Controlling Nature in the Wash Basin: The National Laundrymen’s Association and the Reconstruction of Masculinity, 1898-1931

• In Event: Discourses of nature and gender

Abstract

Working-class white Americans experienced a crisis of masculinity in the early decades of the 20th century. Urbanization, a wage-labor economy, and the federal deconstruction of racial hierarchies disrupted the land ownership and racial privilege that had been bedrocks of working- class masculinity prior to the Civil War. In response, political elites and social groups turned to environmental conservation. Building parks, federal forests, and hunting reserves to combat the “over-civilization” of American men, these early 20th-century actors saw wilderness experience as a central strategy for reconfiguring masculine norms.
This paper pushes beyond histories of state-managed lands to ask about how an early 20th-century crisis of masculinity shaped non-human nature in the household. Focusing on the National Laundrymen’s Association, the largest trade organization of its kind, this paper argues that steam laundry owners in the early 20th-century U.S. used the language of ecological control, rather than wilderness experience, to elicit the interest of customers. In doing so, they redefined cleanliness for working-class and elite families, rendering it as an act requiring mechanical manipulation and chemical aids. Their efforts made possible the subsequent marketing of washing machines, scented detergents, water softeners, and fabric softeners — consumer products that would become hallmarks of late 20th-century cleanliness.

Author

• Spring Greeney, University of Wisconsin-Madison