Making Water Pure: A History of Water Softening From Potash to Tide

Abstract

Making Water Pure: A History of Water Softening from Potash to Tide, is a history of water softening in the United States from 1860 through 1970. Water’s materiality, specifically its tendency to dissolve geological features, consistently interfered with labor processes, especially those that relied on the use of soap or steam. For this reason, the management and control over the quality of water in both domestic and industrial spaces was regular and in many cases economically imperative. Nineteenth-century laborers dealt with hard water on the individual level. They experimented with a variety of different chemicals and methods, including the addition of lye, coffee, blood meal, and wool fiber to water. Throughout the twentieth century, the requirements of industrial efficiency as well as new consumer technologies demanded fast, easy, and standard ways to soften water. This motivated manufactures to produce mechanical water softening systems and synthetic chemicals. This dissertation traces this change and asserts that the history of getting water soft is a history of environmental control and management. Water softening is a lens through which to explore often overlooked actors in the history of managing nonhuman nature such as women, domestic workers, laborers, home economists, advertisers, and commercial chemists. Hard water is a thread that connects usually separate categories such as the home and the factory, industrial chemicals and household cleaners. The control over water was uneven and incomplete and allows for the exploration of the tensions intrinsic in the attempted mastery over nature. The regularity of making soft water reveals not only society’s relationship with water, but the social nature of water itself. Water is a product of ecological, social, and technological discourses and practices-- a hybrid of both environment and culture. To soften water was to make nature fit; it was an effort to standardize nonhuman nature so that it would cooperate with certain technologies, processes, and cultural assumptions.