Web Page No 2462

2^nd April  2018

First Picture: Washing Day

 Second Picture:  Kitchen Cabinets

 Third Picture:  Gas Iron

Forth Picture: Everything was plugged into the light socket !!!!!

When a woman's week revolved around the washing

A remarkable book has shown how very different things were for housewives in the Fifties, once married, women could expect to spend up to 15 hours a day on their household chores . . .

One lady, when her first child arrived in 1952, resigned from her job and turned to the task of caring for her husband, her home and her family. 

For the next 15 years, she shopped, cooked, cleaned, mended, scrubbed, laundered and baby-minded. She spent much of her life clad in an apron — scraping carrots, scouring a frying pan or rubbing her way through a mighty pile of dirty washing. Or she’s pegging out nappies or darning a frayed sleeve. In all these activities, my mother was absolutely typical of a generation for whom marriage and home were the twin pinnacles of aspiration.

Yet, today, a journey into the Fifties  can seem like alighting on another planet.

What was it really like? For most married women, the dramas of their everyday lives were played out beside the washing line, around the stove or at the kitchen sink. They had few hours to call their own. In 1951, for instance, a Mass Observation survey revealed that housewives in the London suburbs were spending an incredible 15 hours a day on domestic activities. Perhaps that figure isn’t quite so surprising when you learn that, by the start of the decade, only around 4% of British households owned a washing machine. Just 16 % owned some form of electric water heater. A quarter of homes were still cooking on coal ranges.

Many households still relied on much of the same basic equipment and materials that their parents and grandparents had used. Everyone knew that homes had to be spring-cleaned, rooms regularly ‘turned out’, carpets beaten, paintwork and curtains washed — just as they’d always been. There was only one person to do the lot, while also looking after the children, making all the meals and making sure that everything was ironed — right down to the baby’s dresses and pram sheets. No wonder the housewife’s familiar lament was that her work never seemed to get done.

In desperation, many turned to magazines for guidance that set out the average housewife’s day with the precision of a railway timetable.

‘She will rise at 7.15,’ it commands. ‘Breakfast is a rolling meal. She and her husband will eat theirs first, before he leaves for work at 8.15, at which time the children come on stream.

‘Once fed, they are packed off to school at quarter to nine. Then the real work begins: turning down beds and opening windows, washing up, dusting and tidying, followed by “weekly work”.

And what might that weekly work be? The Housewives’ Pocket Book has all the rigid answers:

Monday: Laundry.

Tuesday: Clean out bedroom and landing. Ironing in evening.

Wednesday: Clean out children’s bedroom and do stairs. Mending in evening.

Thursday: Clean out hall, bathroom, WC, cooking stove.

Friday: Clean out living rooms ready for weekend; baking for weekend, cleaning silver.

Saturday: Weekend shopping; change all linen, towels etc.

Once the housewife has done her allotted weekly tasks, she’s permitted a short rest at 11am, when she may put her feet up. Then she must go shopping, after which she can have lunch, followed by a 45-minute ‘personal recreation’ period. Tea must be on the table by 4.15pm. After tea, she must ‘tidy herself’, and prepare the evening meal, which will be served at 6.30pm. The children should be packed off to bed at 7.30pm. Then, unless the housewife needs to catch up on ironing and mending, she can more or less relax with her husband until bedtime.

It may seem extraordinary now that anyone felt they should follow these rules to the letter. But the evidence is that many women took them extremely seriously. It was a matter of pride for the self-respecting housewife to have her whites blowing on the line where everyone could see them by Monday lunchtime. 

One housewife wrote in her diary about her embarrassment one Saturday, when her daughter-in-law insisted on doing the washing on a Saturday night. What on earth would the neighbours think when they saw it hanging on the line? Early on Sunday morning, she crept down to the garden in dressing gown and slippers to unpeg the offending articles before anyone could notice them.

Washing, drying and ironing dominated women’s lives. Blankets, sheets, curtains and clothes were all hand-washed, using water boiled up in a vast copper, then rinsed and put through an unwieldy wrought-iron mangle. Cleanliness was next to godliness —and that extended to the net curtains.

Even after all the jobs were done, Fifties magazines — such as Good Housekeeping — were spurring the homemaker to do more. Here she’d learn that her sinks should be disinfected and her dishcloths regularly boiled. Her cupboards should be full of home-made jam, jellies and bottled beans, and her children’s nutritious packed lunches made the night before.

Did women find this truly fulfilling? Maybe some did, but plenty look back on their endless tasks with something akin to horror. One housewife spoke for millions when she wrote this diary entry on June 26, 1950: ‘I have washed. And being a good drying day, also ironed; been to the library, bought rations, typed a letter, had two cups tea, and here I am . . .Housework is endless.

Food shopping, as The Housewives’ Pocket Book said needed to be done daily. Most people didn’t have fridges, so food that lingered too long in the pantry led to many outbreaks of food poisoning in the summer. In 1951, a Mass Observation survey revealed that the average housewife spent 57 minutes a day shopping for necessities.

Grocery stores weighed goods individually. Cheese was sliced off the block with a wire, and butter was moulded with wooden paddles into half-pound rounds. At the butcher’s, entire carcases hung from hooks, while pigs’ heads stared balefully from behind the counter. You chose the cut you wanted and, if the price was too high when the butcher weighed it, you had it cut down to the size. Chicken was a luxury, but every housewife knew the difference between a boiling fowl and one to roast. Cabbage, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts were preferred to spinach or pumpkins, which were rarely available. Avocados and fruit-flavoured yogurt were unknown

From the moment commercial television arrived in 1955, people on buses could be heard humming the advertising jingles. Suddenly, everything seemed to be changing fast. The High Street shops was being threatened by self-service supermarkets. By 1958, these already had a 17 % share of the grocery market.

Why soak porridge oats overnight when you could buy cornflakes, or Ready Brek? Why make a sponge cake from scratch when you could concoct ‘the perfect sponge in 12 minutes with Green’s Sponge Mixture.’ For an easy evening meal, there was Birds Eye Quick-frozen Chicken Pie followed by Lyons Ready-Mix Suet Puddings.

There could be little doubt that the life of the housewife was being transformed — at least in some ways.

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Yours

Peter

gsseditor@gmail.com

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News and Views:

ON THIS DAY 2^nd April 1960-1965

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