by Vanessa D. Alexander

Created on: December 29, 2008

If you're a certain age you can probably remember wringer washers and helping your mother take the laundry outside to hang on a clothesline in the back yard. Every home seemed to have a back yard with a clothesline. Homemakers would have the laundry ready to line dry early to take advantage of the Sun's rays. It was not economics but necessity driven. Laundry in their day was labor intensive in ways we can only imagine today. Homemakers could easily spend an entire day doing the laundry alone and did.

Necessity prevailed back then of course because no one had electric dryers or dryers of any kind. The greatest benefit over all had to do with health.

Sunlight is pure ultra violet and kills pathogens. Pathogen is from the Greek word, pathos which means suffering
and gen meaning, to give birth to. It is an infectious agent or more simply put, a germ.

Pathogens and bad bacteria cannot survive the pure, ultra violet light the Sun's rays give off. Even though pathogens are still destroyed in dryers by the intense heat, line drying outside in pure sunlight is significantly more effective.

The health benefits therefore on the side of line drying are tremendously increased by drying laundry with heat from the sun. Next in line would probably be the old fashioned radiators, steam heat and of course going further back in time, hanging clothes near a fireplace or open hearth.

There is no health advantage line drying laundry indoors, in for example, a dark basement or other room where strong natural sunlight has no contact with laundry, except, to save a few dollars on utility costs. The purpose for line drying would be lost, which is killing the pathogens and bacteria that cause health issues. In this case, drying laundry in an electric dryer would be far wiser.

The generations before us dried their laundry in the Sun, used the steam heat from radiators and used hot irons to get the wrinkles out of clothing.
On the side of progress we would be hard pressed if we had to convince homemakers in previous generations to ignore the advances that have been made. There is a strong point to be made for the conveniences of modern times. The busy life style of the typical family today would be made more complex without them. That is simply a reality.

Previous generations had little time to dwell on the scientific reasoning or the health benefits involved as they hung laundry outside in the open air and pure sunlight to dry on a clothesline. They didn't think green. They lived it out of pure necessity.

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