From Washboards to Washing Machines: A History of Laundry Work

📚Lecture: "A History of Laundry Work: 19th to 20th Century"
🎤Speaker: Sarah Verreault (Collections Officer at Osgoode Township Museum)

From washboards to washing machines, laundry has never been simple.

Before modern appliances, doing laundry could take an entire day of intense physical labour, hauling water, boiling it, scrubbing by hand, and repeating the process week after week. This talk explores the hidden history behind one of the most ordinary parts of daily life: the tools, the labour, and the women who carried it all.

From copper boilers to electrification, from “blue Mondays” to the Wages for Housework movement, this is a story about far more than clean clothes. It’s about class, gender, and the value of unseen work. And when labour-saving machines finally arrived, did they actually make life easier? Or did the board, or mother, still do the work?

Sarah Verreault is the Collections Officer at Osgoode Township Museum. She has 14 years of experience in museums, primarily working in Collections and Living History. She has a B.A. in Histoire from Laurentian University and a M.A. in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester. Outside of her professional interest in collections care and documentation, she has a personal interest in fashion history, learning historic skills and the interpretation of working-class heritage.

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Agenda

6:15pm - Doors open: Grab a seat, order drinks and food and settle in.

6:55pm - Host Introduction

7:00pm - Lecture starts

7:45pm - Q&A with Audience

8:00pm - Socialize and make friends, grab drinks

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