Virginia City Laundry Trade1870s

Nevada Office of Historic Preservation, Ronald M. James. Dir., Richard D. Adkins and Rachael J. Hartigan

“Competition and Coexistence in the Laundry: A View of the Comstock.”

 

     The Census for Virginia City, 1870 and 1880, newspapers and reminiscences of life on the Comstock written by those living there at the time, the authors deal with ethnicity, gender, age and marital status in relation to the establishment and operation of laundries.

 

     As a general rule, Caucasian ethnics looked upon laundry work as degrading and menial, thus creating a niche for the immigrant Chinese who dominated the profession during the boom years.  In 1880, laundering was listed as the profession of 28.6 percent of Chinese males, a figure representing over 80 percent of the toal number of laundry workers of all ethnic categories.  Laundries within Virginia City’s Chinatown tended to be smaller and operated by older males.  Conversely, those located outside were larger, owned by younger men and provided service for the white community.  Among Caucasian ethnic women working n white-owned laundries, the Irish predominated.  Like the Chinese, the Irish operated laundries in their own section of town.  Many women working as laundresses were widowed, divorced for separated from their husbands and raising their children alone.  For some, taking in washing was only one of several professions they may have pursued either simultaneously or over the period of their working lives.  Other European ethnics did not figure prominently in the laundry trade, nor did Indians, blacks or native-born whites.

 

    Most scholars dealing with the Chinese believe that they took up laundering as a consequence of being excluded from more lucrative pursuits, but I is contended that laundry work was just another economic opportunity rather than a profession they were forced into.  The authors acknowledge the racism which pervaded the Comstock in those early years and document instances of whites trying to drive the Chinese out of the laundry business, but they believe that peaceful competition was more often the case. 

 

     In a broader sense, it is suggested that racial exclusion in the midst of ethnic diversity was a failure in Virginia City.  They also contend that the traditional focus upon racial antagonisms might be wide of the mark and that cooperation and coexistence might well have been more characteristic of life as it was than we have been led to believe.