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)

I think about this a lot. My grandmother was an orphan, started working as a child serving for a wealthy family and went on to have 10 children with a man who soon enough left her with all of them behind. She managed to have 12 people in a 2 bedroom (the extra person was a week-time lodger). All of this and I never heard her complain to us about her life.

And then I have to hear my DD moan about her bedroom being too small, our flat being too small for 3 people, not being able to have pets, and so on, so on, so on.

My mom had a mangle for a short while. i remember putting stuff through back in the 60's. Terrifying things, used to be quite a few accidents

I remember my grandmother in her later years most of her garden was a vegetable patch with some fruit bushes. She spent every day in the garden. Used to paint the inside of her house as well. She was in her 80's!!!! and a tiny little lady

I guess they would have had condoms then, but maybe not like todays? / could be expensive?

From my Nan's perspective, she was young, came from a poor family so getting married young, she felt / hoped that her life would improve, it didn't really. Her husband abused her but she felt trapped, definitely it was marital rape but that wasn't a thing back then in the sense husbands I don't believe could get into trouble for forcing their wives to have sex with them. My Nan was raised a Catholic as was her husband, they were practicing Catholics and birth control wasn't a thing for them.

I’m in the middle of researching my family tree and I often think exactly this. I almost wish I could bring all of my ancestors into my home and let them live in a comfortable, warm house with running hot water, flushing toilets, machines to do almost everything for us. It’s unfair that so many of them would have often been cold, cramped, hungry.

My DC complained about a vaccine at school a while back and I had to remind them that some of their ancestors would have died from things they now get vaccinated for. A little scratch on the arm and an ache for a few hours is a small price to pay to protect you against what they had to endure.

I know. I've done two loads of washing today, one load drying, run the dishwasher and I'm having groceries 'whooshed' over, which I'll put in the slow cooker for this evening. About twenty minutes worth of work that would be hours and hours of labour without modern conveniences. I cba with robot hoovers though, noisy bashy fekkers.

And a lost letter could cause loss of contact for years.

My Gran's sister went to Australia in the 50's. She settled in one place then moved wrote to my Gran to tell her, but the letter never arrived. 5/6 years later she came back to visit, but my Gran had also moved (and had wrote to the original address) so they didn't see each other. There was no contact between them after that for decades until two folks doing the family tree crossed paths online.

It seems incredible to think of it now, but watching "At Home With The British" impressed on me the seismic shift in living standards that the red brick terraces offered to the first urban families who moved into them. To go from an entire family living in one room, in an often poorly built, poorly insulated "court" - some of the outer walls were only half a brick thick - to one of these solidly built homes, with your own space in the back yard for laundry etc, your own water tap - no having to lug buckets back from the standpipe shared with dozens of other families, and your own toilet - when before one outside "privy" was, again, shared with dozens of families. The terraces seem incredibly humble to us now, but when you think of what they replaced for a lot of people...

Anyway, my maternal great grandmother raised 8 children in one of those two up, two down terraced homes - unthinkable now. She was widowed young, with eight mouths to feed, working every hour she could to make sure she could house and feed them because Hell would have frozen over before she would let them be separated from her and split up into children's homes, as was suggested by some who wondered how she would cope. She did, another of those remarkable, strong women of her generation. They really were amazing.

That's probably why your back is killing you, because you haven't used it enough and built up the muscle to support it.

Giving my age away, my DM often told me that she had to pay to have me, as if it was my fault ! We went to the Public Baths once a week - no possibility of a tin bath in front of the fire as we rented 2 rooms at the top of a 4-storey house.

A lot of people accross the world still live without modern conveniences. I remember this girl inventing this pedal powered washing machine. I suppose it would keep you fit.

I remember us having a twin tub washing machine. Used to be so much steam that came off them.

My grandmother did all of that plus they always swept the street outside of their houses and scrubbed their front step so everywhere was clean. She was a fiercely independent woman and despite having a DS, DSil and 3 Grandson in laws willing to help, was once found at the age of 82 up a ladder replacing a tile on the roof.

