The joy of hanging out the wash

Putting clothes out to dry is a means of connecting with all the women who went before me

One of my favourite things to do in summer is to hang washing on the line. Even more than slipping newly painted toenails into open toe sandals, or the taste of a perfectly crafted 99 topped with a Cadbury flake. To stand beneath the recently awakened branches of the cherry trees, blossoms sprinkled like confetti at my feet and slowly, methodically peg a basket of freshly washed sheets or towels on the line, while swifts and swallows swoop and soar and pigeons thrash in and out of the laurels, there is no greater joy. Honestly! A sunny day, a gentle breeze and I will scour every wardrobe, every drawer, every nook and cranny of the house, gathering unloved, discarded, slightly sniffy shirts or socks, anything that can be put in a washing machine and strung on a line.

My clothesline is an old-fashioned, fixed, double-corded structure, strung between two poles. It has a pulley system for raising and lowering so I don’t have to stand on my toes to reach it. I had chosen the place for its installation as the first blocks of our house were being laid. It would be a sacred place, I knew.

I say ‘my’ clothesline because even though others use it occasionally, I am the one who lovingly cleans the nylon cord, oils the cranking handle, and replenishes the store of clothes pegs every year, as the days lengthen and the rain takes a well-deserved rest. And it is I who makes numerous trips, up and down the garden steps, standing in that space, shaking, stretching, hanging, and folding the family’s laundry. It isn’t a chore. It’s a means of connecting with all the women who went before me and those women everywhere who still perform this act. Because laundry has usually been women’s work, and there is something about hanging it on the line, raising it to the sun, allowing it to billow freely in the breeze, that lifts this task (and all the other unseen repetitive, menial chores that women perform) out of the shadows, releases it from all associations with punishment, shame, drudgery, and powerlessness.

My daughter-in-law told me that her mother always insisted on hanging out the wash. There was a correct way of doing it, she had said. Large items like towels and sheets went on the line that faced the street, smaller more personal items (unmentionables) on the line facing the kitchen. She had learned this from her own mother and while she really didn’t care who saw her washing, nothing would make her break this habit. She had been late for a flight once because on her way to the car she noticed the shirts hanging the wrong way around and had to fix them.

My daughter-in-law is from Glasgow, a city where the old tradition of drying laundry on poles in the public green is guaranteed by city law. Up until the 1970s people would wash their clothes in communal sinks or washhouses and peg them on lines strewn between iron drying poles. The poles still exist but are never used. I imagine there was competition for the most aesthetically pleasing clothesline. In other parts of the city, where houses opened onto a communal back garden, it was common for women to rescue each other’s laundry at the first drop of rain, quickly grabbing it from the line, and leaving it in a strategically placed basket inside the unlocked back door. Laundry, it seems, fosters community.

Unlike Glasgow, the US has laws that forbid most people from hanging washing outside. Younger generations will never see a line of tiny babygrows or stark white sheets flapping in the wind or savour the plant and floral scents of line-dried clothes. Instead, they will rely on painters and poets, like Heaney, who commemorates his mother in the poem above, to conjure this nostalgic practice.

In London, Parliament Square’s first monument to a woman and first sculpture by a woman was unveiled in 2018. It is the suffragist Dame Millicent Fawcett, designed and created by the artist Gillian Wearing, and stands alongside similar monuments to Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, and other male leaders. In her hands, Fawcett holds a banner that reads, ‘courage calls to courage everywhere.’ The initial design was modified as the Westminster City Council thought that Fawcett looked like she was hanging out the wash. What, I wonder, was wrong with that?