To sit and think my poor grandmother! What would she think?!

[DurableMatts]

It’s 10:30 and so far today my house has been hoovered/mopped by the robot hoover, the clothes are washed and drying…and I have only had to pop the clothes in and press a few buttons. The house is warm and I’ve done nothing for that as it’s on a thermostat.

I am wfh so I get to earn and I still dropped my dc to school.

My poor granny had 10 dc! She had no washing machine so washed everything by hand! She walked the youngest to school and then came home to clean the house, washed the clothes, hung them out if weather permitted, had to light fires to keep the house warm. And she didn’t earn a bloody penny!

she would be in awe at things today 😢 (and yes I’m well aware that a lot of people still have to do a lot of these things these days…I was just thinking about her is all and it got me)

Remember a lot of the things you all mention (I'm quite old now). If we didn't have all these lovely gadgets I'm sure I'd live in a pigsty! LOL.

My mum's parents had the first TV on the street. The kids would watch through the window!

I will preface this with the explaination I was married to a man who kept all his wages to drink and gamble. We lived on my part time earning and child benefit.

When I had DS1 in 1978 didnt have a washing machine, I boiled his cloth nappies on top of the stove in an old jam preserver. Everything else was washed by hand.

My DFather then bought me a twin tub, it took all morning on a monday to do the washibg for the three of us. But was so much easier.

Heating was a coal fire that ran the boiker and the recently put in radiators! Oh they were such a blessing. No getting up in the freezing bedroom.

I didnt have a vacumn only a brush and a carpet sweeper. I used it everyday, befire I went to work, taking DS1 with me, as a part time nanny.

I got divorced when DS1 was 2.5 and took on a bar job in the evenings as well, moved into a brand new council house that had gas central heating, oh tge joy of not havibf to clean a fire out and heating at a flick of a switch.

I bought myself an automatic washing machine. I couldnt get over how easy it was. I think I washed everything after one wear fir a time. 😄

A few years later i got a phone! My parents had had one for a while but i had to save to have one put in.

The real change came though when I learned to drive. It opened up a whole new world.

I started Open Uni, getting up in the night to watch lectures after normal TV had finished.
That opened up my world even more and i started working as a TA whilst doing that.

I look now at all the things around me here in 2026, and 18 year old me would never of believed it. I tell Alexa to turn ny lights on. I have an app that controls my heating. My house is never cold. Another app controls my washing machine, and i dry my clothes in a dryer instead of hanging them on the line or all around the house. My phone is a tiny thing in my hand, that contains most if my life.

Im now disabled, but I can do most things in my home. It takes me a fraction of the time it took me as a healthy 18 year old.

Yes, my Mum had a twin tub out of choice until she died in the early 1990s. When it broke in the early 1980s she managed to buy another new one! I used to hate it - It took forever to set up and there was a stiff rubber tube that you put in the sink to drain the water from the spin dryer and whenever I did it it would flick out of the sink and flood the kitchen, much to my mother's annoyance.

My grandmother (maternal) was deserted by her husband in the 1930s just after he moved them to the south coast. She had two young children and had recently lost one aged 6 months. Her husband buggered off to sea, (Navy) fathered numerous children with other women (as she later found out) and never contacted his children from the day he left nan.

She had no money as nothing was available as benefits in those days. She worked as a cleaner in a private house to make ends meet and my mum told me many, many years later, that nan found she was entitled to a 10s. (50p) charity ticket from the local church. The vicar was so horrible to her, he made nan practically beg for that charity ticket in order to feed her children.

She also worked in a munitions factory during the war and well into her 60s was still cleaning for a local television rental company. She died from stomach cancer aged 79 in the late 70s. Her life was almost complete hardship and living on a paltry income.

She was a fabulous woman, a loving and generous grandmother and I feel a complete wimp thinking of what she had to put up with for so many years, we really are so much better off in so many ways today.

Another thing I don't miss - ice on the inside of the windows, running from the warm bed to get dressed for school, and silverfish in the bathroom. Eww!

And yet according to many MN threads, no mother has ever had a more difficult time than today's.
Mention things like this, and they are brushed aside, along with 15% mortgage interest rates and 12-week maternity leaves.
Non-working mothers were at home living the life of riley, apparently.
No, times are DEFINATELY harder now (not)!

I went to uni in early 90's and the student flat we rented still had a twin tub. Annoying, smelly things! Thought be long gone by then 😀

DH's Granny is 103. She reckons (although she is known for being a wind up merchant) that too many machines is why people aren't happy in life - apparently there's no satisfaction from doing a job fully yourself now. She also announced about 10 years ago that machines are why people don't sleep as well now, we're not tired enough.

She had 15 children (she has outlived 5 of them, which much be so hard) and did once say that contraception would have been good. Though tbh she actually said that while looking at a couple of her sons so I think that was a wind up.

She does love the telephone and video calls though. Not so much now as she's got very frail the last year or so, but she used to love a video call with her grandkids or great grandkids. She has clocks on the wall for the time where various folks abroad are.

I love her stories - life has changed beyond recognition in her lifetime. It's remarkable.

When I first got married (77), we bought a second hand twin tub, it was a flipping nuisance, took ages to wash then spin and took up so much room in the kitchen.

The day my husband decided to do the washing, left the spin dryer on while he left the room for something, when he came back, the rubber tube draining the water had split and water had spun all round the newly decorated kitchen.

We went out the next day and ordered an all singing, all dancing automatic washing machine. Best thing we ever bought.

