Were 1950/60 family homes more clean and organised?

[Tumbleweed101]

With more women in those eras homemaking rather than working out of the home were those homes more organised than those today? As now many are encouraged to have both parents working when children are very young? Or is it more of a myth and lots of women were still working out of the home then?

Most were more Spartan , so perhaps tidy because of that. Also remember not many had Hoover's so only had mops , dust pan & brush. No mod cons.

Everyone had less stuff. Children had fewer toys, there weren't all the fancy gadgets in the kitchens, people didn't wash their clothes after every wear, their towels after every shower, nor their bed linen every few days, people ate less, so there was less waste, and lots of waste was either given to the dog and cat to eat or burned on the fire.

I was born in 1958, my mother was hopeless at cooking, cleaning etc.
She worked full time as a sales rep and we had a cleaner

Based on my gran who had children in the fifties, it would have been cleaner with fewer things like clothes and gadgets but a FUCK TONNE of long life food. She couldn't bring herself to get rid of it bless her after living through the war! She was like that till she died. I once found jelly mix in her cupboard from the 1980s - this was in the 2010s

I think we are more organised now because we have to be. My husbands mother had no fridge, no car, no microwave or washing machine and he’s only 42 !! I find it hard to believe but it’s true (rural home)

so it couldn’t be as clean as now

Was coming on to say less stuff. No cupboards full of toys for every kid, no wardrobes full of clothes so they could be washed after every wear etc. No computers, printers, game consoles. Less stuff to keep tidy, less volume of washing.

None of those thing affect how clean the house is tho. The washing machine facilitates washing stuff more often but it wasn't like clothes weren't washed.

My mum grew up in the 50s. Her mum did work.

Things like less clothes and toys are true, but my nan had to handwash clothes and put them through a mangle so it was hard work.

Food was much more toast and eggs for dinner than all this scratch cooking.

My grandmother didn’t like taking my father and his siblings to her parents’ house because it was dirty and messy with stuff she felt was dangerous for babies crawling around (and always had been when she was growing up). This was in the 50s, there always were some people who found it more difficult than others.

In many groups of society women have always done work towards income for the household.

I was born late 60s. My grand mothers both worked and the homes were as tidy as they are now. No different

People didn’t have so much stuff.
Not so many toys, shoes, clothes, electrical things that all need charging.
Easier to keep tidy then. Having said all that the house was probably dirtier because of less efficient cleaning products.

Less stuff, but more fag ash, coal dust, men doing dirty manual Labour job. I imagine overall dirtier unless you were seriously on top of it with elbow grease

A museum we went to had an original prefab house. I remember thinking how well thought out everything was despite the small size of the house. Cupboards galore and a home for everything. Now many newbuilds don't have a cupboard big enough to keep the vacuum cleaner so I imagine they get cluttered easily. More clutter and more things out makes a home messy and harder to clean.

Yes and no: Everybody smoked and smoking indoors was normal. So ceilings and the tops of walls would go brown.
On the other hand, people had less stuff, as there was less to be had and things were more expensive.

All of the women in my family worked, going back to the fifties, often multiple jobs, it was common but in more working class areas. People would pick up two or three families with of DC from school and take it in turns to support each other working, there were lots of cleaning jobs, factory work, bar work etc around DC and men did less around the house. My DF was mocked by friends in the eighties because he'd run the hoover round, do laundry and god forbid cooked regularly. He also worked 60 hours a week in a machinist/manual labour type job, DM worked in a playgroup part time, had cleaning jobs, bar work etc to top it up. If something went wrong financially eg something broke down one of them would get some extra ad hoc work. Friends' families were all the same.
DM went on to get nursery nurse qualifications and ended up running a private nursery but by then I was pretty much an adult.

Plus it is worth bearing in mind that many more women did work than we tend to think. Especially working class women, who really needed the money. So not necessarily more time. Also, things that they did took longer, just look at the way washing machines worked, if you were lucky enough to have one and weren't trundling to the laundrette.

Oh so essentially everyone was flat out busy so things were clean but sparse. No Hinchlike cleaning regimes etc

Standards for cleanliness were a lot lower in the 50s-80s. And most homes were larger but more cluttered. ‘Raising children’ often meant keeping kids in the pram until they could walk and then letting them play in the street until it was time for dinner.

Both my grandmothers were working in the 50s and 60s!

My grandparents didn't work but I know one side always had a cleaner, less stuff AND sent kids to boarding school so not so much of the kids mess either!

Other side full time housewife. We used to talk about it sometimes. Washing took all day, and she had set days of the week for different chores BUT although we have White goods etc I had pnd and she was sure they were happier as the housewives in the street would share chores and work together so it was more of a shared life for her. .

This wasn’t true of my family or anyone I knew.

We definitely had fewer belongings, so therefor much less to tidy up. And far far fewer clothes - and we wore things for longer before washing them, because it was such a blooming palaver.

The use of coal fires meant that there was coal dust and soot around. We were a lot less fussy about cleanliness - no shower a day lark - and heating water was costly.

My grandmothers house was spotless and she worked.
However my grandfather also pitched in with housework and cooking ( 40's and 50's) . There wasn't the clutter however. When my dgm finally passed her belongings that weren't furniture could be be packed into a few bags. Very different to today. She also didn't sit down very often.

Dm is the same, no clutter, hardly sits down, spotless house, she's 85 and puts me to shame. If she got going in my house the kids would die of horror, and there would be bin bags of stuff my dm deemed not needed. There is no sentiment if you want a spotless house.

Where was this? This is really not something I recognise at all.

Don’t forget more people had coal fires and that creates a lot of dust.

I had a taste of this when we bought an old cottage in 1993. The radiators were heated with an old Rayburn that burnt coal.

There was a film of black dust on everything all the time.

Dontforget about the ‘pea soupers’ London suffered before the Clean Air Act.

So less stuff to get dirty, but no gadgets to save time. But if you weren’t well off and had a big family it was probably very hard to keep things as clean as we are used to today.