My grandad told me that by the time it got to his turn for a bath (he was the youngest) there was a thick layer of dirt on the top 🙈🤢

Large families also come from starting families early.

We have a few large families in the generations above and I would be fitting in marriage and kids from the age of 30 to menopause mid 40s say my gmil had her first at 17 and almost 15 year head start on me!

The age gap between first kid to last could be huge, some of her sisters had moved out, had their own kids by the time mil was born. There is an example on my dfils side where the mother who had a child at 16, and her last at 43 ish, By the time her youngest was 6, his mum was a great grand ma!

I often think this, I mean many do still live like our previous generations did across the world in various levels of poverty or privation, but yes I often think how lucky we are here to live in a time where we get hot water easily, warmth, so many types of food and chocolate too! Things that would have been for the ultra rich once upon a time.

My grandma was born in 1910, one of 11 and 10 survived infancy. She told me how it was back in her childhood: outdoor privy, making the fire, wash day (the men were miners and their clothes were done last), putting clothes through a mangle. She was a very intelligent woman but the family didn't have the money for her education beyond school, she had to start working. She only had 3 children herself and all three went on to study and do well in life, she and grandad were very proud of them all. I learned a lot of useful life skills from all my grandparents: washing clothes by hand of your machine was ever broken, cooking from scratch, preserving and pickling, simple electrical repairs, sewing, mending and gardening.

This is true

I often think of my cousin who was born in rural Community with no running water or electricity. She now works in the emirates, but its very much not her "world" and her maid accomodation is fairly poor and standard of life poor while she works in the land of aircon, shiny floors, washing machines and more extravagance than you could think of

I realised I didn't mind housework, cooking, childcare etc over Christmas - when I took 2 weeks off work but stayed at home.
I do mind doing it all and having a full time job.

By today's (and even back then's) standards, she had an utterly miserable life. Abusive upbringing, no education, back-breaking domestic labour job plus the work of running a household and a complete arse of a husband. But, in spite of all that, she was very happy person. If you'd asked her, she'd have said she had a great life.

Thanks for replying , it’s so sad to think that most women would probably not welcome pregnancy after pregnancy (obv loving the babies that came along regardless), but it was just something a lot of them had to endure just being a woman. Like men being expected to go off and fight wars and battles.

Some may have attempted to fight their husbands off and received a beating. Others may have just gritted their teeth and got it over with, as much a part of their unpleasant daily workload as doing the laundry and cleaning the fireplace etc. But that was how it was. So horrendous.

My grandmother had staff. She’d consider me a bit of a pauper probably. Cooking my own meals, whatever next?

Not so much the washing (which was enough of an ordeal) but the drying of clothes in bad weather, especially when you consider the size of families and that there was always a baby in cloth nappies.

I remember my mum trying to dry stuff outside in winter, and it freezing solid on the line. I will gladly take my modern appliances and refuse to be guilt-tripped about them by jetsetter green ideologues.

I'm obviously older than most of you as it's my Mum, not my grandma whose life was like this. Growing up we had no heating in our house beyond a fire in the living room (swapped from an open fire to the luxury of a gas fire in my childhood) and a parrafin heater in the bathroom that went on on bath nights only. We didn't have a fridge til I was about 10 and got our first freezer when we moved house when I was 16 and the white goods were included in the sale. So my Mum went shopping more or less every day. She couldn't drive and Dad had the car for work anyway so she walked a couple of miles to the shops and carried heavy bags back most days. Before we moved we didn't have an automatic washing machine either, and there's actually quite a bit of physical effort involved in using a twin tub. Being a housewife really was a full time job she grew veg in our back garden too. My Mum was a tiny woman, under 5ft and probably 7 stone at her heaviest but she sure had muscles!
Her Mum was born in 1894 and was widowed in the early 1930s whilst pregnant with her sixth child. I can only imagine what her life was like in the days before the welfare state.
For all the problems we face today we also have a lot to be thankful for.

I’m desperate to do this, how did you manage it?

Yeah, our elders have lived a very difficult life and the irony is they never got appreciated.