A posser, ponch, washing dolly or a poss stick was historically a tool used for ''possing'' laundry by pumping the posser up and down on the laundry in the dolly tub or directly in the

copper Copper is a chemical element; it has symbol Cu (from Latin ) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkish-orang ...

, or mixing

laundry Laundry is the washing of clothing and other textiles, and, more broadly, their drying and ironing as well. Laundry has been part of history since humans began to wear clothes, so the methods by which different cultures have dealt with this u ...

while hand washing it. Possers come in various forms; there is usually a vertical pole with a handle bar at the top but the base can be conical or domed. It has a double rim with a row of holes around the edge of the outer one. A similar tool with three (or more) legs was called a variety of names including posstick, peggy-legs, dolly-legs, and dolly-peg. Sometimes they took the form of a flat disk. The naming of each of these items was regionally specific and the specific meaning of word changed over time. Clothes washing in the early nineteenth century rarely used soap, "bucking" with lye instead. It was a communal event, and infrequent. It involved clothes boards and bats. By the end of the nineteenth century, the tradition of a weekly washing day had been established. Soap was available in the forms of flakes and powder. The posser was not so much used to hammer the dirt out of the clothes, as to agitate the water which would be forced under pressure through the holes. As hand washing has been replaced by electric and mechanical

washing machine A washing machine (laundry machine, clothes washer, washer, or simply wash) is a machine designed to laundry, launder clothing. The term is mostly applied to machines that use water. Other ways of doing laundry include dry cleaning (which uses ...

s, words and implements used for hand washing have fallen out of common use.

References

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