Vintage Laundry and Tide – No Rinsing Needed?

This is a fab vintage Tide ad from Ladies’ Home Journal,  January 1951.  I love how it portrays neighboring housewives comparing laundry over a white picket fence.  Of course they are drying their laundry on clotheslines, as most households at that time didn’t have automatic dryers.  Hearing tales from my mother and grandmother, it was quite common to ‘compare’ or at least judge the neighborhood laundry that was put on the line for all to see.  Since I am the only one who currently uses a clothesline for miles around, I have never even seen any one else’s laundry on the line much less being able to compare it!

But, I digress.  I am amazed that they advertise Tide as needing NO rinsing.  That Tide actually ‘dissolves’ dirt out of clothes…and holds dirt ‘suspended’ in the sudsy water.  What?  Oh, and when you put the clothes through the wringer (they were obviously still using wringers then too), the dirt ‘wrings out’ with the wash water.  Really?  And the pièce de résistance is that you get to hang up the kind of bright, clean wash ‘that makes neighbors look twice!’  Oh the joy!  Nothing like NOT airing your dirty laundry!

I wonder when Tide went to recommending rinsing the laundry?  It just seems weird to think that somehow everything would miraculously rinse clean in the wash cycle.  Maybe it was just another advertising ploy, but seriously has laundry detergent advertising really changed all that much?  I think not.  We all still like a good, clean laundry to this day.

~Marilyn Huttunen