| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880–1940. By Arwen P. Mohun. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xii, 348 pp. $48.00, isbn 0-8018-6002-4.)

In 1967, when I was ten years old, my family lived in the small Dutch town of Wageningen. During that year we traveled extensively throughout Europe, visiting the major cultural and historic sites. Some of my most vivid memories, however, surround the household laundry. The neighbors thought my mother exceptionally fortunate to have a mechanical washing machine. We actually had two machines: the washer to clean the clothes and a separate centrifuge to spin out the excess water. The centrifuge, which looked a bit like the Star Wars android R2-D2, had a propensity to take off like Luke's little helper around the room, so my mom rode the machine to reduce collisions as it spun the clothes. All our bed linens went out each week to a commercial laundry—returning starched, ironed, and folded—because the tub of our machine was too small to hold even a single sheet. Arwen P. Mohun's Steam Laundries brought back my childhood laundry memories and left a scholarly appreciation for the complex web of relationships and multiple challenges involved in doing the wash. . . .

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