Lynn was thinking of her mother and the laundry today. An article from 2010:
https://adage.com/article/global-news/global-marketing-dirt-laundry-trends-world/144398
We have been on trips where we washed a few clothes by hand, using hand soap. The clothes were not very dirty and the water was warm enough. Neither of us has ever washed clothes in an outdoor running water source such as a river.
BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- Every half hour 7 million people in the world wash their clothes with Unilever products, and 6 million of them do so by hand. That rather jarring statistic, courtesy of Unilever Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Keith Weed, helps explain Unilever's exit from North American laundry a few years ago: The biggest growth markets are where people are dreaming of moving up from hand washing to their first hand-cranked or semi-automatic washing machine, or are looking for lower-suds products or rinse additives that will let them make fewer or shorter trips to the well or river.
Getting a machine that can help and having electricity to run the machine makes life lots easier. Lynn remembers a large copper pot that her aunt boiled clothes on a stove that burned wood. When we watched "The 1900 House", we saw a London household where a maid started a fire under a giant pot quite early in the morning to eventually get the water hot enough to help clean the clothes.
Of course, rinsing and drying on a clothesline took additional time, strength and effort. Using a wringer was better than trying to twist each garment enough to get the water out. Getting fingers or other tender parts in the wringer was to be avoided.
Today's washers use enough centrifugal spin to accomplish some water removal and the spin dryers do the rest.
Our laundry day consists of sorting the clothes, starting the washer and using special laundry detergent. Our machine does not alert us when it is finished but the dryer does.
