To ask how women did it?

[TheMurk]

Generations before, how did women do this? Manage children and households 24/7 before all the modern luxuries and distractions we have become so used to?

Having these things withdrawn over the last few months (including activities like baby classes etc) has made me think quite a lot about my grandmother, a woman raising four young children in the late 40s and 50s. My grandfather was a coalman and out all day working. Very traditional roles in that my grandmother was expected to look after everything to with the household and family while my grandfather worked and then did football or the pub when he had free time. He didn’t help her at all and she also had to do everything for him, he even cane home for his breakfast and lunch every day and expected it on the table.

So my grandmother was in the house all with 4 kids, had to do all housework, feeding, shopping, childcare etc. No car, no fancy double Pram’s or scooters to get kids around the streets for shopping, no supermarkets so multiple shops to visit to get the groceries, all cooking needed done, no convenience foods etc etc .

compared to me, I only have 2 kids and all the mod cons etc, plus a DH wfh and helping where he can, but I can barely put a slice of bread in the toaster without the baby screaming because I’ve put them down for 10 seconds, the toddler is (not ideally) occupied by TV but even that barely keeps them going. Toys are played with for minutes and discarded. Too smal for arts and crafts stuff etc.

I am finding it intense, almost unbearable, physically exhausting (not interested in the rights and wrongs of that “you shouldn’t have had kids” etc, I don’t think my grandmother’s generation made much conscious effort to think that deeply about having children, it was just what you did).

I’m interested in the practicalities of it. Did they just let the baby scream and hang of their leg while they made soup?

Did they just turn a blind eye to toddlers jumping off chairs while they did the laundry?

Did they let them roll about fighting and pulling each other’s hair because they were pressing the husbands clothes?

I can’t get any housework done at all, it’s just a constant merry go round of lifting the baby, managing the toddler, feeding them, cleaning up after feeding them, entertaining them, starting all over again.

How did they do it?

It’s the cold. Can you imagine doing it all with no heating or hot water?

My grandparents all had help but they did voluntary work. My Granny on my mother's side was concerned about women's welfare and ran parenting classes for young mothers and children in the 1940s which were then rolled out on radio. A lot of it was practical stuff about family planning, nutrition, breast feeding support etc. Ironic as I don't think she was the greatest mother and had a penchant for gin and tonics.

When are we talking about, @angelfacecuti75?

My gran worked after marriage and children; for that matter (I actually checked this reading this thread, to be sure), so did her mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law. All decidedly middle-class. I'm well aware my grandmother received snippy comments about working (just as women do today), but it wasn't considered 'shameful' that she worked.

Well you can fit 5 kids plus shopping on an old fashioned prom and they had really good suspension... also supermarkets were not out of town so everything you needed was on one shopping parade and they were not as lazy as we have become☺️

I know from my own family that they all found it hard. My DM did amazing but has talked about how hard it was. My maternal GM continued working and hired a live-in nanny to look after her 11 kids. My DM said my GM would not have been able to deal with that many kids by herself and was better off working. My paternal GM very much loved being at home with her children but even then she found it difficult to manage the behaviour of at least one of her DC , to the point where she considered getting help from social services.

I think the women working thing is so varied. Work looked different to what it does now. I think it's more useful to ask if the woman earned money of her own rather than if she had a job.

One of my great grandmothers didn't work outside of the home after marriage, but she did run a largish smallholding and sold eggs at the gate.

One worked in factories and mills throughout her life, she definitely had a job

One of their daughters did bits and pieces of seasonal work after her marriage,often bringing the children too

Another daughter married into a family who due to religious beliefs thought that women should stay at home no matter what. So she never worked again

All women were as working class as it gets, so the money they earned was much needed, however none of them except Factory Grandma would have said they had a job or thought of themselves as working mothers, even though they worked very hard indeed one way or another

For my own experience as a child growing up in the late 70's and 80's and talking to relatives, women did not pander to their children's every need.
Kids didn't expect their parents to entertain them. If we complained to my mother of being bored we would be immediately assigned a task, so we learned not to comlain!

