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From Natural Life Magazine,
November/December 2007
In fact, bans on clotheslines may be going the way of cosmetic pesticides and cigarette smoking in public places. There is even a “Right to Dry” activist movement that is trying to establish clothesline rights. This laundry underground includes those frugal folks who’ve always used a clothesline and are a bit befuddled as to what all the fuss is about, people from countries where hanging out the laundry is part of the culture, those who don’t like other people making up rules regarding their lifestyle habits, and those who realize that foregoing a clothes dryer is an easy adjustment to make in order to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide sent into the atmosphere. Although these initiatives are springing up spontaneously across North America (Europeans really never gave up the clothesline) they are networked through an organization called Project Laundry List, founded in New Hampshire in 1995 by a young lawyer named Alexander Lee. Project Laundry List uses words, images and advocacy to educate people about how simple lifestyle modifications – including air-drying one’s clothes – reduce our dependence on environmentally and culturally costly energy sources. The organization started when students at New Hampshire’s Middlebury College, concerned about Hydro-Quebec’s plans for major dam projects and the expansion of nuclear power, started to hang political messages on a clothesline at protests. Now, its Right to Dry Campaign encourages lawmakers to introduce Right to Dry legislation that would prevent community covenants, landlord prohibitions and zoning laws that stop people from using clotheslines... To read the rest of this article, subscribe to Natural Life's online edition. Wendy Priesnitz is the Editor of Natural Life Magazine and a journalist with 30 years of experience. She has also authored nine books. Read her blog. |
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When
I was a child in the 1950s, I loved helping my mother hang out the
laundry to dry. She had a special window installed in the sun porch
at the back of the house so she could stay warm inside during the
winter while easily reaching the clothesline. My job was to hand her
the clothes pegs and later to help fold. I still remember the
wonderfully fresh smell the sheets had…a scent that lingered even
when they were on my bed. I’ve been able to hang out my own family’s
laundry to dry occasionally since, but too often, we’ve lived in
houses where clotheslines were forbidden on aesthetic grounds or in
balcony-less apartments where clotheslines were impossible even if
they had been legal. But these days, concerned about global warming
and the cost of energy, we’re letting it all hang out, like hasn’t
been seen in a generation. 
