Over the last few days there's been a lot of buzz on social media about the "olden days." Romanticized in extremis I should add. Christmases past particularly but more often than not about lovely smells in kitchens and 4 clotheslines and the lovely old wood stove used for everything from baking and boiling to hot water and heat.
Romantic for some, perhaps, but a drill down into those blissful times will reveal an overworked mother, often with multiple children - my sister-in-law is the youngest of 17 - you read that right - who baked all the family bread and did all the laundry by hand, mended her children's clothes - having made them - if lucky - on a treadle sewing machine with her tired legs after a labour-intensive day and if she had enough oil for the lamp to sew by.
She tended the kitchen garden and collected the eggs and made the butter and milked the one cow or many if it was a farm. She collected the wool from the sheep to spin it and knit her family's sweaters and socks and cut down the father's shabby clothes to fit her sons and used flour sacks - often dying them in different colours from dye harvested from flowers and vegetables to dress her daughters. She bottled and preserved all the fruit and vegetables, down to the excessive eggs for the winter season.
She never, ever stopped. Her husband had it comparatively easy. Escaping from the house to do his work in a factory. an office or a farm or as a general labourer. He came home at night and put his feet up and was served his supper and fresh clothes for the morning and read his newspaper if he was lucky enough to borrow or buy one. And the children were told not to bother Daddy after his hard day.
The woman's incredibly hard day was demeaned and dismissed, despite what she had sacrificed to be this unpaid slave breeder. By her husband, by his buddies, by her church - who also expected she would supply free labour to clean the church and wash and starch the altar linens and her sons' surplices if they were altar boys.
She had 3 choices - service to the church (nun or teacher or nurse - the church owned the convents, the schools and the hospitals and profited greatly), marriage, or a single life, mocked and condemned because she couldn't "get" a man.
She never could use her brain or get educated to a higher level beyond grade school. With rare exceptions from more enlightened parents.
I was born in 1943 and lived with my grandparents for a while and witnessed this lifestyle first hand even though all their children had gone, some to emigration. Granda still worked as a labourer and granny had no electricity and no running water and even with just me in the house, she worked non-stop from dawn to dusk. Financially and religiously trapped forever.
She passed on many words of wisdom to me, the top one being: "Get an education, colleen* and you'll avoid this."
Words I followed, never wanting the lifestyle of either her or of my mother.
So yes, I am enraged by all this memory washing. A lot of it by men. Who to this day don't ever understand (and don't want to) the workload and sacrifice of their mothers or sisters. Apparently they all "enjoyed it."
*Irish for little girl
Ah yes! I have seen the same. A recent post bemoaned the passing of the Sunday dinner. I remember those---Mom hurrying home from church to cook while Dad read the Sunday paper. In most families I knew, and in some even today, the women did all the cooking and cleanup even though it was supposed to be a day of "rest".
ReplyDeleteOh yes. Romanticising a life of hard work - predominantly by those who worked much less hard.
ReplyDeleteHiss and spit is the politest phrase I can muster.
Agreed!
ReplyDeleteThe labours for woman often began at a young age too. Your grandmother was clearly aware there was a different life for women rather than how she had lived. I think she would be rather pleased with you.
ReplyDeleteI am so glad most of us have progressed past that lifestyle, though I suspect a few are still caught up in it, even with today's electricity and labour saving machines, which still have to be cleaned and cared for. I do remember girls being expected to help in the house from an early age, though the boys didn't get off scot free either, they were expected to help their fathers, with things like cleaning the cars, mowing the grass and other garden work on weekends.
ReplyDeleteIn my home, all the kids (2 girls, 2 boys) took turns with helping in the house, each making their own beds and helping with washing dishes etc.
Yes looking at it through rose tinted glasses. that's what I was told, get a good education and I did!
ReplyDeleteSo much reminiscing about the Good Old Days here too.
ReplyDeleteAre those the days when you couldn't access birth control, abortion or a mortgage ?
When the Irish government in the 1950s was bringing electrification to remote Irish villages they had no opposition from farmers as long as the power only reached the animal sheds but they struggled to convince the head of the household himself that it needed to reach the house, after all that might result in the wife abandoning her nighttime duties and reading by the light of an electric light!
I was very fortunate. My parents also worked sunup to sundown. Farming. My dad also worked 12 hour days at the cotton gin during cotton picking time and daylight hours pruning vineyards during winter months. Their advice to me--get an education and work in an office. I never liked to hot or dirty. My parents never required me to do much around the house or fields because they always said my "job" was to get an education. And, that's just what I did.
ReplyDeleteYes, memory can be very selective, especially for those who want to paint a rosy glow on their version of it. I think that Miriam and I share the load equally and willingly and we are both better for it. It has always seemed natural to us. We never had to divvy up the workload. We have worked together since the day we first met and I couldn’t imagine it any other way.
ReplyDeleteI grew up wuth big multi-family meals made on special holidays and served by my mothers, my aunts, or my grandmother. Indeed I remember them fondly. Who wouldnt? Those of us who didnt do the work. Now that I know how much effort goes into putting on a meal for 15 to 30 people, I never do it. My sister-in-law often does and I always take something to contribute, and help with the shitload of dishes. Note: only 3 or 4 of us, my spouse included, pitch in with the cleanup. Why anyone thinks it's fine to fill their fat faces and then sit on their asses while other people (esp the younger set! wth!) do all the dishes will forever be a mystery to me.
ReplyDeleteI mean the younger ones are those who dont get up and help. Irritates the bejesus out of me. And dont get me started on the men who wouldnt think of it. Entitled asses.
DeleteYour overworked mother with 17 children reminds me not of my parents, but of my grandparents in the early 1900s. My grandmother raised 7 children (one died in the Spanish flu), cleaning and cooking over a wood stove and tending a kitchen garden and scrounging for food and storing extras in her root cellar. I'm sure there were plenty of positives as well, but it was a tough life and to romanticize it is basically dishonest. But I'm sorry, your view of the men is literally dead wrong. Sure, my grandmother had it hard. But my grandfather trekked off to the factory every day, working in a dark and dismal place, covered with metal dust and shavings, knowing he could never quit, never take a vacation, because all those kids were depending on him for food and shelter -- and all of which (like many men of his day) cut his life short in his early 60s. Meanwhile, my grandmother, once the kids were gone, lived out a fairly comfortable retirement until she passed away at age 96. The moral of the story: Women have no monopoly on hard and sometimes-demeaning work. And today, both men and women have it pretty easy compared to our forebears. That's called progress.
ReplyDelete