What you have which your grandparents couldn't have dreamed of....

[Something4theweekend1]

I read a lot of memoirs from the early half of the 20th Century. In a weird way it always helps when I get lifestyle envy! But I do think of what I have, both materially and lifestyle, that my grandparents would have considered absolute luxury in their childhoods. For context, paternal grandparents born 1920, 1924. Welsh mining family. Maternal grandparents born 1930 and 1932, Northern factory workers. Off top of my head....

• A profession where I sit in an office warm and dry. Health and safety legislation that wouldn't see me dead of lung disease at 46 (my G Grandad), or deaf in my late 30's (my grandad).
• Hot running water which would have been a godsend when not spending an hour an evening heating water for a bath you could barely fit into (pit workers)
• An inside Loo. Something my gran didn't have until she was married.
• Vaccinations. My grandads sister died of measles at 3 years old.
• Easy accsess to communication. Not spending 3 years in the army with only intermittent letters to let you know if (my grandad) was still alive.
• Privacy. My Gran was one of 10 (!) and when she was born they had 2 rooms above a shop. They later moved to a 3 bed house (when I think no.7 was born) and thought it the height of achievement.
• Education. All 4 of my grandparents where out of education by 14
• Wine! Even when I was growing up in the 80's wine was considered the preserve of the rich by my grandparents!

There's loads, loads more but I won't go on all night! It just helps me sometimes to get into perspective that my lifestyle, just 2-3 generations ago, would have been considered luxurious.

Not having to put a sugar bowl of water under the gas fire
Central healing
Showers
Children having some kind of say on what they eat
Having children and being unmarried and not even living 'ower the brush' but being an actual single parent
A career of my own and being financially independent - alien to my grandmothers
Medical care that would have saved my paternal grandmother now
Owning more than one 'best' outfit
Not having to boil cabbage for 3 hours!
Adding Chinese 5 spice to roasted belly pork
Not having to 'keep yourself nice and respectable' in case the neighbours talked
The list is endless. My grandparents were all born during the First World War and lived through the second. Their lives were so far removed from mine today but they all died when I was young or before I was born (see point about modern medical care) so I never got the chance to really know them. I have family stories, photographs and letters to go on.
I think all 4 of my GP's would have publicly disapproved of me but been quietly proud I broke the mould and walked to the beat of my own drum

My grandfather died in 2000 in his 90s. He was a mathematician. The iPhone would have blown his mind.

Oh fitness for fun.

I'm an ultra runner. My grandparents would never have joined a gym or pursued a selfish hobby like mine. Out of the house for hours with husband doing the childcare!

My grandmother left school after year 8 and started work plucking chickens. She spoke about my grandfather (he died before I was born) like he was a hero because he rescued her from that because he had a good job with the railroad.

Their resulting family was definitely on the better side of income, but my mother still had weekly chores like washing the walls of the accumulated coal dust from the heater.

I have a cushy desk job that gives me interesting tasks and the greatest risk is being too sedentary. my husband, I love him dearly and hope never to be parted from
Him, but if he turns into a jerk tomorrow, I can show him the door without a worry to how I will support our child because there was nothing stopping me from being financially independent and earning a good living.

So many here!
The one best outfit. Dressing for fun and not function.
Electricity and all modern conveniences. Not having to devote an entire day to washing.
Someone mentioned television. Even my mam on the late 50's talks about standing in the street watching TV through a neighbours window because they didn't have one.
Books. One set of grandparents were great readers but never owned a book. It was library or nothing.
Education - yes. My sibling has a doctorate (we are the first generation to go to uni nevermind get a doctorate). one grandparent couldn't be prouder, the other was totally bemused by it.

Contraception.

My granny had 10 kids. One of the first times she met my dad (in the 70s) she told him that if they had the pill in the 40s and 50s she'd have been swallowing them like sweeties

Hopefully pain relief in labour. My grandma (now 102) had to give birth to my uncle in 1945 in Germany when pain medication wasn't available for love nor money. She still hasn't forgotten.

I am 50 years old.

I know my paternal grandfather was born in 1885 but died before I was born in 1963.

My three other grandparents were born around 1916. They were deceased by the time I turned 11 (along with my mother). All four grandparents grew up in the same village. But they all left their village and country and resettled far from home.

My maternal grandmother didn't read or write but the other three did.

My own father (born 1936) didn't attend school past the age of 8 years old. My mother finished her compulsory education (year 8, aged 13) but went further to year 12 and got a vocational education in accounting. My four grandparents were migrant cotton pickers.

My grandparents on both sides were very lucky to have had large families. My paternal grandparents however, had a large gap between my father (the youngest child) and his youngest sibling by 16 years. My maternal grandparents had 12 children living but lost one in an automobile accident and another by illness as a child.

I visited my paternal aunts and their families who returned to their home country in 1978. The village (where all four of my grandparents were from) had a telephone pole in the middle of the village. It was the only phone in the area. They had only just been supplied with widespread electricity in 1977. They had no paved roads and everything was compacted dirt. They still had outhouses but slowly they were getting a water and gas line. I believe the village got it all in 1980. They had dirt floors in their houses and neighborhood ice houses where they kept their food cold.

My mentioned to my father once that I had installed "wood floors" in my house and he asked me if I was short on money because I didn't have carpeted floors. That was luxury to him and my mother.

My Dad, up until his death in 2011, took cold showers. But he loved his microwave 🤷🏻‍♀️ My mother worked with an ABACUS at work but loved her percolator coffee machine.

