Talk about a "not-in-my-back-yard" issue. It turns out that today, in the land of the free, more than half the approximately 300,000 homeowners' associations that set the rules for condo developments, subdivisions and other residential clusters don't allow clothes to be dried outside.
Hard as it would have been for our grandmothers to imagine needing legal backup to defend the right to dry the wash on the line, the issue has given rise to a spate of new state legislation defending outdoor drying; recent legislative battlegrounds include Vermont, Oregon and Hawaii.
The basis for the anti-clothesline regulations is a combination of "snobbery and prudery," says Alex Lee of Project Laundry List (www.laundrylist.org), a group based in Concord, N.H. that supports people waging legal fights for the right to dry. Ceil Bell, a member of the board of directors of a homeowners' association in Timonium, Md., may not have thought it snobbish to offer this comment about outside drying on NPR's Marketplace some time ago: "You get people hanging towels over the railings, you get clotheslines in the back yard. We just don't like the look of it. It looks like a lower-class neighborhood."
But others might say this fits squarely in the snobbery category. And as for prudery, some here in this nation of skin-splicit films just don't like seeing their neighbors' knickers on the line.
The serious point here is that American consumers have reached a showdown between our aesthetics and the imperative to conserve energy and preserve the environment. Our yards look neater if a dryer completes our laundry operations, and if we put our food waste down disposals instead of making compost piles. Our kitchens are smarter if we don't have recycled cans and bottles wallowing around in unsightly bags. Our houses are beautiful bathed in exterior night lighting. But such enhancements are costly. The toll is environmental as well as financial, and accepting that one may not be entitled to such amenities even when one can pay for them is an unprecedented challenge.
