means more sheets, more towels, more hours at the washtub. That’s not setting. That’s the cost of the plot. Her independence requires a boarding house, and the boarding house requires Monday. When Delores Bailey from the Moonshiner Mysteries series who lives alone on her Montana homestead, the smallness of her laundry pile is its own kind of freedom — and its own kind of loneliness. The wash tells you the size of a woman’s world.

And when Lucie dreams of standing at the front of a classroom, she’s not just dreaming of chalk dust and books. She’s dreaming of a Monday that doesn’t start on Sunday night. A life where her hands do something other than wring.

The quiet standard

There’s a moment in The Promise Trilogy that I rewrote more times than any other. Lucie comes home from graduation and tells her family she wants to teach. In the first draft, the dialogue was sharp and the conflict was clear — mother and daughter, two visions of a woman’s life, colliding over a kitchen table.

And it floated. Because she wasn’t doing anything.

So I put her at the kitchen counter and gave her a bowl of squid to clean. Cold, slick, unavoidable — the kind of task that requires your hands even when your mind is somewhere else entirely. And suddenly the scene worked. Not because the words changed, but because the reader could feel what she was trying to escape. The squid was the life she was being prepared for. Her hands were in it while her mouth was arguing against it.

That’s what I mean by the weight beneath the plot. Historical fiction doesn’t live in the marches and the speeches. It lives in the work people had to do the next morning. The peaks — the decisions, the declarations, the moments that change everything — rise from a landscape made of Monday’s laundry, Tuesday’s ironing, Wednesday’s mending, and the thousand acts of endurance no one recorded because they were just what women did.

Two books shaped my understanding of this more than any others. Susan Strasser’s Never Done: A History of American Housework is the best single account I’ve found of what the daily work actually looked like, hour by hour, century by century. And Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s More Work for Mother traces how household technology reshaped women’s labor in ways that were often counterintuitive — the washing machine didn’t simply free women’s time; it raised the standard for how clean a household was expected to be. The weight shifted, but it didn’t disappear.

If you get the weight right, the peaks take care of themselves.

“What the Hands Know,” a short story set in the world of The Promise Trilogy, follows a girl who reads her neighbors’ lives through what their laundry confesses — and faces a choice between the washtub and the classroom. It’s available exclusively to newsletter subscribers.