This talk about the 70s and 80s being like the olden days makes me laugh! There were plenty of mod cons then and many women worked outside the home.
Looking back at my childhood in the 50s and 60s, our family of 6 shared an outside toilet with another family of 6. There was a tin bath once a week (whether you were dirty or not 😁) in front of the coal fire. Women shopped every day because fridges weren't around, washing was done almost every day. As the eldest child I helped look after my siblings, shopping, housework etc. However, we had much greater freedom and were far more self reliant, we just had to sort shit out for ourselves. I went to school on a bus by myself at the age of 7, all the local kids went to the swimming baths together, not an adult in sight!
There's an awful lot of pressure on families today. It's shit that there has to be 2 wage earners just to make ends meet. And let's face it women still do most of the housework and child rearing. Technology hasn't helped us , we were meant to have more leisure time but that's not happening.

I think the women working thing is so varied. Work looked different to what it does now. I think it's more useful to ask if the woman earned money of her own rather than if she had a job.

That's a really good way to put it, YY. I do get that a lot of women worked in ways that weren't paid but were hugely valuable (and that's still the case).

Maybe also it matters to distinguish between work inside the home or outside? Loads of women did work they could do at home (sewing, often), but I get the impression going 'out' to work is a real dividing line.

@Stressing, I certainly remember the cold, frost on the insides of the windows! I think it's why I can't bear to skimp on heating now

Yes, absolutely. At home or very close by/somewhere you can take the children

Even now when I think about it, when I was at university I did some cleaning of holiday lets, and I brought DD along as they were empty and she was a good child. It was quite casual, just me in my old jeans and DD sitting quietly in a corner. Nobody in a million years would have thought it a proper job. I didn't refer to it as such. Two years later I was commuting to a job which had a contract, a pension, and a dress code, which meant I had to buy a car and put DD in childcare. After paying for a car, petrol, clothes and childcare I didn't, to be absolutely honest, have much more in my hand than I did with the cleaning. But it was a "proper" job.

They worked incredibly hard.
Farm work, being in service, helping with family businesses, laundry work as well as managing the household.
The Family at One End Street is a childrens book from the 30s.
The mum is constantly at it and the older children look after the younger ones.

Posted too soon- and meant very different things for our family dynamics in general

My factory grandma's wages were probably equal to the smallholding gran's pigs, eggs and veg if you priced everything up, and the hours put in were probably not too dissimilar but again one is a job-job and one isn't

Kids were expected to amuse themselves. Families were often larger so the older kids would then look after the younger kids. My mother was one of eleven! Even when I was young (70s) we didn't have much time with our parents. Dad worked full time and mum was busy so you had to make your own amusement. There was always kids playing out in the street so you went out and played with them. I think there's alot of pressure now for families to have 'quality time'. I'm not saying it's not lovely, but apart from 2 weeks caravaning holiday in Cornwall every year I can't really remember doing anything with my parents. Now parents are expected to attend every baby/toddler class, go to the zoo, the cinema, a theme park, bowling every weekend. Kids have clubs and activities every night! There's no way to fit it all in. I think we're made to feel a bit of a failure if we're not 'enriching' our children's lives with all these wonderful activities constantly. We got turfed out on a morning and told to be home when we were hungry or before it got dark. My mother probably had more time in the house on her own than I do now.

@Malin52

Yup women not working is a myth. Being 'raised by the village' or with relatives help is a myth. My mum had no relatives to help with childcare nearby and neither did DH's mum

Life was fucking hard and no one tried to be perfect, was expected to be perfect or was expected to raise their child from day one with a focus on getting a first from Oxford or even an office based job.

Leaving a baby to cry was of course fine. It's not a big deal. There wasn't so much consumerism or choice so kids didn't have much to tantrum about or demand. There were no 'kiddy things' such as food menus or restaurants catering specifically for them. They had to rightly fit into adult life. You take it or you leave it. If you left it you soon learned there was no alternative and frankly that's life. Parents went about their business and kids had to deal with it.

