Was it harder being a housewife in the olden days?

[bubbles092]

Just that really! I am actually so curious to see how hard housewives actually worked in the olden days (30s-70s?)

Now, we are so lucky we are able to afford things like getting a cleaner, going to work, having a washing machine, dishwasher, etc! Back then, I can't even imagine how hard it must've been for them to look after their children, handwashing clothes, housework, cooking dinner from scratch... no convenience food whatsoever.

Some people sit at home on their phones and social media all day and everything gets neglected. I really would love to see and live in them times! Seemed a lot more productive back then!

My mum used to spend an awful lot of time lugging shopping around. I'm not sure productive is really the word I would use!

Fuck yes! My granny's both long dead now, used to love regaling us with tales of the olden days.

Hours of laundry done by hand, hours of cleaning, hours of food purchasing and preparation (as there were no fridges and meat had to be bought almost daily. Hours of walking to the shops and walking everywhere.

You also had no choice about being a housewife. Women with children did not work outside the home, unless their husband had died or was incapable of working for health reasons.

I wouldn't want to live back then at all. I like going to work, I love the fact that I don't have to get on my hands and knees to scrub the kitchen floor, I love that I can get Tesco to deliver my weekly shop and that it contains a few ready meals so that I don't have to cook every day of the week, I love that I can get fruit and veg around the year and not just in season, I love that I have lots of plug sockets to power all my appliances!

They weren't any more productive than we are, everything just took way longer to do.

However, the great thing is, if you want to you can live like they used to and do all that shit for yourself - because we have the choice nowadays!

They didn't handwash clothes in general, there were twintubs and then washing machines. The 1970s was the age of convenience food so it wasn't all living in caves or anything.

What was easier for many women is that they only had the housewife role. Now we do both.

Housework was less efficient then. You're confusing productivity with being busy.

I'd go back. I don't feel like I have any choice now.

Obviously, watch Back in time for tea or supersizes go and you may see some of the differences. It would take hours to make dinner even.

I think it sounds horrible.. I don't want to work my fingers to the bone for a basic lifestyle. I wouldn't have been able to work because it would all have fallen to me - how awful

And yes, they'd get the same amount of stuff done as we do, it just took them a lot longer and was a lot harder.

I cook most meals from scratch but it takes max an hour because I have an electric oven and a reliable job/microwave

"Women with children did not work outside the home"

This is only true for middle class women. Working class women have always worked. My granny had to work in factories, cleaning offices and suchlike for a pittance while also somehow doing childcare and housework, all with no mod cons. I don't know how she did it. She was 5 foot nothing and the kindest woman I've ever met.

All I can say is I know why my granny died at 60. Her life was so hard.

She had 7 children, worked as an early morning cleaner at a factory and then did some evening shift back in the factory - it wasn't cleaning but I cant remember what it was.

Plenty of women worked outside the home, they were just working class women with very low paid jobs at difficult times with few rights.

She cooked 'from scratch' as there wasn't really any other type of cooking and yes laundry was hand done in a tub with a mangle in the garden, rugs were beaten.

I am so glad to be a woman now.

You should check out the TV series "Back in time for dinner" BBC (first one).

I agree, I'm not sure it's 'productive'. Horrible and back-breaking, a lot of it. Have you read any of the Jennifer Worth (Call the Midwife) books? She's very good giving a sense of what a physical toll that kind of work took on women.

Mind you, convenience foods absolutely did exist. My granny was born in 1924, and I get the impression a lot of her generation loved convenience food. A lot of 1950s recipes are big on it, too. It wasn't seen as lazy but as aspirational.

Would love to know who the 'we' are who can afford a cleaner, too. We certainly can't!

Plus, now I think of it, my granny's also an illustration of the fact plenty of middle-class women worked outside the home too. I don't know at what point married teachers were allowed to continue working (and I'm guessing during the war TBH), but certainly for a lot of the period you're talking about, middle-class women who ran homes also worked.

