Laundress: Historic Background

High School student demonstrates laundry practices during Education Days, 2014.

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Laundresses firsthand accounts of life on the frontier haven’t survived to the present. With little access to education for women outside the upper classes, even away from the frontier, few laundresses were literate and those that were had little time to keep journals. Most surviving information comes from military records and secondhand sources like the journals of officer’s wives, who were more likely to be educated.

Establishing a Role for Women

The role of the laundress, the only formally recognized position for women in the U.S. Army, was inherited from the British and codified in the 1802 Military Peace Establishment Act which reorganized the military, created the Army Corps of Engineers, and established the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. The act stipulated a ratio of one laundress for every 17 men, not to exceed 4 per company. At Fort Scott, built as a three-company post, the ratio was 15-to-1.These regulations also provided laundresses with bedding straw, use of the post surgeon, and one ration of food per day. This meager ration may have included meat, bread, and whiskey.

Laundry Fees

A post’s council of administration, made up of three officers, set the fees for laundry services. At some forts in the 1830s and 1840s, the rate was $.50 per month for each soldier, two dollars for a single officer, and four dollars for married officers. Children’s and servant’s clothing incurred an additional cost. Laundry fees were deducted from a soldier’s pay ahead of debts to the sutler, protecting laundresses from non-payment.

Getting to the Frontier

Why and how would women come to the distant frontier? In the 1840s Kansas was neither an organized territory nor a state, and the town of Fort Scott did not exist. Many women joined the army back east and followed work or enlisted husbands to the frontier. Their earnings from laundering clothes combined with any extra income from assisting the post as midwives, nurses, seamstresses, or cooks made them some of the more highly paid employees at the fort.

 

A Soldier's Wages

Pay for soldiers at Fort Scott ranged from $7 per month for an infantry private to $13 per month for a Sergeant.

 

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Information from this section was taken from:

1. Sally Johns Ketchum. Historic Furnishings Report: The Dragoon Barracks.
2. Dana H. Prater. Sabers and Soapsuds: Dragoon Women on the Frontier, 1831-1866. 1992.

 

 

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Overview | Program Outline | Tools of the Trade | Regulations | Historical Background | Doing Laundry | Making Soap | Washboards | Laundry Prices