| Korean women do laundry in the early 1900s / Robert Neff Collection |
By Robert Neff
When Isabella Bird Bishop, an intrepid British travel writer, visited Korea in the mid-1890s, she declared that Korean women were slaves to laundry and that it was to be their “manifest destiny” as long as their husbands wore white. According to George Gilmore ― one of the first American English teachers here in the late 1880s ― the “most wearing and incessant labor” for a Korean woman was doing laundry.
Before the clothing could be washed, it often had to be taken apart and allowed to seep in lye, or water that had been used to wash rice or beans or boiled with barley. After the clothes had soaked for a while, the real labor began ― rinsing and washing in clean water. In the countryside, finding a place to do laundry was relatively easy in the spring and summer and may have even been somewhat pleasurable to be away from the eyes of their husbands or the sharp tongues of their mothers-in-law.
Bishop, who traveled extensively around the Korean Peninsula, claimed that “every brookside has its laundresses squatting on flat stones, dipping the soiled clothes in the water, laying them on flat stones in tightly rolled bundles and beating them with flat paddles…”
| Women wash clothes in the frozen Han River in the early 1900s. / Courtesy of Diane Nars Collection |
During winter, however, the task became much more difficult as the ice had to be broken so that the women could complete their cold and disagreeable work.
In the early 1890s, Gilmore recalled seeing women, in the early mornings, making their way slowly through the streets ― their faces carefully concealed and their laundry in bundles upon their heads ― to their favorite streams located just outside the city walls.
“Here, in a hollow in the brook's bed, they dip the clothes, and then, laying them on the stone, proceed to beat out the marks of wear, turning the clothing now and again to bring uncleansed spots under the paddle. They beat in time, as though to a tune and dexterously change the paddle from one hand to the other without losing a stroke.”
Gilbert's description of laundry in Seoul was almost poetic, but Bishop's observations were a little more negative ― she acknowledged that women washed in the streams outside the city walls, but they also did laundry in the Han River (which she denounced as being a “foul river”), in the pond of one of the deserted palaces and “in every wet ditch.”
Many of the Western visitors ― including Bishop ― grudgingly admired how brilliantly white the clothes were after they had been laundered.
| Clothing are left to on walls and rocks during the winter of 1883/84 / Robert Neff Collection |
Gilmore added: “It might be supposed that this method of washing would be hard on the fabric. But though Korean clothes are often of thin texture, the paddle seems less destructive than our own way of rubbing. Against its effectiveness nothing can be said, for nowhere is there a more glowing whiteness produced in the laundry.”
Once the clothes were soundly beat and clean, they were laid out on flat stones or on grassy slopes to dry. Once dry, they were gathered up and taken home where the next phase of the laundering process ― ironing ― was done later that night and will be the subject of tomorrow's article.
As for many of the Western families living in Korea in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they had their laundry done by Korean or Chinese servants. The bachelors at Jemulpo (modern Incheon) and the other ports sent their clothes to one of the many Chinese laundry shops that dominated the local market. However, in 1902, their dominance was challenged when the Korean Laundry Company was established in Seoul.
In 1924, Agnes Campell, an American teacher in Korea, included an amusing anecdote in a letter to her friends back home. According to her, there was a man found sitting upon a wall wailing in a loud voice his grief because his wife had left him. A passerby opined to the crying man that he must have really loved his wife. The man looked up and replied, “No, I never loved her. But who will now wash and iron my clothes for me?”
Perhaps we know why she left ― it wasn't her “manifest destiny.”
| Chinese women wash clothes in the early 1900s. / Robert Neff Collection |
Robert Neff has authored and co-authored several books including, Letters from Joseon, Korea Through Western Eyes and Brief Encounters.