When is the last time your local newspaper ran a feature like this?

[launderess]

There are two ways of doing laundry

Shifting of clothes or shifting of water.

Semi-automatics and conventional (wringer) washers are the former, and automatics the latter.

When nothing else existed and or you didn't know better then doing washing by hand (with or without mangles) and or using a conventional washing machine was fine. The latter probably was considered a step-up from the former. However once fully automatic washers come upon the scene the case for using wringers became slimmer and slimmer as the years went on.

Looking at the features of washers in the linked OP housewives and others must have thought they'd died and gone to heaven....

Read a comment on another site where a woman had announced her husband had just purchased and given to her as a gift a wringer. One of the other ladies quipped back that if her husband had given her a mangle he'd be one of the first things she would put through it. *LOL*

We know from across the pond how bad laundry day was well through the 1950's as women were stuck with either hand washing or using wringer washers.

 

[vacbear58]

Across the pond

Don't disagree with you Laundress on your point about the UK, but we did have a war to pay for. In the immediate postwar period the majority of UK production was assigned to exports and, even in the mid 1950s when equipment was more easily available there was a purchase tax (its actually a sales tax) of 40% and upwards - from memory it was not until 1958 that this was reduced, alongside an easing of hire purchase controls.

Picking up your point about second hand items these were sold without the tax. the washing machine market pre WW2 was pretty small (although there were some machines available), the vacuum cleaner market was much more mature so people were encourage to trade in their old cleaners which could then be re-sold without the tax

 

[vacbear58]

Across the pond

Don't disagree with you Laundress on your point about the UK, but we did have a war to pay for. In the immediate postwar period the majority of UK production was assigned to exports and, even in the mid 1950s when equipment was more easily available there was a purchase tax (its actually a sales tax) of 40% and upwards - from memory it was not until 1958 that this was reduced, alongside an easing of hire purchase controls.

Picking up your point about second hand items these were sold without the tax. the washing machine market pre WW2 was pretty small (although there were some machines available), the vacuum cleaner market was much more mature so people were encourage to trade in their old cleaners which could then be re-sold without the tax

 

[Chetlaham]

Great find!

I really enjoyed reading this.