Microfiber sheets

Remember watching "1900 House" and that poor wife and mother with her family moved into a restored period Victorian/Edwardian house complete with a copper off the kitchen. It was one of those real life back in time bits, where a modern family tries to live the way it was back then.

The only training the family, especially the mother had of housekeeping was day or two at a country estate run as it was back in 1900 or so, with the housekeeper and maids.

Well NOTHING could have prepared that woman for doing laundry via a copper, wash tubs, mangle, iron (heavy cast iron jobs, heated on the range). She did know that even as recent as her grandmother's day schools were almost totally absent of girls on Mondays, because they were kept home to help with the wash. One of the fist things the woman did when returning to modern times, was make a bee line for her modern washer and dryer. According to the voice over during the program, a modern washing machine can do in about an hour what took a housewives one, two or even three days.

As for us having more clothes today than back then, I don't know about that. Certainly we have more, many more outer garments than say even the average middle class person. This is when owing more than five or six gowns was considered "rich"; but there were all those undergarments, especially for women, which added up to lots of laundry.

IIRC, since many outer garments like dresses, pants and such were either non-launder in water, and or so complicated that one often didn't bother for a year or so, that many clean undergarments were required, as they were changed more often to help keep down the BO level.

Remember reading about a mother in the South, around 1920's or so that literally sewed her sons into their long undergarments at the beginning of winter, and didn't release them until Spring; much to the relief of the children's schoolmates and probably everyone else in the area/downwind of them. *LOL*

Candide

My mom did the first diapers by hand for a while. She was no fan of that! She really was a whiz at laundry over the years and loved her Maytag machines. She kept clothes looking good forever and could get every stain out. The day she died her machine literally died too. I swear she took that thing with her worried that she might need it in the next life or something! I think those poor 1900 house folk could have used a little more preparation. They probably weren't the best suited for that life. I enjoyed watching though. Taria

Candide wrote:

Getting a bath was no simple matter, either. The water had to be pumped, then put on the stove to heat, then carried to the tub and poured in. Everyone bathed in the same tub, in the same water, taking turns. IIRC, the father was first. By the time the little ones went in

-- all at once -- the water was tepid at best and not too clean. This was ordinarily done on Saturday so that everyone would be clean for Sunday. There were no daily baths. No showers at all. Underwear was changed when the person bathed.

My mother grew up in such a house. No plumbing, no electricity, a wood and coal stove in the kitchen that did for everything, except when laundry was done in the yard and the water heated over a coal fire. There was scrap coal to be picked up. The lights were kerosene lamps. The men who worked in the coal mines did wash at the end of their shift, but didn't take a full bath. The work clothes went back on in the morning before going off to work again.

Most people had two outfits. Everyday, and Sunday. Closets were tiny because there wasn't much to go in them. One set for summer, one for winter. If you had one or two more, you didn't wear it and put it in the wash - I didn't even do that when I was in high school and we had an electric washer. My mother wouldn't have stood for that.

Groan! I don't even want to think about it!

And I can just barely remember my mother having "dress shields" which basically were unarm pads for sweaty armpits so that dresses/shirts etc didn't have to be washed so often. Yuck!

My mother had some beauties. A couple I liked are "back to your dugout" (learned from her teacher who had been in WWI) and "If wishes were horses then beggars would ride".

The sad thing is that I now find myself using them and although it's understood by my generation and those one generation below me, those under

30 (the TV saturation generation) don't seem to possess the skills to figure out what the sayings mean.

So did I when it came to the once a week bath. Water storage in the country in those days was always limited.

No plumbing, no electricity, a wood

Well in winter (now) I use a kitchen stove (range) that heats the water, does our cooking and heats the house using hydronic heating..

Hey, it was bad enough for the woman, but they were in period dress as well. So there she was, huddled over a hot copper, scrubbing, washing, rinsing, lifting, mangling, and so forth for all that heavy laundry wearing corsets and long skirts. To be fair she did have her two youngest daughters helping as well.

Happen to think dress shields (which are still available, by the way), are quite a sensible method of dealing with perspiration, especially when it comes to bridal and other formal gowns. A few quick stitches and they things are in place, protecting the underarm area of the gown not only from "sweaty armpits", but the ravages of anti-perspiring chemicals as well. Much easier to remove and replace dress shields, than deal with the damage caused by the above.

Wish in one hand and spit in the other, which one fills up first?

Yes, I know about the period dress. Did you see Outback House? At least there they had the sense to strip down to their underwear to do the work. And I can't blame them as anyone who would be silly enough to stick to 'rules' set simply for a TV show when the temps top the ton would have to be silly.

We did, for our first three babies. What's more, we only had a cold water supply so a kettle on the hob had to heat all water. The 'kitchen' was an alcove in the only ground level room. Spouse did a lot of it because his hands were harder than mine and I developed blisters from wringing the nappies. They were dried round the coal fire. The babies were born in 1960,

62 and 63 so there were always more than one in nappies :-)

I'm not complaining at all, it was our house, not rented, we could do whatever we wanted in it.

When that house was demolished for redevelopment we should have been re-housed in a council house ('social housing') but we didn't want that so the council gave us a mortgage for my aunt's house which had recently gone on the market - we're still here. I was still washing by hand but had a small wringer. When I was pregnant again in 1966 my mother gave us the deposit for a Bendix combined washer/drier. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven!

Wouldn't have a drier now but nor would I want to go back to hand washing for the bulk of the laundry. Although it's satisfying to wash woollens and fine fabrics by hand and I enjoy that.

Mary

They've given us time to use pcs. Don't get me wrong, I love the pc and I'm an internet junkie but if I had to choose between it and a washing machine there'd be no contest. I could always go back to a typewriter and there's still the postal system :-)

Mary

I think so. Spouse has one but the elastic has stretched. My only brother was younger than me :-(

Mary

"You look like the wreck of the Hesperus". And, "You look like you were dragged through a hedge backwards".

Sould you want to replace it with one with the traditional stripey sort of elastic:

Oh - lovely!

But they were around in the 1940s ...

Thanks,

Mary

Most fashions seem to come back around don't they? Some are more welcome than others. I know I will never miss polyester flares with ric-rac on the lower leg!

Lizzy

I misunderstood my mother's description of me, when I was small I thought she said I was like 'a tart in a trance'. Since the only thing associated with tarts was the tray they were baked in I thought that's what she meant, they're still called trances in our family even though I now know what she really meant :-)

Mary

I missed those the first time round (no money for fashionable clothes) - but one of our boys didn't :-( He had a pair of flares each leg of which was like a skirt. One of his sons is wearing them now.

As you say ... :-)

Mary

Isn't that the truth. So much of our current language in the US seems to have degraded into terse phrases of no more than four letter words. I once heard a high school girl describe _Pride and Prejudice_ as similar to reading a foreign language. Hopefully this pattern will turn around.

Phae