ABSTRACT
When art historians think of laundresses, Daumier and Degas come to mind. Depictions of these women were actually a commonplace in middle-class nineteenth-century French culture. Georges Montorgueil, a self-educated worker, journalist and popular writer, also commented on the laundresses' love of dancing. He suspected they were even abandoning laundering to become dancers at the neighbouring café-concerts. The laundresses' moral code motivated a great deal of Emile Zola's narrative in L'Assommoir as well. Laundresses were not only popular in literature, but in painting too. Both the abundance of laundress images and the emphasis, especially among ironers, on sexuality are striking. The laundry industry occupied one-fifth to one-third of the population of Paris and its suburbs. The women were seen picking up and delivering their clients' laundry and laboriously transporting it to and from the washhouses. Objectively, then, laundresses were overworked, underpaid, sick and frequently alcoholic.
