Dirty laundry: public hygiene and public space in nineteenth-century Paris

In nineteenth-century France, in rural areas, women washed laundry in the nearest streams or in the sea and hung the linens where they could, on lavender bushes, rocks and grass fields, where it had a quaint, if not artistic quality. In villages, laundresses washed linens in fountains, or other water sources, which were often found at or near the center of town. In either case, laundresses operated in public spaces without problem. I argue that, in Paris, changing ideas about the functioning of city space, the management of public hygiene and decisions about the use of public space, made laundresses and laundry operations matter out of place in the city. This study will demonstrate the changes laundering and laundresses underwent during the nineteenth century in Paris, making them out of place. City administrators and public health officials changed the occupation and places where laundry could be done as they sought to render laundry and laundresses invisible within Paris. In the early nineteenth century the Préfet de la Seine forbade women from using the river banks. In the mid-nineteenth century complaints about the disgraceful aspect of women laundering on the river prompted the Préfet to try to eliminate bateaux-lavoirs. In the late nineteenth century the discovery of microbes focused attention on laundry and laundresses and their potential to transmit diseases prompting another wave of hygiene regulations and questions about closing bateaux-lavoirs and lavoirs. The Préfet and Conseil d'Hygiène's struggle to make them invisible by moving them into approved facilities continued until the end of the nineteenth century. Studying laundresses and laundry sheds light on how the shifts in politics, changes in acceptable uses of public space and public hygiene affected working women. It illustrates the manner in which public hygiene- the Conseil de Salubrité and later the Conseil d'Hygiène, functioned and to what degree they could demand changes to the city in the name of hygiene. Through identifying subtle policy shifts, historians may learn how laundry demonstrates policies on the use of urban space, public hygiene or issues about work.