Housework
Housework
Laundry Day. The average American farm wife’s week began with “Blue Monday,” the traditional laundry day in most regions. She began her day by hauling many buckets of water from the outdoor pump or well into the kitchen. Next, she had to start a fire in the stove and boil the water in large pots. It took about fifty gallons of water (weighing four hundred pounds) for one load. Sheets and underwear had to be “cooked” and scrubbed with rough lye-based soaps until they came clean. Then came
rinsing, bluing (adding a faint blue dye to the rinse water to make the linens look whiter), starching, wringing water out of the heavy wet laundry, and finally spreading linens on the grass so that the sun could bleach them or hanging them on the clothesline with the rest of the wet laundry. Repeating this process several times until all the wash was done, a woman typically spent all day at this backbreaking task. Nothing was ever wasted; women poured their used laundry water on their rosebushes or vegetable patches. The first washing machines, which became available after the Civil War, provided some help with scrubbing, but the housewife had to turn a hand crank to work the agitator instead.
Ironing. Tuesday brought another difficult chore: ironing. The heavy cast irons (some of them filled with live coals) had to be heated in the stove. A woman had to be very careful pressing shirts, ruffled dresses, and tablecloths lest she burn holes into them.
Indoor and Outdoor Chores. Early before sunrise, every day of the week, the wife was the first to rise in order to start breakfast, which consisted of freshly baked biscuits, fried eggs and bacon, sliced meats, and cooked oatmeal or grits. As the day progressed, she had to feed the chickens, rabbits, and geese; she had to remember to clean out coops and hutches, milk the cows, gather eggs, and tend her vegetable garden. She also had to churn butter and do a great deal of baking—most nineteenth-century Americans distrusted “store-bought” bread. The next chore was to prepare an enormous midday meal for all the workers and family; then washing the dishes, which meant hauling more water from outside and heating it. Then, perhaps with the help of her daughters, the woman began to clean the house, making beds, shaking out rugs, and scrubbing floors. Besides tending livestock, and depending upon the time of year, she also had to schedule canning, preserving, sewing, “doing” for a sick neighbor or an elderly relative, and completing whatever seasonal tasks lay in store. This would include helping with the butchering, salting or smoking meats, cutting out shirts for the menfolk, and helping with the harvests or the cornhusking. Meanwhile, she also had to watch over her numerous children and try to teach them their tasks. In the evening she cooked another meal (the “supper”), did the dishes again, and then sat down to do a little sewing, while her children read aloud what they had learned in school that day. Long before nine in the evening, she put out her lamps and fell exhausted into bed. Sunday was a day of rest for most, but women still had to do the cooking and dishes for Sunday dinner. This life was backbreaking—day after day of long, hard labor for women. But neighborly women also helped each other out; if someone was sick, people attended each other’s needs. No woman ever made a quilt by herself, and friends found ways to make work light by sharing conversation, advice, and even songs over needlework.
Source
Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life: 1790-1840 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988);
Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982);
Daniel E. Sutherland, The Expansion of Everyday Life: 1860-1876 (New York: Harper &c Row, 1989).