How to Use laundress in a Sentence

laundress

noun
  • In a little over a year, my three-decade indenture as a full-time laundress will come to an end.
    — Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times, 19 June 2024
  • Others worked for officers as valets, while some women found roles as cooks and laundresses.
    — Barbara Spindel, Christian Science Monitor, 12 Mar. 2025
  • Her own parents, Lee and Eva Renfrow, worked as a cook and a laundress.
    — Scott Simon, NPR, 6 Jan. 2026
  • Milda, her mother, took care of other people’s children and was a laundress in a hospital.
    — Calvin Tomkins, The New Yorker, 26 Aug. 2019
  • Cecil was a clergyman and his sister, Linnie, was a laundress in a private home.
    — The Root, 8 Dec. 2017
  • Her father was later a caretaker and her mother a laundress and the owner of a boardinghouse.
    — David Stout, New York Times, 28 Nov. 2021
  • One worker presses down hard on a shirt with a hot iron, head lowered and leaning into her labor as a commercial laundress.
    — Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times, 13 Aug. 2024
  • The backyard is scattered with dozens of buttons, remnants of Maria Maynard’s time as a laundress.
    — Washington Post, 7 May 2021
  • Melchor was a foreman on a sugarcane plantation, and Luisa was a laundress.
    — Christopher Rudolph, PEOPLE, 23 Sep. 2025
  • Before long, the arrests spread from the tenants to their nannies, guards, laundresses, and stairwell cleaners.
    — Michelle Weber, Longreads, 13 Oct. 2017
  • Harriet Scott, who worked as a laundress into her later years, died in 1876.
    — Equal Justice Initiative, USA Today, 6 Nov. 2025
  • Though born a free woman in 1867, she was orphaned at the age of seven and grew up as a domestic servant and laundress.
    — Andy Audate, Forbes, 10 May 2021
  • As the exhibition indicates, the artist created many of his city scenes, like the image of the laundress, by looking down from a balcony.
    — Steven Litt, cleveland, 4 July 2021
  • Your mother used the napkin rings to lighten the load of the laundress (who, for all Miss Manners knows, may have been your mother herself).
    — Judith Martin, Mercury News, 19 Aug. 2025
  • Johnson was raised by his mother, a laundress, after his father, a minister of the gospel, was murdered in the 1860s.
    — Dave Lieber, Dallas News, 11 Feb. 2021
  • His father was a public accountant and his mother a cook or laundress, depending on the account, but for murky reasons they were gone from his life in early childhood.
    — Randal C. Archibold, New York Times, 30 May 2017
  • Pervis’s mother, Oceola (Ware) Staples, worked as a maid and laundress at a hotel.
    — New York Times, 14 May 2021
  • There are a chef, a housekeeper, and a laundress, and two housemen/waiters; Basso's group also had a captained boat at their disposal day and night.
    — Lauren Lipton, Town & Country, 13 Mar. 2015
  • When the war ended, most of those women, who had served as pilots, snipers, mine-detectors, nurses, cooks, and laundresses, quietly went home and resumed everyday life.
    — Bob Blaisdell, The Christian Science Monitor, 25 July 2017
  • Her mother, Eva Renfrow, worked as a laundress to support their family while her father, Lee Renfrow, worked as a cook.
    — Claretta Bellamy, NBC News, 3 Feb. 2023
  • Her family had emigrated from Belgium to one of the poorest neighborhoods of Montmartre, where her mother worked as a laundress and her father a tailor.
    — Moira Hodgson, WSJ, 16 Nov. 2018
  • Kelley looks at the history of her own working-class ancestors, as well as the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who made up the world of Black labor.
    — Ibram X. Kendi, The Atlantic, 7 Aug. 2023
  • As told in this compelling stage story, young Freda Josephine was made to leave her family's home at age 8 when her mother, who worked as a laundress, arranged for to work as a live-in maid for wealthy family.
    — Philip Potempa, Post-Tribune, 30 May 2017
  • In New York City, the press has documented the rise of private kitchen staff, rotating teams of nannies, and in-home laundresses who will devote half an hour to ironing a single shirt.
    — Evan Osnos, The New Yorker, 22 Jan. 2024
  • Catherine Lynch, an Irish immigrant and laundress, moved to Elm Street around 1870 when the house was divided into apartments.
    — John Kelly, Washington Post, 28 Nov. 2020
  • From the 1850s onward, the artist was enthralled by the Parisian laundress—a working-class woman frequently seen washing and ironing goods and transferring heavy baskets in the bustling city streets.
    — Stephanie Sporn, Vogue, 18 Aug. 2023
  • While the former laundress was elbowing her way through the medieval patriarchy, a young man named Raymond of Campagno was similarly rising in the king’s estimation.
    — Anne Thériault, Longreads, 3 July 2018
  • During the Franco-Prussian War, a young French laundress shares a coach ride with several of her condescending social superiors.
    — Los Angeles Times, 4 Oct. 2019
  • In fact, the product’s popularity soared in the Victorian era, when the royal laundress credited her perfectly bright linens to the little blue additive, turning it into a household must-have.
    — Alexandra Emanuelli, Southern Living, 11 Dec. 2025
  • Another must-see stop is the Rose Cottage, the former home of Adeline Rose, a woman who was born into slavery, yet managed to save enough money from her job as a laundress to construct this house for herself and her children.
    — Lisa Cericola, Southern Living, 2 Aug. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'laundress.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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