Steamy!

Did this subject once inspire a whole genre of post cards?

I haven't been able to find "naughty laundress" as a period subject, but it would have been a natural. After all: working-class women, stripped to their underwear... Even if this well-groomed model is posed (and wearing rather fancy lingerie, at that), "doing the wash" was an excellent excuse for the pose.

Don't know the card's date, but those nice undies include a slip with decorative border somewhere between art nouveau and deco.

I especially like the retouching to denote water drops.

The card was widely marketed:

And this really jumped out at J:

Haven't managed finding more about that besides another card, with this description:

Hand-tinted card, posted in 1912, of a lovely young woman with an Art Nouveau style. This card was printed on paper soaked in radium bromide; after the discovery of radiation by the Curies in 1898, uranium and its salts took on magical properties in the minds of the people and were used for "health"and decoration (it glows!), in food, clothing, toys, and yes...postcards! No promises that this card glows, as we haven't yet had the chance to place it under a blacklight.

There's no visible effect on the laundress card either. It actually looks like photo paper that this was printed on, as there's silver residue (which doesn't show on the scan).

I also saw references to radium brom in homeopathy; well, another good reason to give that theory a miss.

So: did this represent la petite blanchisseuse, or der kleine Wäscherin?

The card probably is German.

As were many good old-fashioned questionable radium products.