Jitterbug 1:1

I've tried to approach The Experiment as an attempt to understand the 1940s housewife as a whole woman. Not just the nitty gritty like housework, beauty rituals, vintage cookery, and not just the fun stuff like hairstyling, clothes, and movies --- but the rhythm of life and ways of relating to others which made up the context for all that. Things like etiquette, arts, and social activities - they can be so deeply engrained in the background of life that my '40s counterpart may not even have noticed them herself. Mind you, there's plenty of things about the 1940s cultural mindset that I'm perfectly happy to leave in the past, but there's much of value, I think, that could enrich our modern lives.

And if I'm ever going to truly understand the world to which my grandmothers belonged, I must hie myself to church.

Now if I can just get across the threshhold without being struck down by a thunderbolt, I wonder how my life might be shaped by going to Mass every week. (I'm being a little over-dramatic with the thunderbolts stuff. I was just in church last Sunday with my parents. Nothing happened.) I hope those of you who are deeply serious and devoted to your faith will not feel that I'm being flippant or proposing this in jest. I'm not. (Likewise, I hope those readers who might feel impelled to proselytize will step away from the comments button.) I've come to appreciate more with the years just how important and meaningful my parents' faith has been to them. My own relationship with God has been a long and stormy one, but there have been many occasions when going to church has been a comforting experience to me. I have theological differences with every religion out there, but despite all the churches I've "sampled" over the years, none has ever felt quite as much like home as the Catholic church in which I was raised.

My grandmothers had very different religious experiences. My paternal grandmother was raised in the Methodist church and married into the Catholic church. Her faith must have been deeply shaken when she was widowed at 36 (my age!) with four small children. But it also must have reminded her of her late husband and helped her in keeping his memory alive in her children's hearts. My maternal grandmother was raised in the Baptist church and married a Catholic man, much to the consternation of both their families. "Mixed marriage" was a big deal in rural America in the 1930s. (Her mother-in-law never accepted the marriage.) She and my grandfather set religion aside and raised their daughter outside either church.

This must have been fairly unusual in the small town in which they lived... Agnostics, atheists, working folks who were just too plain tired on their one day off in a six-day-working-week world - these good folks have existed in every time and place, but they were still a very small minority in 1940s America. If you were a member of the business class, you could lose clients and social standing if you weren't a member of some faith. For many people, the church to which they belonged was the center of their social activities. The vast majority of Americans were Christians and so on Sunday mornings the world came to a virtual pause for church. Stores and restaurants were closed. Social activities were taboo on Sunday mornings. Church services and religious music could be found across the radio dial. Things certainly picked up on Sunday afternoons, but even then most folks shared in experiences like hearty noon-day meals, visits with family, drives in the country, leisurely activities at the park or at home.

It's hard for me to imagine in 2009 how hushed and still Sunday mornings must once have seemed. Today, Sundays are like every other day of the week for almost all of the people I know. And yet, I think there's something of great value in taking regular time out every week to stop and reflect on your place in this world and feel gratitude for blessings. I may have mentioned this before, but I'd really like to bring back that kind of rest and ritual to my own life. So will I chafe at attending Mass so regularly in my Sunday best? Will I listen to the service with a new ear? Will I find myself joining the choir and crocheting doilies for the Christmas crafts fair with the other church ladies? Hmmm... I hope my red lipstick isn't too flashy for church!

Hold the Cream

I tried to do it, I really tried. This morning's 1945 breakfast menu started out with Sliced Bananas with Cream. My arteries won the contest, though, and I ate the Bananas without the Cream:

Sliced Bananas

Poached Free Range Eggs on Toast

Cream and Top Milk were a staple fixture on the 1940s breakfast table. And not just for coffee. People laced their cooked cereals with Top Milk. They served cold cereals in bowls of Cream. Now it shows up with fruit. I guess they didn't have the constant commentary on health running through their heads that we do today. Cream and Top Milk were considered nutrient-dense foods, not cholesterol-laden substances to be used in strict moderation. I hesitated before the Cream in the dairy section at the grocery store last Wednesday. Thought I really ought to taste the dish for the sake of The Experiment. But I just couldn't do it.

At any rate, this was the last of the breakfast menus in the front of my cookbook. When I started trying 'em out a couple weeks ago, I expected these menus to be a little ritzier than the ones in the budget feature in the back of the cookbook. Fresher ingredients, maybe. So how did they measure up? Here's a bit I wrote about the budget-conscious menus:

Nearly half of the meals (43%) were built around some sort of cooked cereal. 27% of the menus were built around an egg dish. Baked goods were the main attraction for 20% of the menus, and cold cereal for the remaining 10%... I'm also a vegetarian, so I've taken any meat dishes out of the menus. This didn't take much time. These were the war years, and only 20% of the menus even include meat.