I remember my mother washing things by hand (using Lux flakes) - jumpers, underwear, tea towels, etc. She used to BOIL my father's hankies in a saucepan on the stove! My father's shirts (which had detachable collars) along with towels and sheets were sent to the laundry and returned clean and starched! In the late 1960s she got her first washing machine - it was a Bendix washer/dryer which was all in one so you put the washing in and only opened it again when it was dry! My grandma had a mangle outside and I loved putting clothes through it!

And those that emigrated - blueys home took weeks - no FaceTime, internet, free wifi phone calls like today. I often think of this. Must have been so lonely being the one at home with children.

I think the way we do our washing has changed too, my mum only washed one day a week - Monday was washing day. I’d come home from school and the kitchen was festooned with drying washing ! We had a coal fuelled aga so at least it was warm in there. Tuesday was ironing day.
Nowadays I just throw stuff in when I have a full load !

That's the problem with these threads, they also decend into criticism of current generations.

Its a tale as old as time that every generation thinks the ones below it are soft and feckless.

I love the reminiscing but eventually it always turns into a discussion about how easy kids have it, and lack of resilience. It would be nice to just stay on track without insulting whole groups of people

It's probably getting used to bad stuff happening.

The more adversity you cope with at a younger age the more you are able to withstand as you get older.

That generation had a really tough time. My Nan was left as a war widow, and was left with 3 kids. One child was 4 days old. And no home, no clothes, no possessions (bombed out) until she got rehoused in a prefab. And then had to rebuild a home. She worked outside the home, in a factory, and worked inside the home, doing the usual chores, with no husband or mod cons.

My life was easy compared to hers.😊

I made myself use all the groceries I had before I bought anymore this month. I felt like I had 'no food' because of the lack of immediate fresh stuff in the fridge. Then I looked in the cupboards and freezer. All the way to the back. And thought to myself, 'Do you realise that 99.99999% of humans who have ever lived upon this earth would think you are some kind of royalty?'.

Got all the way to the end of the month without shopping 😀

I think this every time I go to the supermarket. We have aisles upon aisles full of affordable, clean and nutritious food.

What someone earns, minimum wage, for an hour, could theoretically feed them a balanced diet for a couple of days.

It is amazing.

I think you are spot on @Isekaied she and I'm sure many like her just got on with it as hard as it was, and perhaps in years to come my generation (I'm 50) will be looked back on and future generations may think I had it hard, who knows? Also as someone else has posted on here, despite the gadgets we have now, cordless irons, hoovers etc. I still hate ironing lol.

I’m mid-50s but my mum had a twin tub in the 1970s and maybe even early 80s. I remember we got our first washing machine which lasted for 20 years or so. Thry don’t make appliances like that anymore.
My GM was one of 10, born at turn of the 20th century, but she married well and when my DM was a young child they moved to a lovely house (unf GM then sold up in the late 60s - it’s worth about 3 mil now).
I often think about my dad who died when I was a teenager - pre-internet, mobiles etc. He’d be completely baffled at society now.

I know someone who has 2 figure aunts and uncles on both sides of her family. She’s the exception though. As contraception was basically the man’s responsibility, as the pill wasn’t available - what went on in marriages back then?

Was it mainly marital rape or were the women happy, or at least accepting of having as much sex as their man wanted in spite of all the risk associated with pregnancy etc? I know they didn’t get a lot of say but were these grandmothers happy with all their children or was there a sense of resentment and that they’d been forced upon them, and all the added back-breaking responsibility that went with that?

As men were main breadwinners (although a lot of mothers did work too) what were they thinking? Infant mortality was obviously a real thing, but after baby number 7 was growing and presumably doing alright - they didn’t need to ensure more followed to replace them on the farm or earning extra money for the family income or whatever. They had to feed and clothe all these extra mouths - was the sexual urge too great to resist and they just didn’t connect the two as the reason they were in such poverty?

I assume the only way she could do this is that the older children were looking after the younger children most of the time.

I never knew my maternal grandmother because she died befor I was born and my paternal grandmother lived in India and the only contact I had with her was one phone call and a birthday card (my dad's family and his history is complicated). Anyway, both women had big families; my maternal grandmother had 6 and my paternal grandmother had 7 and while I have no real knowledge of what their lives were like I am sure that they would be amazed at the way I live, one child, loads of labour saving devices and that I as a single woman own my house. This would have been unheard of for them, women could not get mortgages, divorce was rare and carried a lot of social stigma. Of course we have problems today but the endless slog, big families whether you wanted them ot not, sticking it out in a bad marriage must have been a real challenge. As I get older and older I do think about both my grandmas, wonder what I inherited from them and feel that not having any grandparents (both my granddads were dead before I was born) is in many ways a loss.

This always strikes me too
The world is so much smaller now
I emigrated and suspect that its only one or two generations ago I wouldnt have gone back at all, but also potentially wouldnt have had photos and all the links to my home town I do now. I can still listen to things in my language, have the music i grew up with and talk to my family with ease

I cant imagine how different it would have been

I always think of my grandfather in law who was born in 1913 and died in 2016 who saw so much change in his life, he had sky sports and what's app at the end of his life to communicate across the world. He was very much a running bare foot kid, of downton abbey times and was an adult by the call the midwife eras. When I took a photo of him holding our daughter (who was donor conceived via ivf in a same sex mixed race relationship), I remember really feeling the marvel of science

I always think housewives and domestic female staff of the past must have been incredibly physically strong. Aside from washing, lugging coal etc, ever tried making cake/bread or whipping cream or eggs by hand? Arm-ache!