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!

Sorry wasted is a bit strong, I don't mean your mum or my grandparents lives were "wasted" I hope you know what I mean, not lived fully how they'd choose.

i dont remember my mother working that hard in the seventies. she had a washing machine (albeit not fully automatic) a freezer, fridge, central heating, telephone and 2 cars. we werent especially well off - dad was a sales rep. my mother worked one day a week outside the home, mainly because she wanted to.

she cooked from scratch as do i. but if you use a slow cooker that really is just slinging a few things in a pot and switching it on.

if you have 7 seven kids.....as some people report on here, then your life is going to be very busy which ever era you were born into. my parents had a massive garden and that was a lot of work....but none of us can afford that now.

Huge difference between the 30s and the 70s.

In under a decade from the mid 60s to the mid 70s the UK got:

• the Pill
• reform of divorce laws
• legal termination of pregnancy (except NI)
• sex discrimination outlawed
• equal pay act
• maternity leave and pay

I grew up in the 60s and 70s. Lots of women worked outside the home in those days, part-time or full-time. That was a big change from the 50s. My MIL had to give up her Civil Service job in the early 50s when she married. My mother carried on working as a teacher when she married less than ten years later. I'm not sure if she could have gone back to work after having me. That would have been pretty unusual and she had no family nearby to provide childcare, so she didn't, and money was very tight for several years until she was able to do a bit of supply teaching once my brother and I were at school.

Convenience food was big in the 70s. Dried, tinned, frozen, we had the lot! Not much frozen, admittedly, as we only had a tiny icemaking compartment at the top of the fridge to store frozen food. You could fit a block of Neapolitan ice cream in there or a tiny packet of peas.

I disagree that people had lower standards of cleanliness back in the days before electrical appliances made it all so much easier. Most working class women prided themselves on having an immaculately clean home and many middle class women had domestic help to keep up the standards. I know my standards are way below my mum's in spite of having more appliances and time. But I don't get judged on how clean our house is in the same way she did (or felt she did). I also share responsibility for the cleaning with my husband, and my mum didn't, even when they were both working full-time. To be fair to my dad, he did the weekly supermarket shop on his own for years, including putting it all away, and also did all the DIY and a lot of the gardening, and he worked much longer hours than my mum. And when he retired he pitched in with the cleaning.

Kit10

I'm glad that my mum had no regrets and didn't moan but did something about it.
When ss said she couldn't work, she made sure she volunteered at night when Dad was at home, he was fantastic too.
She'd also do some weekend events and Dad would take us on day trips, usually something science based.

I'm sorry that I wasn't that type of character, even with a brilliant career I chose sahm. We could have afforded a nanny to accompany us, and at home, but I chose not to. Just couldn't be without the kids, I know that sounds bad.

I'm sorry that I wasn't that type of character, even with a brilliant career I chose sahm. We could have afforded a nanny to accompany us, and at home, but I chose not to. Just couldn't be without the kids, I know that sounds bad.

Romany

That doesn't sound bad at all, we wouldn't have made progress if women felt socially forced to work, the important thing is we have a choice and men too....I know not everyone has the financial freedom to choose as they wish, but I hope people aren't choosing today to do something because they feel they ought to, or are down right told to like my grandmother who wasn't "allowed" a job until her youngest was 5!

My dad was born in the 60s, his mother was a Latin teacher and I think returned to work when they went to school. I think only party time and they had a nanny/cook/cleaner. My maternal grandmother had her children in the 60s , she never worked but I don’t think she spent a great deal of time cooking or cleaning either. They lived abroad and I think she had lots of help at home with the childcare and domestic tasks and her children were all off to boarding school before their teens.

I used to read my grandma's women magazines back in the 60s/70s, and always checked luggage problem pages. The most common problem by far was women wanting to get a job but their husbands not allowing them to do so, even if they promised that the husband wouldn't be inconvenienced in any way!
And I can remember discussions with friends at school about whether you would work after you got married, and especially after having children. It was certainly viewed as optional ( caveat - at a girl's grammar, so fairly middle class).
Conversely, paid maternity leave now, and the entitlement to have your job held open for a year, is fantastic. Someone I knew back in the early 90s had to go back to work full-time when her baby was 3 weeks old, as she hadn't been employed long enough to qualify for any maternity pay, so she used her holiday entitlement and that was it!
I do think it is harder for parents to stay at home with small children now, with accommodation costs being so high; certainly in London most families need both parents to work just to keep afloat. Its not just a question of tightening belts, I know that my husband's wages would just have covered the bills, and we needed my wages to eat. I think it's even harder now.

This has goady written all over it.
Not everyone can afford cleaners and all the mod cons. Not everyone is middle to upper class. Some people live in poverty and suffer social deprivation which doesn't correlate to a university education= more choices/better income.

Modern housewives don't just sit around on social media whilst everything else gets 'neglected'.

If you'd have had a charmed life, then perhaps you would look at the past with rose tinted glasses and love to go to more 'productive' times. Ah, the good old days when women lifted a finger and didn't just laze around all day long eh?
In reality many women across the classes lived a life of relentless, repressed misery and ended up drinking to cope with the monotony of suburbia or sticking their head in the gas oven when counting the pennies to try and make them stretch to feed 9 kids ground them down too much.

My DGM got a scholarship to an Ivy League university and couldn’t take it up as her DParents couldn’t pay board (because she was a girl...had it been her DBrother the money would have been found). She was extremely bitter and I do think it massively affected her parenting because she was bored and some. She was very very proud of the education her girls got and her DGDs.

