Ashford remembered the tiring laundry process at Norland, where she trained. "Today's housewife enjoys a multitude of machines to make laundry work a thing of ease," she wrote. "The laundry room was fiercely hot, and soon all our faces were flushed red from the heat. Three big copper boilers, heated by gas flames, dominated the room; and all the sheets, pillowcases, napkins, clothes, and nappies went in there to be boil washed... Afterward the clothes had to be wrung on a giant mangle, which required the biceps of a sailor to turn. Then everything had to be hoisted up onto giant wooden maidens attached to the ceiling to dry. This was easy work in comparison to the ironing... The irons were heavy, too, and one had to press down with great force... But they also required great delicacy and care, because there were no temperature controls, so it was easy to scorch fabrics... It was hot, tiring, relentless work; and we had to complete it all wearing our lisle stockings, uniforms and aprons."
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
