the gentrification of air-drying clothes

Reading The Shopkeeper's post about hanging laundry sent me on a trip down memory lane. When I was a kid growing up in South Africa, I would watch my mother wash clothes in the bathtub and then hang them on a line to dry. And when we visited family in India, I'd watch her beat the clothes on a designated laundry rock (a large, flat thing either born there or dragged there) before...hanging them on a line to dry. This was very much the way of life for us and everyone else I knew. A dryer was not just a luxury, but a wasteful one – it was for people who had electricity and kitchen space to burn, and for whom the anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties of sunshine were inconsequential in the face of musty convenience. (And it was usually rich/upper middle class people who owned the dryers and looked down on the rest of us for hanging clothes the poor people way.) This is less so the case now with rising property prices and real estate putting a premium on sunlight, but the large…