Modern Day Steam Laundry
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A history of the development of the steam laundry industry from the first commercial laundries in the 1840s to their decline in the 1930s. Historian Arwen Mohun argues that the trajectory was shaped within the constraints of what was technologically possible and culturally acceptable. Rising standards of cleanliness, new kinds of machinery, and an increasingly polluted urban environment provided the context for the industry's emergence. The shortcomings of applying factory methods to washing clothes, increased regulation, and rising costs of labour encouraged consumers to abandon laundries for newly available alternatives - electric washing machines and irons - a century later. By comparing this process in Britain and the USA, Mohun reveals differences created by culture, regulation, and social structures. She also shows the unexpected transatlantic character of this seemingly localized kind of business. The text tells the stories of people: exploited but fiesty laundryworkers and the work culture they created; would-be entrepreneurs seeking easy success but finding instead imperfect technology; narrow profit margins, and unco-operative consumers; and reformers who entered laundries in the guise of workers, later using that experience of heat, monotony and danger to argue for regulation. This is a study of the technological, cultural, business and labour dimensions of an important and virtually unstudied industry.
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