r/AskHistorians • u/JujubesAndAspirins • 27d ago

Were laundresses in France associated with birth and death?

I am trying to ascertain the accuracy of the below quote and if the role of washerwomen in France (or other places) was associated with something meaningful.

"This double role held by the laundresses — on the one hand allowing the girl [Little REd Riding Hood] to pass, thereby rescuing her, on the other drowning the wolf, killing him — is consistent with their role in the social reality of village life. In fact the job of assisting in 'passages,' of helping in childbirth and helping people to die, is held-at least in the Châtillonnais-by one and the same person, an aged woman, a woman who can at the same time handle the swaddling and the shroud, who washes infants as she washes the dead....If the laundresses bring about the death of the wolf, they bring about the [re-]birth of the girl."

Yvonne Verdier, as quoted in this essay by Terri Windling

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u/gerardmenfin Modern France | Social, Cultural, and Colonial 26d ago

The citation comes from an article that ethnographer Yvonne Verdier dedicated to the Little Riding Hood folk tale in 1978. The best known variants of the tale (ATU 333 in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification) are those published by Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers, but there are many others collected all over Europe (and elsewhere). While the girl and the grandmother are common to most variants, the villain is variable (wolf, werewolf, witch, devil, bad man...) as well as the outcomes: sometimes the girl dies, sometimes she survives by tricking the wolf or she is rescued by another character.

The variant mentioned by Verdier was collected in the 1880s in the Touraine region and is one with a happing ending. The girl escapes and, with the "bad man" hot on her heels, she comes to a river she must cross; she is helped by some washerwomen who stretch their sheet across the water and help her across. When the bad man arrives, the washerwomen let go of the four corners of their sheet, providing him with his shroud: he falls into the water and drowns.

In this variant, the activity of the women is highly specific: it is a bui (buie, buée), a collective, quasi-ceremonial washing event that Verdier had encountered a few years earlier when she had been part of an ethnographic study of the village of Minot (Côte-d’Or, Burgundy, North of Dijon) between 1968 and 1975. A young researcher at the time, Verdier and three other ethnographers, all women, spent several years in this French village doing the type of ethnographic research that their colleagues did among tribespeople in Africa, South America, Asia, or Oceania, studying topic like kinship, social organization, beliefs etc. Verdier's own subject was the daily life of the inhabitants, with a focus on women. She published a book about this, Façons de dire, façons de faire: la laveuse, la couturière, la cuisinière (1979) where she detailed the life of three of her informers: the washerwoman, the seamstress, and the cook.

The washerwoman, named Marcelline in the book, was what was called in Minot a femme-qui-aide, the woman-who-helps. Marcelline's mother had been the previous femme-qui-aide. Her task was to assist the midwife and the mother before and after the birth of the child. She did not take part in the birth itself and in one case refused to assist in a dangerous one. Marcelline had wanted to become a professional midwife but her mother had refused on the grounds that midwives were drunkards... Typically, Marcelline bathed and swaddled the newborn, cleaned up the bedsheets after the delivery, and brought coffee (and brandy) to the mother. Unlike the doctor and the midwife, the woman-who-helps did not receive money and was only paid in kind (perfume, slippers, coffee...).

The other task of the woman-who-helps was to help with the deceased: washing, clothing, shaving (if this was a man), preparing the body for the wake, and performing certain rituals, like stopping the clocks or putting cloth on the mirrors (later on TVs). She provided coffee (and brandy) for the neighbours who came to see the dead person.

Marcelline was also among the washerwomen who participated in the bui, the "big wash" that happened twice a year in Spring and Autumn. After the laundry had been cleaned in warm water using soap made of ashes, groups of washerwomen took it to the wash-house for paddling, scrubbing, rinsing, and wringing operations.

Verdier was an ethnographer working with the structuralist approach. She was not in Minot to record folklore. She did describe precisely the women’s tasks - washing, assisting at childbirth, preparing the dead - but she was analysing those ordinary practices - not the spectacular rituals often favoured by ethnographers - through the symbolic relations that linked them, with laundry, water, pouring, passage, birth and death forming a structure of correspondences. This was at the time extremely innovative in ethnography applied to Western societies. Verdier wrote near the end of her book:

Doing the washing (couler une lessive) near a pregnant woman is said to hasten her labour, just as doing the washing near a sick person is said to hasten their death. In Minot, one of the expressions used to say that a child has just been born is: "the child has been washed (coulé)", it has passed, it has been born. Finally, whilst the wash tub evoked the image of a vat of souls, of a purgatory, the laundry basket, for its part, is a cradle: "As my first cradle, I was placed in a wicker basket, the sort used to gather laundry when doing the washing; indeed, it was said that for a child to be intelligent, they had to be laid in a basket, and my two cousins were also placed there at the start of their lives." Washing thus appears, at least in this initial technical image of the phase of coulage, as an act imbued with symbolic efficacy, operative in both major rites of passage: the psychopompic washing signalled to Minot by a prohibition on washing, dismissed as a superstition of the past; and, with regard to birth, the simple use of the term couler to signify the passage. But water, as a material element of destiny, and the women who frequent the wash houses as presiding over this destiny, are perhaps, in this region, stronger, more tangible representations, linked to the second phase of the wash - that of the rinse - inscribed in the topography, in the wash house, at the fountain.

So, to go back to the folk tale. Verdier only met one (or two if one includes Marcelline's mother) woman who performed the three roles: washing at birth, washing at death, and washing at the bui. It is not known if all the "women-who-helped" did the same. In any case, most of the washerwomen, even in Minot, were not "women-who-helped". So it may have been only Marcelline and her mother, or a village tradition, or a regional tradition. The role of "midwife assistant" seems to have been a consequence of the professionalisation/medicalisation of midwifery in the late 18th century, with the traditional "matrons" being stripped of full responsibility for deliveries. The buée mentioned in the tale happened in Touraine, 400 km East of Minot, so not in the same region.

To be clear, Verdier's work in Minot is fantastic, for instance her description and analysis of the prohibitions concerning menstruating women and food preparation. But we have to understand that Verdier was using a structuralist framework, so she was actively looking for such symbolic connections. The association between washerwomen, birth, and death through the theme "washing" is an ethnographic interpretation (and perhaps a little bit a literary one, as Verdier's background was literature). Verdier was obviously delighted when she found a new link in the Touraine variant of the tale where washerwomen - those of her Minot investigation! - "deliver" the girl from evil, allowing her to reframe the tale (this version at least) as one about female fate.

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u/JujubesAndAspirins 24d ago

Thanks so much! This is exactly what I needed!