I think all of our grandparents and my two parents would find it insane that my sister and I revere their lifestyles of simplicity.

She also dreamt of owning a tracksuits a girl in the 1930, but wasn't allowed one they'd become very fashionable at the time.

@ouchmyfeet

Contraception.

My granny had 10 kids. One of the first times she met my dad (in the 70s) she told him that if they had the pill in the 40s and 50s she'd have been swallowing them like sweeties

Can't blame her!

My nana was born in the early thirties and always tells me how her Dad would come in every morning to scrape ice off the inside of the windows in winter.

A lad up the road brought a banana back from Africa when he came home from the war and it was so rotten it was entirely black. No one had seen a banana since before the war and he cut it up into slithers so everyone on the street could try a bit. It was the first time she remembered eating a banana and she thought that was how you ate bananas. It took until the mid 60’s for her to try another to realise oh wow they aren’t supposed to be rotten.

Also she had an awful story about a friend who had two little girls. They were playing in front of the fire after their bath and unfortunately one got too close and her flannel nightie caught fire. The poor thing died of burns a few weeks later.

In many respects we don’t know we’re born. Then again, they were not better times.

Interesting how differently our grandparents lived. Mine were slightly older than OP's, but both my grandfathers went to university, and therefore worked in offices. Both sets of grandparents moved around the country (and overseas) for work. One grandmother gave up her job on marriage, not sure about the other.

Both my parents are one of four, so they must have been using some form of birth control (even if it was the rhythm method). My grandparents had one, one, two and five siblings (who lived to adulthood), so again, not huge families.

They also lived a long time - the last died only a couple of years ago, so they got to see most of modern life. One came from a much poorer background than the others (married up), and she struggled more with modern plenty than the others; she had fewer home comforts, and her house is the only place I've eaten luncheon meat and spam.

Both my grandmothers (born 1920s) never understood that it was ok to be chatting to me at 5-6pm I wouldn’t be in trouble for not being at home with the dinner on.

that sounds awful but they both had marriages that they would describe as happy to good Men who worked hard weren’t violent/unreliable or profligate (in fact the opposite).

I told my grandmother about a promotion I’d had once and she nodded and said ‘oh, I’ll never understand you’. The unspoken was that she assumed this meant no more DC.

A career. My all accounts my maternal grandmother was brilliant and I suspect being a housewife with 3 young kids caused great harm to her mental health (she did have a spell in an institution). Her father and brothers were all high achieving engineers.

I suspect if she’d been born now she’d be in a very senior and technical role.

My grandad (born 1914) used to tell me his mother occasionally used to give him the very last bit of a candle to take to bed when he was small boy so he could watch it go out in bed whilst he fell to sleep.

Stuff like that.

I'm not sure either of my grandmother's ever went abroad - my parents went to Majorca in early married life and it was a big deal.

Was going to say birth control too.

My granny had 6 children but 2 died in infancy, so healthcare and especially antibiotics.

Travel - she always dreamed of going to Egypt.

Definitely contraception, also access to termination of pregnancy.

Proper mental health support rather than being sectioned for a bit of PND.

An education beyond the age of 14.

Freedom from the catholic church.

Holidays abroad!

Career/education for women.

A washing machine
An upstairs bathroom
A bedroom for each child
A daughter living down the road instead of the other side of the world
Carpets
A telephone
A fridge
Colour television

One of my grandmothers had lived on three continents by the time she was 20, including spells in finishing schools in France and Germany. The other traveled once to London ( from Ireland) for a wedding and that was it. She had an exciting life all the same, smuggling guns under her skirts during the Irish war of independence.

On my dads side would be technology. Didn’t know maternal grandfather. Grandmother who died in 1994 always moved with the times and would have been online all the time.

Ddads wife said that as soon as a woman - of her class I suppose - got married she was supposed to give up her job 'for the unmarried girls who needed it'.

My nan was born in 1902 and died when I was 16. She would have been amazed that I went to university; she was in service in her early years and my grandad worked in labouring jobs and later as a machinist in an engineering factory.

I often think of her when I whip out my phone to Google something, the fact that we have a constantly evolving and infinite source of knowledge at our fingertips.

Both my grandmas were always envious of my education. They were both really clever and both passed the 11+ by miles. Mum's mum was from a middle class ish family so she got to go to grammar school until she was 14, when ww2 started so she went to work then. Dad's mum was from a working class mining family and was the eldest of 7 children. Her family couldn't afford for her to go to the grammar school. She stayed at the local school (a primary school really, but they kept local children an extra year or two if that was the only school they could get to) til she was 13, then had to get a job to help support the family. She went back to the local school as the school secretary and stayed there until she retired. They were both just as clever as I am, but there was never any possibility that either of them could have gone to university. I always feel very fortunate that it was relatively easy for me to achieve that goal.

There was the marriage bar (until about the 60s) where married women weren't actually allowed to work in many professions.

Slightly off the original thread question but if relations were in hospital, you weren't supposed to visit I believe. I think the hospital used to put up in patient names and status updates on the wall and in the paper(?)

There's a film called A Touch of Love from 1969 where a young mother has a toddler that needs to have a heart operation and she has to hand the baby over to the nursing staff for a few weeks and not supposed to visit. Obviously a film but presumably based on reality?

This is the sort of thread where I like to recommend Can Any Mother Help Me? By Jenna Bailey which is a collection of writings by ordinary women who creates their own private magazine detailing their lives over the earlier part of the 20th century. An absolute eye opener for every day social history as experienced by women. It's a bit like a Mumsnet for it's time!