Beautiful drudgery: Laundry in old Korea

Korean women doing laundry along a riverbank. Robert Neff Collection

For many people, laundry is one of the most dreaded household chores. It is often described as a mind-numbing, tedious and neverending task: Load it into the washing machine, then the dryer, then sort and fold everything by hand. But in the past, it was even worse.

When I was a boy, I often watched my grandmother do the laundry. I remember when she used a washboard, scrubbing each piece by hand. Later, when times were financially a bit better, my grandfather obtained an ancient wringer washer to ease her labor. The “modern” contraption had a tub where the clothes were agitated, and above it, a hand-cranked wringer through which she fed the clothes before hanging them on the line to dry. For her, laundry was an all-day affair.

The same held true for Korea. In the late 1880s, George W. Gilmore, an American teacher, described the daily lives of Korean women in his letters home and his book. He acknowledged that cooking and preserving food for the larder took time, but claimed these tasks “occupied a modicum of the Korean wife’s time. Her most wearing and incessant labor [was] at the laundry.”

About a decade later, Isabella Bird Bishop — the English travel writer who spent an extended period in Korea — echoed Gilmore’s sentiments. She described laundry as a Korean woman’s “manifest destiny so long as her lord [husband] wears white.” She added that women were the “slaves to the laundry.”

A postcard shows women doing laundry in Seoul. The task was probably made more enjoyable by listening to the neighborhood gossip. Robert Neff Collection

Both agreed that most of the work was done away from home.

Gilmore observed that washing was done “at the well-side, by the side of the street or by the side of a brook or river. Even the main sewer [in Seoul], at places where the mountain stream which flows through it runs less laden with filth than elsewhere, is utilized for this purpose.”

Once again, Bishop echoed Gilmore’s sentiments, writing that women in Seoul washed in “foul river[s], in the pond of the Mulberry Palace [Gyeonghui Palace], in every wet ditch …”

They both painted a bleak description of the laundry women who worked for hours in dirty water in an effort to clean their clothing, but elsewhere in their narratives, the tone is much softer. Gilmore noted that, in the early morning, it was common to encounter women in the streets with bundles of laundry balanced on their heads, making their way to favorite spots — meadows or streams outside the city walls — to do the family washing.

A popular site for laundry was just outside of Seoul’s city walls during the winter of 1883-84. Robert Neff Collection

Bishop’s account is more poetic, and even tinged with a rare compliment toward this native method — something not often found in her writing about Korea, which tended to denigrate anything not Western.

“Every brookside has its laundresses squatting on flat stones, dipping the soiled clothes in the water, laying them on flat stones in tightly rolled bundles and beating them with flat paddles, a previous process consisting of steeping them in a lye made of wood ashes. Bleached under the brilliant sun and very slightly glazed with rice starch, after being beaten for a length of time with short quick taps on a wooden roller with club-shaped ‘laundry sticks,’ common white cotton looks like dull white satin, and has a dazzling whiteness,” she observed, which inspired her to liken the finished garments to the clothing of Jesus.

Even Gilmore ruefully admitted that the Korean method of laundering seemed “less destructive than our own way.” Its effectiveness, he added, could not be denied, “for nowhere is there a more glowing whiteness produced in the laundry.”

These contradictory views of Korean laundry and cleanliness extended to the missionaries as well. In 1893, Mattie Wilcox Noble described some of the differences in how Korean women performed household chores compared to the way the women back home did. “The Koreans,” she wrote, “have no machines as we have at home. They wash & iron sitting down while we do standing… They have a very rude way of ironing, & yet their clothes get a finer gloss than after our way of ironing.”

Women do laundry on the shore of the Han River during the winter in the early 20th century. Courtesy of Diane Nars Collection

Many missionaries hired Koreans — both men and women — to assist with the family’s laundry. There were occasional problems, some of them rather amusing.

Nobles generally sent the family’s clothing to a Japanese laundry, with the exception of smaller articles (I assume these were her unmentionables), which she preferred to wash herself. In one of her diary entries she noted that a Korean male servant had ironed some of the clothing and tablecloths that had not been sent out. The servant “came across one of my underwaists and asked me if I would please give it to him. If I had, I suppose he would have put it on & worn it as a fine outside garment.”

Not everyone was willing to do laundry. In a letter home, American missionary William Baird declared that his household “had an insurrection the other day” when his Korean male servant refused to do the washing.

Baird lamented: “I remarked to him [the servant] the innocent-looking word ‘kakora,’ which means ‘leave.’ He left. Since then we have had entire[ly] green help who doesn’t know whether the food should be placed on the table or on the floor, and who is greatly at loss to know whether we want our coffee in cups or in wash pans.”

Robert Downs’ photograph of women and their children during laundry in Seoul, circa 1960 / Robert Neff collection

As mentioned earlier, many of the Westerners — including diplomats — used Japanese or Chinese launderers. Judging from their letters and diaries, the relationships between them and their launderers were generally good, and they sometimes exchanged gifts during holidays and important events. There is, however, one noteworthy exception. In 1886, William H. Parker, the American minister to Korea, “raised a scandal by his treatment of the wife of the Japanese washerman.”

Laundry was a lucrative business. In 1898, an ad appeared in The Independent — a newspaper published in Seoul — announcing the establishment of Chemulpo Washing Company. According to the ad, the company was determined “to give to the foreign residents every facility to have their clothes properly washed.” To ensure its success, “skilled washermen” were brought in from Shanghai, and the company promised that “every attention will be given and charges moderate.”

Koreans also opened laundries. In the spring of 1902, a group of Koreans applied to their government for a charter to establish the Laundry Company near the Northeast Gate (Hyehwamun).

Jean Perry, a missionary and superintendent of The Home for Destitute Children (located near the West Gate, Seodaemun District), also operated a small “laundry for foreign patrons.” The children under her care did the washing and the enterprise was considered a success.

A posed photograph of women ironing in the late 19th century / Robert Neff Collection

Although Koreans traditionally used lye, rice water, mung bean water and water boiled with barley, by the early 20th century these Korean laundries were probably using Western soap and synthetic lye imported from Japan.

Despite modernization, some people continued to use the traditional form of laundry well into the 20th century, as evidenced by photographs taken in the 1950s and my own recollections of women washing clothes in streams and rivers in the 1980s.

Through modern eyes, some may view this traditional way of doing laundry as quaint or even as a source of embarrassment — a symbol of Korea’s backwardness. But others don’t. In 2002, the City History Compilation Committee of Seoul published a book called “The Modernization of Seoul and its Trials,” in which they stated: “It has been scientifically proven that beating laundry with a stick is an effective method, and so it is still used today.”

I hope it is true, and that you, the reader, might one day have the chance to hear “the most common nocturnal sound” in Seoul during the winter of 1889: “the musical rat-tat-tap of the Korean laundry.”

My appreciation to Diane Nars for her invaluable assistance and for allowing me to use one of her images.

Robert Neff has authored and co-authored several books, including Letters from Joseon, Korea Through Western Eyes and Brief Encounters.