What do ships, laundry rooms, and feminism have in common? Actually, more than you think. The history of washing is also the history of how women’s hidden care work drives technological and societal progress. It is also a story about architecture, and about whose labour history records and whose it leaves out.1

In nineteenth-century Zurich, one could observe women scrubbing laundry with the fresh water of the lake. They stood on the floating washing ship “Treichler” on the Limmatquai. It was a large washing infrastructure designed by ETH professor Gottfried Semper, a hygienic necessity intended to help rid the population of the epidemics of the time, such as cholera and typhoid fever.2 The ship was decorated in a Pompeian style, its roof carried by female figures very similar to the caryatids in Athens, a grand gesture meant to signify societal and technological progress. However, the manual labour behind this progress, the scrubbing, rinsing, hanging, basically the women’s work, was forgotten. The ship, the owner, the architect, and the technical innovation entered the history books; the workers did not.
A century later, that same labour still happens, less laborious and more efficient, but this time hidden in basements.

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