The Reimer Girls Help with the Clean Wash

January 31, 1934  H. H. Reimer girls helped take care of the clean wash, ironing, folding, and mending.  K. H. Reimers came over.

Baby Anna was only five days old, so mother Margaret was still in bed resting and recovering.  Mary was busy with housework and caring for the mother and newborn, so she needed help with the wash.  After a baby was born, it was common for single Mennonite girls to come for a day or even several weeks to work.  This day several daughters of Henry H. Reimer, Margaret’s brother, came over to help with the clean wash.  They were probably Catharina, Mary, and Helen Reimer, whom we knew in later years as just “the Reimer girls.”

Everything needed to be ironed or pressed with a mangle – shirts, pants, dresses, dish towels, sheets, pillowcases, etc.  It would have been embarrassing to wear an unironed piece of clothing because it would have proven to the entire world the slovenly housekeeping standards of the mother.  The linens should be nice and crisp when they were put on the beds.  And who would want to dry dishes with a wrinkled dish towel?

Of course, ironing was not so easy without electricity.  Metal irons had to be heated on a stove to just the right temperature so as not to scorch the fabric, and then clothes were pressed until the iron had cooled, and the process was repeated.  Everything was folded neatly and put away.  And then clothes that were torn or worn needed to be mended.  Holes were patched and re-patched because it was expensive to buy cloth and make clothes.  Holes in socks were darned.  When collars and cuffs wore out, they were replaced rather than throwing away the entire garment.  No clothes were disposed of until they were well and truly worn out, and then they were cut up into rags, which themselves had innumerable uses around the house and farm.