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Having these things withdrawn over the last few months (including activities like baby classes etc) has made me think quite a lot about my grandmother, a woman raising four young children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?

I remember a GM, born in the 1890s, telling me how she’d asked her own mother (10 children) how on earth she’d managed without a pram.
‘I used my arms.’

Prams would surely have been very expensive then, and yet my GM’s parents weren’t actually poor, as things went then. Her DF was a master craftsman.
My GM, OTOH (5 children born about 1914- mid 1920s) took a pram more or less for granted.

GM (2nd eldest child) also told me how her mother would sometimes keep her home from school on washing day, to help - only she had to hide from her father, who valued education very highly and would have made her go.

Read The family From One End Street written in 1938. It won the Carnegie award for children's books and it is generally regarded as one of the best children's books ever written. It was the first to be written from a working class perspective. It is funny and warm hearted. Seven kids but all loved and cared for. Both parents worked, Dustmen and laundress.
Really ordinary but gives you a flavour of growing up in the 1930s.

she fed her babies every 4 hours then swaddled them and put them in the garden in the pram where they would sleep or cry until it was time for another feed!

This is the Truby King method and was pretty popular.

KKSlider exactly - 100 years ago women "suffered with their nerves" and today they have anxiety... Women also used to be institutionalised in asylums if they weren't coping 100 years ago!

www.amazon.co.uk/Family-One-Street-Puffin-Book/dp/0141355506/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+family+from+one+end+street&tag=mumsnetforu03-21&qid=1591609868&sr=8-1

One of the biggest stresses for me was having enough money for the pill every month

My neighbour is 86 and had four children in the space of eight years starting in 1955 or 56 when she had her first. I also have had four children over the space of eight years and she often sends over sweets and things for them because she says it reminds her of when she had her own. She tells me little stories and one day she told me that after her fourth was born the doctor asked for a word with her husband. He took him outside and told him that enough was enough, she had done her bit now by giving him four children, it was high time he stopped "bothering her" and that he hoped there would not be a fifth. They had separate beds from then on! She thought the pill was a marvelous idea when it came out and was glad that young women could have a choice.

I have no idea!

I think they were tougher and more mentally resilient than we are nowadays. We are quite weak and so much less prepared for difficulties than they were years ago.

Perhaps our expectations are too high. We expect to home school and it has to be to a certain level. We expect things to be perfect. We are quicker to judge and seem to be less forgiving of problems.

Men and women years ago accepted their lot - men long working hours and in dreary jobs that were hard graft, women all the childcare and household chores. Very simple existence.

How did they do it?

They didn't pander to kids back then the way people do now.

Children weren't allowed to rule the roost and were expected to behave and do as they were told.

🤷

@BeatrixPottersAlterEgo - isn't it a great book?! I love it.

My grandmother (in her 90s, did most of her child rearing in the 50s) speaks about her mother (child rearing in the 20s and 30s, 8 kids) with awe. Leisure time didn't really exist for her but she was, by the sounds of things, also a powerful matriarchal figure. Older children were fully enlisted in childcare and household duties when not at school and once they went out to work, their wages mostly went towards the running of the household until they were married. My great-grandfather worked long hours down a mine but would also help at home and on Sundays would take all the children out for very long walks while my great-grandmother prepared dinner in peace.

I think it's important to remember as well that for previous, more religious generations, this life wasn't necessarily seen as the 'main event'. Happiness wasn't seen as being achievable in the course of earthly life for most. Instead, duty, virtue and conformity loomed larger. This probably allowed people to reconcile themselves to hardships in ways which more secular generations struggle to.

The above is of course, a sweeping generelisation and oversimplification but when thinking about the experiences of earlier generations, I think it's important not just to consider the differences in material and social circumstances but also the ways in which outlooks and motivations may have been starkly different to those we have today.

I always think that on here there is a lot of misconception about women and work. Most women worked. It was only post war when women were 'encouraged' to stay home to give jobs back to the men that you had a generation who became SAHMs.
My mother, six kids always worked. Ditto her friends

I think the fact they didn't work would have outweighed the extra graft that it seems as though they might have done. Women these days juggle a career with everything! Also bear in mind people owned a LOT less stuff, junk etc. Kids would have been encouraged to participate a lot more in helping.

