Listening afternoon podcast (Zw)erfgoed: ‘Wednesday wash day. The story of the Auderghem washerwomen’

De Kleine Wijngaardstraat in Oudergem formed a hub for the dirty laundry of wealthy Brussels residents until the 1960s. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the municipality grew into a center of the Brussels laundry industry. It became the most important economic sector of the municipality, dominated by women. Although many wealthy Brussels residents had domestic staff at the time, they outsourced laundry work because it was labor-intensive. A flourishing laundry industry thus emerged in the outskirts around Brussels. Especially villages in stream valleys, such as Laken, Sint-Pieters-Woluwe, and Oudergem, grew into important centers of the laundry industry. Vooral Oudergem had an excellent reputation in that area in Brussels.