Lye Soap

As a child, I can still remember my mother and grandmother doing the hard work of making “lye soap”. (Household grease combined with chemical lye, sodium hydroxide and water)

At the time, this was no great mystery because during the great depression (FDR depression as opposed to the Obama depression) people were not accustomed to the sense and scintillation of 21^st century living. Eighty years ago before the time of electricity, washing machines, automatic dryers, laundry as well as personal hygiene was an entirely different anecdotal experience from today. Store bought “sweet soap” was used on special occasions. Normal laundry, work clothes, bed linens, towels, etc. were washed with lye soap. In our homes, and ours was better than most country homes, there was a wash-house... A place with a large iron wash-pot heated by burning wood. There were large washtubs and scrub-boards. The lye soap was used to rub on the clothing and the soil was miraculously removed by the scrub-board. After rinsing, all of the laundry was hung on outside clothes lines. (long wire lines with laundry attached to these lines with clothes pins, a wood-springed instrument.) The sun did a much better job of drying the laundry than todays electric dryer.

Of course, back then, there was no such thing as a dishwasher. You washed dishes in large pans using lye soap. Only in recent years do we find laundry soaps in boxes and dish detergent in bottles.

In Africa, I have seen hundreds of women in rivers without soap of any type just beating there laundry on rocks. In India, laundry is a business of its own... Large areas of clotheslines where professionals had been hired to do the laundry.

In recent years, in eastern NC, the more affluent white women would take their family laundry to the black sections of town where the laundry was done and even the clothing was ironed. We here about “stay at home work”. These were some of the first stay at home work jobs (black women doing laundry and ironing for other people in there homes).

Today's young people do not realize how recent electricity and the electrical appliance are, and how limited electricity was at one time, it could very well be that way again. Electric grids are the first target of the terrorists

I have visited places in Africa where electricity is only available one or two hours per day. At one hotel in the Congo, where electricity was limited to two hours, they tried to do everything involving electric power during that time. Before the electric iron, ironing was done with heavy flat irons. They were heated on the stove and then used on the ironing board. There was always a threat of scorching/burning. I don't believe young people have any appreciation of the hard work of housekeeping before electric power.

Now what did our ancestors do before lye soap? We know that our ancestors did not bathe very often, that they wore dirty clothing. I am firmly convinced that this accounts for their good health. The fact, and it is a fact, that our largest most active physiology takes place with the skin, our largest organ. The elements in dirt entering the skin, entering the body, stimulates a terrific healing ability. The dirty, sweating, smelly natives of Africa and South America where life is still very much in the raw as it was in America before it became tattered with the sissified characters of daily showers-body soap lotions-deodorants... Deadly chemicals entering the pores of our largest, most important organ, the skin.

An awakening experience and knowledge for today's young people. There was a time before artificial fibers. (Double-Knits, polyesters, etc.) Our ancestors would gasp at a mating of wool and cotton fibers with synthetics. I have seen women use special instruments to remove cottonseed form cotton and many of the old spinning wheels are still around. More entertaining than any Saturday Night Live jokester, would be the sight of today's tattooed, pierced, painted cheerleaders making cloth for their clothing. Sanitation is of greatest importance of me in preserving life. If our early ancestors had just possessed the good sense to wash their hands, may would have been saved of sickness instead of dying. This is certainly true especially in the flu epidemic 1918. Most of the soldiers who died during the civil war died because the surgeons did not wash their hands, had no concept of sanitation.

With all of our learning, endowed universities, tax supported schools, I am convinced we have learned very little. These hands, with fingers on the ends of your arms cause more disease than anything else... doorknobs, stair-handrails, etc. The most dangerous place you can go is a hospital or doctor's office. You go into a doctor's office, chairs with arms, arms on which sweaty-diseased patients have been sitting... their germs entering your pores. Who cares - more patients, more fees. Same in hospitals. Believe it or not, the local hospital, when I investigated (New Hanover Memorial) overstuffed chairs in patients rooms, draperies on windows, carpet in corridors, all HARBORING microbiology.

Benjamin Franklin said cleanliness makes you feel good. Cleanliness of mind, character, your body, your clothing, your home – even your auto. Show me a man with a dirty car, I will show you a sorry man