The Seattle Empire Laundry, seen in 1915, was a purpose-built, "power laundry", run by steam. It had opened only a year before the photo was taken.

Once a familiar and ubiquitous sight in American cities, the power laundry was also unique in terms of technology. It used steam and gas power, hand-guided as well as treadle-driven machinery.

At every level the industry relied on female expertise, from the customers who judged work to the girls who executed it. In 1914, the Washington State Industrial Insurance Commission reported 3,540 "inside" employees at work in 195 power laundries. Four-fifths of these were women, yet almost all bosses and all owners of these laundries were male.

Finally, in 1932, they launched a citywide strike, one that erupted into violence. This strike was finally won by those women at the Seattle Empire Laundry. The union they thus established remained for two decades Seattle's largest organized coalition of women workers.

Seattle female laundry workers were a unique group, known in their city as "the most ill-used of toilers." Dave Beck's mother had herself worked for the Palace Laundry, a job her son always recalled as virtual slavery.