Washing Clothes Under Communism

Hand Soap Cheia, type superior

I remember vividly having to do laundry by hand in our heavy bathtub because it was the only container large enough to wash sheets in our tiny apartment. In summertime we used the tub to chill watermelons by running water over them and adding ice if available.

My hands and my mom's were raw from washing clothes with lye soap (see the photo). It sounds like we lived in Dickensian times but it was the same in many ways.

We had to boil enough water to do the wash and to actually boil white clothes in another cooking pot on the stove with lye soap in hopes that stains might come out and the whites will be brighter. No such thing as bleach. We used some blue dye cubes to restore the blue tint to men's shirts and our school uniforms when the shirts faded. Mom starched our shirts with a mixture of flour and water, when flour was available. But we had plenty of DDT to kill pests with in the garden and even vitriol.

Pesticide pump called Flit - it was often used to spray DDT

My grandmother had a small carved wood oval tub to wash things in by hand. The reason it was so small was because she only had so much soap and water available. She washed the sheets at the crystal clear river. I am not sure if the resident fish liked that very much.

Photo: Wikipedia

Copaie de lemn

The tub doubled as a dishwasher, face wash, and a place for newborns to be rocked in. I remember being rocked to sleep in such a tub when I was a toddler and my legs and arms were hanging over the sides, like a chunk of meat too large for the cooking pot.

In case you wonder what prompted these memories, I had to do a lot of laundry this week, no scrubbing, just a lazy American folding them and putting them away, washer and dryer did all the work, God bless the person who invented them. But, I’m old, the arthritis hurts, and climbing stairs with a laundry basket is not so much fun as it once was when the novelty of modernity was amazing. 

And we have abundant electricity and water thanks to the hard-working entrepreneurs and inventors who were allowed to be individual thinkers instead of serfs to the collective.