Ironing: From the 50s to the Present

I understand that most young people today don’t own and iron and wouldn’t know what to do with one if they had it. I’ve seen people in clothes that should have been ironed and it isn’t a pretty sight. Manufacturers and major stores advertise that their clothes are 100% cotton, and that’s just fine, but all-cotton clothes rarely look pressed when they’re taken from the dryer. Even the most expensive dress shirts look messy without at least a little touch-up on the fronts.

I remember that as a teen (back in the 50s) we all wore cotton skirts that were very full and made to stand out by crinolines, sometimes two or three. My blouses were white shirts from Ship ‘n Shore and they had to be ironed. I decided that I could iron my clothes myself (an act of rebellion on my part – what kid today would think that was daring?) and I learned in a hurry. The trouble was I wasn’t good at planning ahead, and fairly often I would be ironing a blouse or skirt just before going somewhere in it. Mother ranted that I was wasting electricity by heating up the iron for one item. I did some calculations (I’d had physics by that time) and decided that each session was costing $.05. She wasn’t impressed, probably because her real issue was my lack of planning and doing things in an orderly way.

Talk about orderly systems, to get ready to do the ironing, you would lay out each piece on the ironing board and sprinkle it with water contained in a bottle with a sprinkler gadget stuck in the neck, an empty pop bottle was a good choice. The sprinkler gadget had cork around it so it would have a tight fit. Then you would roll each piece up tightly and lay it in the basket. Ideally, by the time you got to ironing, each piece would be uniformly damp and ironing would make the fabric nice and smooth. The biggest problem with this scenario is that I often didn’t want to finish all the ironing at one time. I’d put the dampened but unironed pieces in the refrigerator. If I didn’t, they would develop mold, and NO one wants to deal with mold spots on clothes! Probably half the women in the country had dampened clothes taking up space in their refrigerators.

When we moved into the house in Peoria, there was a trunk in the attic with several odd items. One was a ceramic sprinkler bottle in the shape of a Chinaman and a poem was on a card around his neck: “More better sprinkle bottle way Than squirt through teethie all the day.”

When I got married, I was faced with ironing a pair of men’s cotton pants. Hoo boy! Where should I begin? Rebellion be damned, I solved the problem by walking two blocks to Mother’s house and having her show me how to do it.

In the 60s clothes began to be made of blended fabrics, mostly nylon and cotton, but sometimes rayon and cotton. And we were blessed with a wonderful invention: the steam iron! To top it off, someone started producing spray starch!! At last the refrigerator was free of dampened clothes and the whole task was immeasurably easier—especially if you wanted to iron one piece at a time.

Over the years I have learned to enjoy ironing. It’s nice to have a job that is actually, really completed. Almost everything in housekeeping is never-ending and you can’t see any improvement after getting the jobs done. But with ironing, every piece starts out wrinkled and ends up sharp and crisp and hanging on a hanger. If there are 6 shirts to iron, you can rejoice when you get to the end of the 6th one. It offers a sense of accomplishment.

To make it even more enjoyable, I learned that when my kids were little, they stayed away when I was ironing. I think it was too boring for them. But, oh, what peace I had! All alone with my GE steam iron and a stack of ironing that would take me as long as I wanted it to. Janet Evanovich writes that Stephanie Plum’s mother ironed when she was anxious. Sometimes she ironed the same shirt over and over and over. I’ve never gotten that bad, because I always have plenty of things to iron, and if I weren’t so busy on the computer, I might even get caught up.