"In Steam Laundries, Arwen Mohun traces the industry's development from the first commercial laundries in the 1840s to their decline in the 1950s. That trajectory, she argues, took shape within the constraints of what was technologically possible and culturally acceptable. Rising standards of cleanliness, new kinds of machinery, and an increasingly polluted urban environment provided the context for the industry's emergence. The shortcomings of applying...