I think things like washing machines and tumble dryers etc have definitely made life easier. But, I also think there is a huge resurgence in cleaning for the sake of cleaning - and taking pride in cleaning your home much like the “old” days (Mrs Hinch Instagram sensation is such an interesting recent phenomenon)! I actually think for a lot of people the whole sitting on their phones thing all day is becoming a bit boring and people are looking for a more simple, old fashioned world.

There wasn't twin tubs from the 30's.

My mum had one in the 70's but my granny washed by hand before that. Wash day was a Monday.

My granny had a very hard life, widowed with babies & toddlers & had to work as well as look after children & the house. She died in her 70's but looked much older

I think housewives did have to put in a lot of hard physical work and I think the thing that's often forgotten was that that kind of thing was considered more of a priority than kids - babies and toddlers would be put in playpens/cots while mum cleaned and if older kids were about, they'd be sent out (maybe with younger kids as well) to be out of the way. I always feel this gets forgotten as people act like there's some golden age when mums spent much more time than now with their kids - they didn't! They were too busy cleaning the house!

I think the cleaning, shopping, cooking etc was harder and took longer. But I think the parenting was easier - the expectations were just that kids were clean and fed. Fine to send kids out to play on there own for hours and leave babies in playpens etc.. Nowadays there's a lot more expected of you to even be a "good enough" mother (maybe because we have time to do it!)

on their* own

LRDtheFeministDragon - ooh I'm interested in those 50s recipes. my mums family were very poor and properly malnourished so I wonder if that was more middle class if it was aspirational. I bet my posher dad would have had more convenience foods but I didn't grow up with stories about that. Spam I know was a big thing. My mum mainly ate eggs, bread, greens, potatoes and meat on a Sunday. She definitely had tinned beans

I’m 51 and remember the washer we had as a child, it got wheeled out of a cupboard and filled with hot water via a bucket from the kitchen tap, emptied later by a pipe that went down the sink. We had a separate spinner which had a little tube that stuck out at the front, a washing up bowl would sit under the tube to catch the water as it spun. No electric kettle, no central heating, no microwave, small fridge and no freezer. Shopping was done locally, butcher greengrocers although there was a bread van, milkman that came daily and the pop man came on a Thursday. Bought cakes and biscuits were a luxury but home baking was popular. All household chores took far longer and bills such as utilities were paid in cash at the post office, we didn’t have a house phone until I was 10 so even making a phone call required walking five minutes to the phone box.

Well I speak from personal experience. In the 1960s I washed everything by hand, we had no car, tv, telephone, spin dryer, coal fires (which I still miss) no fridge, and all meals were made from scratch (which I still do). Were we happy? we certainly were although it was hard work particularly lugging heavy shopping bags home on foot. Would I like those times back again? no thank you!!

I also think these days the standards of cleanliness are much higher, for example, most people wear a shirt once and then wash it. Before I imagine people used to wear things a few more times?

The other thing to remember was that maternal mortality and ill-health was dramatically higher than today. One in 200 women in the 1930s died as a result of childbirth! And many more were horribly butchered by the process. Imagine having an obstetric fistula in a world with no antibiotics, no washing machines and new clothes an unobtainable luxury. Of course this is still the lot of many women today in the third world, but you have to go back only a couple of generations to find the same situation in the UK. I have very little time for misty-eyed nostalgia about the lives our grandmothers lived.

I was a housewife in the seventies and also worked outside the home.

No vacuum cleaner, used a brush to sweep lino, stair carpets and rugs.

Twin tub and line dry for washing.

No central heating, just a gas fire in the living room and a wall heater in one of the two bedrooms. No double glazing, so ice and condensation in winter.

We could get convenience food though, although I shopped at the local supermarket, butchers, greengrocers and bakers, all walking distance.

No car, so had to walk or take buses. No takeaways, even if we could afford them.

And we were relatively well off, more so than our parents, as we had a mortgage and salaried jobs.

My grandmother always used to say she worked harder, got more done, didn’t have time to feel tired etc etc. I used to like to remind her that when she was my age her doctor had no problems with prescribing her amphetimines to keep her peppy.