Not neglect. Not by any stretch.

Your second paragraph is exactly what I think and my husband and I have discussed since lockdown.

That and this need we (general) have to constantly have our kids lives filled with clubs and activities.

It will be so interesting to see if things change, won't it? So many women (and men) are working from home with children now, and it's so clear it is really hard and not something you can just dismiss.

And YY to the idea of a 'job-job'. I think that's true even now. I wonder if it says something about the ways class and gender interact? People have talked about working-class men doing the allotment or growing the veg; I know my very middle-class paternal great-grandmother did an amount of veg growing that we'd consider semi-commercial these days, and expected to do that. It makes me think all these posts saying that men didn't 'help' with work at home, but did grow veg, might look very different if we thought about a really diverse variety of activities as 'work'.

Since having my son I often wonder this, and I’m amazed at the strength of women. The fact that we were ever referred to as they weaker sex’ is so laughable! Being pregnant, giving birth and raising children takes so much but it’s always been dismissed rather than given the respect it deserves.

You actually answered your own question in your opening sentence...

without the modern luxuries and distractions, we have become so used to?

There was a thread not so long ago where people came to a similar conclusion. Even though gender roles were more clearly defined, men often did quite a lot at home in terms of the heavier outdoor jobs, and d weren't necessarily sitting around doing nothing buggered off to pub Compared to now, where you see these boyos doing a 9-5 sitting in an office, and they think that means they're entitled to do what they like the rest of the time, regardless of whether the bins need to go out or whatever

It was time consuming but they generally didn't work or worked part time. My gran lived in a cottage with no electric or running water and this was right up to the sixties. She would spend a whole day doing washing by hand. She cooked over the fire. In summer she would cook over a fire outside. They only had an outside tin bath. The toilet was a hole in a plank in an outhouse. My grandad used to have to empty this by hand into a cesspit. My gran worked in agriculture hop picking etc. In the war she was a land girl.

Also, in the winter when the snow was really high, my grandad would walk through the snow 12 miles to buy food because they lived in the middle of nowhere. He would carry it home in a sack on his back.

One of the tricks was having older kids look after their younger siblings. Another was letting young kids run around unsupervised. If you look at coroners' records from the early 20th century, the number of young kids who died in accidents - mainly drowning and falling out of windows - is astonishing.

Many women worked. I was born in the mid-50s and my parents ran a pub for years, so my mother certainly did, serving on, doing the catering, washing the glasses by hand, restocking the bars. And doing all the housework, cooking all meals from scratch, washing up by hand, etc. They’d a cleaner for the pub but not the house (attached to it), and her standards were a lot higher than mine, with a proper thorough clean every Friday, all furniture polished etc. She’d a twin tub but everything had to be dried outside or on a creel, and she’d iron everything. There was no running hot water, the only heating smoky coal fires. She used to make my clothes as well in whatever spare time she had - I can’t actually remember when that was!

Where they did have the advantage was on childcare. As others have said, children at that time were left very much to their own devices. Nobody fussed over us - we were fed, watered and expected to help out and to behave. In fact it was a great childhood full of freedom if you had good parents, but mine had a lot more in common with my grandmother’s than my grandchildren’s or even my children’s, and she was born in the 1880s.

I can only imagine that children, husband and household were their only life. No iPhones / MN/ coffee shops and shopping dates, no education, further education or courses, barre or yoga classes, etc etc ....... what a life eh. We are very spoilt now with so much freedom and choice and that old lifestyle is not for us all these days.

Standards and expectations were different then. Now most people change their underwear daily, before washing machines it was once or sometimes twice a week. Children wore the same clothes all week, changing into their best for Sunday.

Food was in many ways simpler, and the focus for many educational opportunities; from a very young age children helped they had chores. Even back in the early 60's, as a 4 yr old I had to catch a bus to and from school on my own, and I would even then nip to the shop for my mum, we were more independent.

You just can't compare lifestyles.