Imagine you are a housewife living in the early 20th century. You always have so much to do, but the thing you dread most is the ironing. Heating the iron on the stove, avoiding burning yourself on it, ironing a shirt, then reheating the iron for the next shirt is so tedious. Of course, you also must remember to sprinkle water over the fabric, otherwise you will scorch the clothes. Luckily you have a lovely little gadget to fit the end of a bottle which makes sprinkling the clothes with just the right amount of water easy.
When I showed this ironing sprinkler bottle top to the children, their guesses were amusing. Most had no idea what it could possibly have been used for, and the first guess was ‘something to do with salt or pepper’. Soon, the children were guessing it was for ‘watering a tiny garden’ (and in fact, it proved useful for watering the seeds the children planted that day!) None imagined it could possibly be for sprinkling the ironing with water. For children today, they assume that the iron itself does everything, and indeed many modern irons have steam settings. They were surprised to realise that in the past, ironing was a much more labour intensive process.
Today, ironing is a task which is relatively simple. Irons come with all sorts of settings to make ironing easier, and in fact modern fabrics and even modern washers and driers can almost eliminate the need to iron at all. Yet in the past, doing the laundry, and of course the ironing, was an incredibly labour intensive task. Women took pride in their laundry, and it was all done in a very orderly fashion. Whites, towels, colours and sheets would be washed separately and various additives,especially a "blue bag" would be added to the wash water to make sure the laundry was ‘perfect’. After washing the clothes, and drying them in the sun, the housewife would have to collect the clothes to bring inside. Many would fold the items as they were taken from the line, and sort the washing into things which required ironing, and things which did not.
The next step would be the ironing, which was a two day process! First, the clothes which needed ironing would be sprinkled with water from a ‘sprinkler bottle’, with a top like the one I showed the children (it may have originally had a cork to hold it in the bottle). Then, the clothes would be rolled up and left overnight to ensure the water was evenly distributed. Ironing clothes which were dry meant that scorch marks were very likely, and these would ruin the clothes. In the early 1900s ironing was done with a flat iron like the one shown here. This would be heated up on the stove each time it was too cool to work effectively. If the clothes seemed too dry, more water would be sprinkled over them and another sprinkler bottle would be used to add starch to shirts to ensure crisp, stiff collars. Later the ceramic top was replaced by a metal one, or even just a bottle top with holes punched in it.The sprinkler bottle top I showed the children might be a small and humble item, but it certainly played an important role in the life of a housewife!Modern housewifes can certainly be thankful for the steam iron.