As an activity, making laundry has a heavily feminized past. For time immemorial it was a female profession and in many southern European cities, special areas were designated for this, constituting socially important spaces for women's communities. In many languages, the word laundress exists only in female form, lacking a male counterpart.

According to the European Institute for Gender Equality, women do at least twice as much unpaid housework as men.





Some European cities tried to implement the air-drying ban, claiming that in developed, modern metropolises, laundry should be dried by the machines, not the breeze, and certainly should not be seen publicly. It became the subject of an aesthetical, ecological, but also gender debate.

Drying outside, clothes are transferred from the private sphere of the interior to the public sphere of the streets. Due to this brief but cyclical intrusion into the outside world, drying clothes could be seen as a manifesto of incessant and invisible work carried out by women, becoming, at the same time, a mark of female visibility left in the public space.