People must still iron, because you can still buy irons! There was a time, not that long ago, when two things were certain: professional men wore suits to work, which involved wearing a shirt (usually white) under the jacket, and women had to iron the shirts. They were horrible things to iron in the days before what was called “permapress.” I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers whose husband was a bank manager. She got so tired of ironing two or three shirts a week that she came up with a new system. She ironed the collar and and a bit around it, and the cuffs and a bit up the sleeve, also a bit at the front. She figured since he never took his jacket off, she would only iron the parts that showed. I used this idea myself in the days when my husband had to wear a white shirt under a referee’s sweater – not sure how much time and effort it actually saved, but it just felt good to think that somehow I was beating the system. The newspapers, then as now, carried household hint columns and similar things – one I found was “How to Wash and Iron a Shirt.”
Researched & written by Kathryn Auger