It's quite sad nowadays...on our street, there are lots of children but none of them know each others named of ever play together. They all just stay in their houses and go out to organised activities driven by their parents.

Something I also find interesting is how the use of outdoor space has changed. I live in an old cottage which opens right out onto one of the main streets in my village. In a candid photo taken over 100 years ago, and recently posted on the village FB page, there are no pavements, women are standing at their doors chatting. Doors and half doors are all lying open and there are toddlers playing in the middle of the road and bathtubs with washing sitting outside. Now although the street is still counted as quiet, we have tiny narrow pavements, to make way for all the parked cars and the road, plus a fairly regular stream of traffic going far too fast for a toddler to get out of the way. It's still a nice pretty street, but it's not somewhere you'd stand or chat, and I keep the doors double locked as I'm terrified that my bonkers toddler will open the door and try to play with the buses.

To counter the (valid) points about standards being lower for childcare, I would like to point out the immense educational value of a free-range childhood. Children allowed a large degree of autonomy, if they survive it, are more emotionally resilient and better able to explore their environment with confidence.

Of course, that has to be balanced against safety, and it works best in combination with proper education. My sister and I had the benefit of a rural, mostly safe environment that we were turfed out into with neighbourhood children (in the 90s).

Completely different times. The older children were outside playing, only coming in for food, not being entertained or supervised. The younger children were expected to amuse themselves within house and garden, and babies were in prams outside, being left to their own devices.

My mum used to sit my three brothers (much older than me), in a line on the sofa, give them each a car, and instruct them to entertain themselves, be quiet, and not move. They did !

I'd actually really like to just open the door and have a gossip with mrs across the street while the toddler made mud pies, especially now

Standards of cleanliness were also low. My Gran and my friends grans would often not change bedsheets weekly, swept floors / carpets but only mopped and polished as needed, never saw any of them deep clean cupboards.

My bedsheets stay on until I can be arsed to change them, we hardly ever mop (although we do sweep frequently) and I'm not sure I've ever deep-cleaned a cupboard

They didn't pander to kids back then the way people do now.

Children weren't allowed to rule the roost and were expected to behave and do as they were told.
Totally agree with this. Until adolescence, at least, I wouldn't have dreamed of backchatting or knowingly answering back to my parents. And if they were busy doing something I knew to leave them to it and entertain myself.

Women did work though.

They took in washing or they worked in a central laundry, they were machinists, they worked in mills and factories, they worked in domestic service, they were seamstresses and dress makers, if there was a family business such as a shop or a farm then they worked there, they were nannies, they even worked in mines although they were banned from working underground in 1842.

Middle class women would have vocational roles such as teaching, nursing, typing/secretarial work.

Women staying at home after marriage is a myth, some did but it wasn't the norm and for people at the lower end of the economic scale they needed the money from both parents working.

They didn't entertain their kids. Children walked to and from school from a very young age. They played out from dawn to dusk. Older siblings parented younger siblings. A friend who was the youngest of eight said she was pretty much raised by her older sisters and barely noticed her mum.

Also, standards were a little more basic then. One bath a week, clothes worn many times before being washed. I remember the dreaded 'I'll sponge it down' instead of putting stuff in the wash.

I agree op women had it bloody hard, most women anyway. My mum was born in 1926, married at 20, has 14 kids. Tiny house on a rough estate, no car or mod cons of any kind. Husband out all day at a manual job and didn't help when he was there. Her parents were dead and she had no siblings so no family help at all. She spent all day every day washing, cleaning, ironing and cooking. She certainly didn't get any help from neighbours, they were a nightmare and stole anything that was left out in the garden. Her life was one of absolute drudgery, and what makes it worse in a way is that she was well educated and extremely clever, and came from a relatively privileged background. She was left a widow at 40, some of her dc still quite small. Amazingly, at 94 she is still alive and has managed to hold on to her memory and her sense of humour. She is an amazing woman, but i wouldn"t wish her life on anyone.

I love the 'if they survive it' rider!

It's the problem, isn't it? I'm sure being free range and taking loads of risks was great for some children, but we've got this awkward human habit of caring not just about the population but about our individual children, whom we prefer to keep alive.

