Cocio

Sexual/gender division of labor

Gender and space

Gender stereotypes: public / domestic

The cocio, or cuezo, is a clay pot that was found in domestic settings and was used primarily for laundry, i.e. for washing and whitening clothes. It is fashioned in the shape of a truncated cone, with a wide mouth and narrower base, and was molded in different sizes depending on the amount of clothing to be washed or whitened. In medieval times, women were responsible for washing clothes, first in the river, stream or canal, and then in the home, where the laundry was whitened and sanitized using ashes. The women carried the water from the river to the home for this purpose, and whitened laundry was then washed a second time. This labor, which was never duly acknowledged until the appearance of the modern washing machine, occupied a good part of the day.