Carpet Beater
date: label: Date made
content: 19th century
notes: label: Description
content: Housework has always been physically demanding and time consuming labor. In the 19th century coal and wood burning stoves constantly soiled walls, drapes, and carpets, so that rug beating, along with window and floor washing, would have been a necessary chore. Usually made of wood, rattan, cane, wicker, spring steel or coiled wire, rug beaters were commonly used to beat dust and dirt out of rugs. A rug beater's flexibility depended on the number of woven switches it had in its paddle, a two-switch beater being more flexible than a three- or four-switch one. This nineteenth-century rug beater consists of three rattan switches, bent into a five-loop paddle and wrapped around an iron wire rod handle. Introduced in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, carpet sweepers and vacuum cleaners allowed for higher standards of cleanliness and more frequent cleaning, but lifting heavy vacuums was strenuous work.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
setName: label: See more items in
content: Home and Community Life: Domestic Life
label: See more items in
content: Family & Social Life
label: See more items in
content: Domestic Furnishings
label: See more items in
content: Artifact Walls exhibit
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 1987.0794.01
label: accession number
content: 1987.0794
label: catalog number
content: 1987.0794.01
objectType: label: Object Name
content: carpet beater
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: iron (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: rattan (overall material)