My nan had twelve children - four of whom were born before WWI. So she was left, aged 29 years old, with 4 children under 6 years old whilst my grandad went off to fight. One died as a baby from meningitis whilst grandad was away.

When he returned they went on to have another 8 children. They lost another child at the age of 10 from diphtheria - her best friend was, unknowingly, a carrier of the disease (I suppose you'd call her asymptomatic now). My mum, who was the youngest, remembered the GP cycling like crazy down the street, throwing his bike to the ground, shouting 'get the children out, get the children out - it's diphtheria' when the test result came back. My sister stayed with a neighbour whilst they battled to save her sister for days. Unbelievable now in the days of vaccines...

My mum was given jobs at an early age. One job was to 'black' the range regularly - so you'd use a black 'lead' polish to cooking range. She also had to scrub the huge pine table my nan used to cook on every Saturday morning. She used soap, water and a scrubbing brush and the pine table was white with the cleaning process. Mum would have been 6 when she did the table.

Nan took in washing (even with 10 children although there was 20 years between the eldest and youngest so she wasn't washing for everyone in the family). Grandad was a self employed carpenter so money was irregular. Nan used a copper to boil the water and a mangle to squeeze it all out. The boys took turns to do the mangle if they were home.

The kids slept top to toe in one big bed (6 girls in one bed, 3 boys in the other - the eldest boy and girl had left home by the time my mum was born). Toilet in the garden like most people then.

Nan made clothes before she married - a seamstress. She made ball gowns...by hand. Her sewing was amazing apparently.

She and my grandad were pretty forward thinking to be honest. She taught her sons to cook as well as her daughters and they could all sew very well. That came in useful during WWII when the boys went to war and the girls went to land army etc., One of the sons taught his wife to cook as her parents weren't the best at cooking apparently so she had no idea about cooking times etc.,

Hard times for a lot of people but, although it seems like my grandparents had a hard life, grandad and nan did have work. During the depression my nan used to make huge pans of bread pudding which she used to hand to the kids on her street. My mum said one of her friends, years later, told her 'your mum's bread pudding was sometimes the only meal I had as dad was unemployed - she kept me alive'....

Once mum went out to work (aged 14) she would go to the cinema at lot - the news was through that, radio or newspapers. She and her friend would also go to the public baths each week where you could have a booth with a bath in it - otherwise it was in front of the fire in a tin bath (which, incidentally, I used to go into up until we moved from our 'no bathroom'' house when I was about 10). Mum said you weren't allowed to bring hair removal cream into the baths but she and her friend would sneak it in. Then get shouted at by the manageress as she could smell it! They used to wash their hair, roll it to set it, bathe then put a scarf over their heads and go home. Next day their hair was beautifully set and it would last the week.

My mum, on the other hand, had a twin tub and a 'proper' cooker which she was very proud of. I remember the first freezer we got and trips to Bejam's (I think I've spelled it correctly) to fill it up with goodies! That changed mum and dad's lives really as mum, who worked part time, didn't have to shop every day or other day. I also remember the old black and white TVs. The 'tube' inside it would regularly explode and dad would have to replace it (at least it could be replaced - now we just chuck the lot away). And I remember them getting a colour TV rented for Princess Anne's wedding. We had thirty people jammed into our living room watching it in full colour! Can't imagine that now.

Yes to the benefits of the free range childhood. My grandad tells us of his boyhood climbing lampposts and the sides of quarries. They all did it. I wouldn't particularly like to see 12 year old DD and her friends climb a lamppost, but I don't actually think any of them could. And DD is whip thin and fit as a fiddle, she does sport and I've always had her outside as much as possible. But you look at pictures of my grandad and his brothers/friends and they're like scrawny little monkeys up until they're 16 or so. Then heavy manual labour sorted that out

I'd actually really like to just open the door and have a gossip with mrs across the street while the toddler made mud pies, especially now

Oh, gosh yes. Wouldn't that be lovely? I live in a tiny village and our house used to have the communal well in the garden. It'd have been people wandering in and out all day! We definitely have less of a sense of outdoor space being communal space, I think.