Hanging out washing is unnecessary and unreasonable.

 

People will tell you that using a clothes dryer cannot be justified because it is not a necessity. Those same people use televisions, mobile phones, kettles, and may even own a melon baller.

 

Condenser dryers with a heat pump can have a 10 star energy rating: environmental condescension is redundant.

 

Hanging out the washing is not the only chance you, as a mother, have to get vitamin D. You can just go and sit outside in the sun without even having to confess that you did so. You could sit out there while your washing is in the dryer.

 

Sitting alone in my house with my small children, surrounded by piles of laundry, I romanticised the days of the communal laundry-house. Women all gathered together, their children running free, boiling coppers, endless chatter, maybe some home baked morning tea — clothes and sheets gently drying on long lines under a temperate sun. Loneliness can create delusions that make you think you have to hang out washing in deference to your forebears or to connect in some way to other women. You don't.

 

An unmarried Polish man, tired of hanging out his own washing, invented the dryer.

 

Using a dryer for your clothes and bedding extends their life. Fabrics are not subject to harsh conditions like the savagely hot Australian sun, damaging the fibres and bleaching out colour.

 

None of our clothes have a fade mark across them where they hung over the washing line too long, reminding me of my inadequacies.

 

Or permanent peg indents.

 

The weather should not dictate what clothes you can wear or when you have to leave a place. Exclaiming that you must rush home to get the washing off the line when storm clouds brew does not make you a superior homemaker, it makes you a slave.

 

I will not string lines across my lounge room in winter and heat my house to unreasonable temperatures in some kind of nostalgic nod to yesteryear in order to have clean underwear. It is not cosy and homely, it is impractical and creates mould.

 

Our lawnmower never stops working because pegs are caught in it.

 

If you do not like ironing, clothes come out of a dryer mostly wrinkle free. I do not iron. Ironing everything doesn't make you a better mother, just a more absent one. Wrinkled pillowcases do not cause childhood trauma but obsessive perfectionism does.

 

Tumble-dry everything, even things labelled ‘do not tumble dry'— if it doesn't make it, you don't want it.

 

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