day. This 1920s advertisement tells husbands to join industrialization; machines should do the laundry, so women can fulfill their modern roles as loving wives and mothers

Ladies’ Home Journal advocated communal laundries with hired help. But these attempts failed, largely because communalization was seen as socialistic and unAmerican (Cowan 1976b, 164; Cott 1977).

One innovative solution for reducing the laundry task in rural areas utilized the steam plants and water supplies which operated creameries to do laundry as well. At the Milltown Cooperative Creamery Co., in Wisconsin, the laundry of fifty families could be washed in forty-five minutes. It seems, however, these rural alternatives couldn’t compete with the urban commercial laundries and these eventually gave way to self-service laundromats (Cowan 1983).