A recent post on Apartment Therapy reviews how housework was done a hundred years ago. She describes following a housekeeping manual: “I Tried a 1920s Cleaning Routine for a Week—And It Was Nearly Impossible.” It wasn’t impossible, of course, but it was rigorous, with daily tasks and tasks completed on specific days. Monday was washing day. It was an entertaining read (and illustrated with photographs that do not come from the 1926 book).

“The good housekeeper must bring to her task of housekeeping every one of the qualities that make for a successful executive in the downtown business world.”

Brentnie Daggett, the author of the article, assumes the book was “written for professional housekeepers—teaching them how to take care of their clients’ spaces and manage their businesses at the same time” and that such a housekeeper would have the new gadgets such as an electric washing machine, vacuum cleaner, and dishwasher. She was wrong about all that.

First, the book was written for housewives not professional housekeepers, for married women whose profession was caring for their own home, not for hired staff. The illustrations in the article might depict a maid but should show a housewife wearing her apron, which she would certainly have worn while cleaning house. Most housewives learned their task from older women in their family, but sometimes a book was handy reference for tasks Mother did not explain thoroughly. I have several of these books, some of them quite expansive with chapters on dying cloth and stain-removal, on simple home repairs and pickles. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management comes to mind.

The author of the AT article finds the cleaning process described in the Good Housekeeping book unworkable, even “impossible” yet she only does the morning tasks of breakfast and cleaning. She does try a bit of mending on Mending Day (Tuesday), but she does not mention luncheon, dinner, or entertaining. She also does not mention seasonal tasks such as canning.

Daggett uses an automatic washer and dryer, and I do not blame her for that, but it is very unlikely her great grandmother did. There is no mention of ironing. Untreated cotton wrinkles to a degree few young people would recognize today. In 1929, cotton fabrics were first treated with a solution of urea and formaldehyde, but it would be decades before wrinkle-resistant fabrics became common in American homes. In the 60s, all of our sheets were synthetic because my mother refused to iron sheets. I am 67, old enough to remember ironing my father’s shirts with an electric iron. The task took hours.

Most American homes would not have had anything electric in 1920, no washing machine or dryer, no electric iron, dishwasher, or vacuum. (As late as 1945, the majority of American homes did not have electricity at all.) I recall my step-grandmother doing laundry in a large room, necessarily large because it held multiple tubs of water, mangles and wringers I was warned not to touch. The clean laundry was hung outdoors on the lines strung in front of the vegetable garden.

Cleaning floors between full-on down-on-your-kees weekly scrubbing was accomplished by scattering dampened newspapers on the floor and sweeping them up with clinging dust. Carpets were taken outdoors to be beaten clean with what looked like a massive flyswatter. I had a vacuum cleaner when my children were small, and that took care of the carpets, but I also scrubbed the kitchen floor once a week.

“Clean enough to eat off the floor” was no joke. It was the goal.

Gas or oil lamps had to be cleaned once a week. My mother and her sister did this on Tuesdays during the summers they spent in the house where I now live. It had a wood stove and no electricity or indoor plumbing in the 20s and 30s.

Electric stoves were not in every home, and wood stoves had to be fed with wood that had to be cut and split and stored and carried indoors. The icebox mentioned in the Good Housekeeping book was kept cold with…ICE.

All this non-electric equipment was used every day and had to be kept clean. In the 20s there were no antibiotics and lifespans were lengthening less because of medical science than better nutrition and cleaner homes.

Unmarried people lived in boarding houses for most of the 20th century so that meals and cleaning would be provided and they could go to other jobs. Keeping house was recognized as a full time job and women who stayed home to keep house were on their feet all day, cleaning and cleaning and cooking and caring. And cleaning. 

My great grandmother Rosa [Garcia] Jackson supported her family by opening her home to boarders. She cooked meals and cleaned for pay and that supported her and her children.

My mother was also raised in a single parent household from the mid-30s. Her mother worked full time in a shipping office, but my mother and her sister and their mother all still had the housework to do after work and school. On Saturdays they rushed around to do all the “upstairs” housework in order to be free to attend a Matinee.

Housework was anathema to my mother for the very good reason that her mother never stopped. My grandmother took the bus into the city for her job and then came home to care for her daughters and the four-bedroom home she won in the divorce. She took no alimony and she was paying on time for the furniture her former husband had chosen. My mother avoided canning and embraced every “time-saving” household technique for the rest of her life. Think Campbell’s canned soup and instant mashed potatoes.

In my mother’s childhood winters, laundry was hung in the basement, a chore she hated so much that she used a laundromat throughout my childhood rather than have a washer and dryer in our home. Though she was a stay-at-home-mom throughout my childhood, housekeeping was a full-time job my mother was determined to escape. She was thrilled to return to paying work when my father retired early on disability and my brother hit his teens.

My mother recognized society’s devaluation of women’s work, and she resented it until she died.