The Clothesline Question

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I was ready to point out that what seems like progress isn’t always so. For instance, modern medicine spends a lot of time and energy trying to cure health problems that modern life creates. Modern gym equipment is necessary only because modern conveniences encourage unhealthy inactivity. Modern weapons research is driven by the need to secure the natural resources that modern life chews up with inordinate speed. One technology inevitably creates a problem that only another technology can fix, and the economy has grown dependent upon perpetuating this pattern.

What I wasn’t prepared to defend, however, was my lifestyle. I hadn’t really anticipated that the seemingly innocent act of hanging my clothes on the line rather than using a dryer would alarm and irritate people around the world.

The subject of how I dry my clothes arose when Ken Ringle of The Washington Post interviewed me after my “Luddite” book came out a year ago. How I live my life was apparently worth probing. There is no litmus test for Luddism, I am always careful to point out. One need not live in a mud hut to question our current enthrallment with technology. In truth, I had not taken up the topic of Luddites because I live in a primitive, machineless state, but because technology resisters—those who had, through the ages, protested or challenged the machine—intrigued me. My shingled cottage is old but connected to the grid. I drive a car and I use a computer—albeit reluctantly. I have and use a few basic appliances in my house, I explained to the Post reporter, but my success with the clothesline inspired me to begin eliminating unnecessary technologies from my life.

The Post article was widely reprinted. I had a few nice letters from fellow clothesline connoisseurs, but the attacks were memorable. For an American freelance writer in Costa Rica, I represented “not Luddism” but “sanctimoniousness and self-righteousness at their worst.” She lived, she said, where women were forced to hang their wash on the line and would be grateful not to have to. A critic in New Zealand even wrote a one-act play parodying my Luddite tendencies, in particular my clothesline.

Is it possible to excavate multiple layers of cultural meaning from carrying a basket of wet clothes into the backyard and pinning them to a line? It seems that getting rid of the clothesline, banishing it, regulating it out of existence, becomes the defining act of the advanced society. I’ve heard in the news that Singapore is contemplating an outdoor drying ban.

When precisely did the clothesline become the symbol of oppressed womanhood? Who decided that women would be better off away from their homes and their children, tethered to a conveyor belt or drill press or chicken plucker or computer screen so that they can afford to buy a machine and the energy to run it to relieve them of this simple and not unpleasant task? Who, precisely, defined work at home as onerous and work for hire as desirable? And where does all this anger come from?

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