Doing the washing was a major task for my grandmother in the 40s when I remember it.

A huge boiler was dragged to just outside the scullery door, and filled with buckets of water, then set to heat up. When bubbling nicely, the various laundry items would be added in strict order, and mashed about with the poss stick. Then they would be hauled out and dumped into a large tin bath of warm water.

Soon the mangle would be ceremonially unwrapped and washed, and the laundry fed through the rollers, usually more than once.
Eventually lines of gleaming washing would engulf the large yard, and possible spread out into the lane too.
With any luck, the weather would stay fine but breezy, and by early evening mounds of clean washing would be gathered in, ready for the next task of ironing with a series of flat irons heated on the gas stove.
It was back breaking work, and hugely time consuming, wash day meals were always quick and simple, bread and cheese, a bacon sandwich if you were lucky!

Proper lol at the 1970s being the olden days...

planechocolate

I think some aspects of the 70's will return post Brexit, sadly, I predict a riot... or two.

But yes, 70's The Olden Days, I feel ancient.

I think the major changes came during the 50's and 60s.
Until 1954 weren't our gp's and parents still under rationing?
Kids had rationing on sweets lifted before this iirc

My mum had a twin tub washing machine until about 15 years ago. I bought a normal washing machine, and she was obsessed. She couldn’t believe how much effort it took with a twin tub when all she needed to do is throw it in the machine.

It sounds like total drudgery tbh

I think it depends on if you had a nice husband, if you had money, and if you had friends/neighbours around.

My nonna had 3 boys under 5 in 1950s/60s rural Italy so you'd think life was really tough for her but...my nonno was lovely and always tried to 'help', they were middle class and my nonno liked technology so they were for eg. the first house in the village to get a telly and she's had a microwave since the 70s, and she lived in the same collection of villages as all her friends, sisters and sisters in law so there was always someone to help out.

She thinks me and my cousins have it tougher in someways because we all work with DC and our DPs/DHs have longer commutes, plus we are not so physically close with our families.

Rationing was finally over in July 1954, but it was a lot less stringent by then. I remember when sweets first came off the ration and the sweetshops were virtually empty within days as all the adults flocked to them. It was then re-imposed for a few years. The rationing week began on Sunday,and there was a sweetshop near me which opened then; the ration then was 4oz, and I would get a 1oz tube of Trebor Refreshers, a 1oz tube of Rowntree's Fruit Gums and 2oz of sherbet lemons or pear drops. My mother would save her ration until she could get a box of Cadbury's Milk Tray (in short supply), and she would let me have one of them.

Other huge differences between pre-war and post-war Britain:

• the NHS (massively helped by the arrival of antibiotics and effective vaccinations so mortality from common infections dropped very fast)
• big increase in life expectancy
• free secondary education (before that most children went to elementary school from 5 to 14 so never got to do more advanced work in e.g. science) - school leaving age went up to 15 and then 16 in the early 70s
• introduction of grants to pay for higher education for the brightest children and massive expansion of higher education, including not just universities but also polytechnics and specialist colleges for teacher training, art, music, drama etc etc
• Welfare State provided free/cheap prescriptions, dental checkups, optician checkups/glasses, family allowance (precursor to Child Benefit) paid to the mother to ensure it got spent on the children, all sorts of other benefits
• social mobility was the best it's ever been in the UK - a lot better than it is now (we're going backwards), not least because there were controls on pay and higher taxes

It was massively harder to be a housewife in the olden days I work from home and do nearly all the house work and cooking and the only thing that takes much time is cooking. I get my shopping delivered and the rest is done in 30 mins a day and I get on with other things. In the past it was a fulltime 24/7 job with no holidays and no pay! I think it still is like that for women doing the bulk of care for small children but then they had the kids too and had do all the shopping, go the the steamie scrub the close stairs etc!

I vaguely remember Christmases in the early 70’s where we had wider family stopovers. All my uncles’ presents to their wives were things like pressure cookers, latest hoovers, washing machines...! The aunts would all croon over them the rest of the day. Sends shivers when I think about it now.

@IAmNotLikeThem

Depends on the person I suppose. I love cooking so would be very happy to get kitchen or baking stuff for Christmas.

I remember being a teenager & being horrified that an older cousin got a microwave but she'd just moved out & it's what she asked for.

Different times, women were probably glad to get labour saving items

I’m a child of the early 50s so ‘proper’ olden days . My memories of household chores are that my grandmother, and to a lesser extent my mother, led a life of drudgery inside the home with few if any labour saving devices. By the time I had my children I was better off than they had been at that stage in their lives but still by no means well off. I was a SAHP for many years but so was every other mother where I lived so I didn’t really feel isolated as we did gather together on the odd afternoon.

I loved my twin tub washing machine, it was a much more efficient use of water and electricity although it did mean a proper ‘washing day’ as it couldn’t be switched on and left.

I’m grateful for the luxury of a fridge, washing machine and hot water but very aware that there are still many, many families who don’t have these things.

My grandma worked outside the home. She was a Pharmacist, had a degree and everything. She was born in 1915.

Also surely people still do shopping on foot? I do. I walk to the supermarket after work every day and carry it home. it's not that weird.

I do not want the days of drudgery and back breaking labour for women back.

Not sure about more productive, either. We introduced a lot of work because we can. Daily baths, towel changes after one use, fussy extra requests for dinner and complete changes of clothing every day would have been impossible unless you had domestic help.