The menus in the front of the book are only built around cooked cereal 9% of the time. Nearly two-thirds of the meals (64%) feature an egg dish, and baked goods lead the way in 27% of the menus. You can see right away just how useful cooked cereals would have been to the housewife who had to be especially careful with money. Somebody who was a little more comfortable financially could count on having eggs at the breakfast table several times a week. Another major difference is that 46% of these front-of-the-book menus include meat - twice the amount as in the back of the book. The only kind of meat referenced in the budget section is bacon, while the menus in the front of the book include codfish, ham, and sausage. Another glimpse into the kind of pantry a thriftier housewife would have kept in the '40s.

I'm not done experimenting with breakfast just yet. I've been able to find eight more vintage breakfast menus in cookbooks and magazines, so I'm going to try these out and then move on to dinner. The first trio of menus is from a 1944 edition of the Good Housekeeping Cook Book (New York: Farrar and Rinehart). I'm also going to fire up my "new" Drip-O-lator for the first time. A friend bought me this lovely contraption last summer and it looks absolutely fabulous on my stovetop, but it was missing the aluminum drip unit that fits in the top. Until Christmas, that is. It's all assembled and ready to go, but I feel a bit like I'm trying out a new Bunsen burner in the lab. Will it make good coffee?

Thrift 1 / Curiosity 0

Yipes! I realized this morning that I haven't blogged about my breakfasts in a couple days. Lest you think the Fried Mush incident scared me out of the kitchen for good, I'll get caught up now. My tastebuds did recover. Tuesday's menu:

Orange Slices

Scrambled Eggs and Toast

Coffee

Nothing wrong with a meal like that one. Here's the menu for today:

Applesauce

Graham Muffins

Hard-cooked Egg

I substituted some of my Graham Muffins - they've been in the freezer since last week - for the Oatmeal Gems that were actually on today's menu. I was curious as can be to try the new recipe, but thrift won out and I decided to eat up some of my leftovers instead. As far as I can tell, the Oatmeal Gems are a biscuity type of muffin with oats sprinkled inside. I haven't noticed any differences in these menus at the front of my cookbook except that there are more baked goods in these menus. Which makes sense. The author is trying to interest her readers in some of her recipes. The very next menu features a whole new recipe altogether! I think I'll stick with today's menu one more time and try to free up some space in the freezer.

Once I've finished experimenting with this first run through the menus, I'm going to revisit that "reducing" plan I found in a '40s magazine. I'll save the baked goods for an occasional treat - once a month instead of once a week! - and take up those vintage serving sizes more rigorously. It'd be loverly if The Experiment had some benefits for my waistline, too!

The Great Housekeeping Experiment

This blog had its beginnings in 2006 in another discussion forum. After moving into a new apartment in a new city, I started something I called "The Great Housekeeping Experiment" - an attempt to keep house according to the routine written up in a 1947 housekeeping manual. After three days, I threw in the vintage towel. It was an exhausting workload that women could only have done after spending years apprenticed in their mothers' homes. Have you ever seen the scene in Woman of the Year (1942) where accomplished careerwoman Tess Harding (Katherine Hepburn) tries - disastrously - to make breakfast for her husband? That was me after just three days. Here are a few excerpts:

For starters, the housekeeping schedule doesn't tell us when the housekeeper could shower (or bathe) and dress herself. That was the very first issue staring me in the face when I got up this morning. Did the 1940s housewife head down to the kitchen fully washed and dressed and ready to be seen by the world, or was she garbed in a robe with her hair still in curlers? If we were to judge by advertisements from the era, I'd say they were fully dressed at the breakfast table. In real life, was that really the case?

I can definitely see what a treat a favorite soap opera or two would have been to a 1940s housekeeper. It's easy to imagine a woman working extra hard to get a task done in time to sit down to listen to her favorite soap - maybe with a fresh pot of coffee or a friend. Wondering how a cliffhanger would be resolved could keep the mind occupied while doing monotonous work.

Housekeeping in shoes bites!!! Whether you're in a housedress or street clothes, there's no getting around the fact that 1940s housekeepers most assuredly wore shoes around the house. It's all I can do to keep from kicking them off and going barefoot or wearing slippers. And they aren't even heels --- as we see in ads. Just flats. In those days of door-to-door salesmen and neighbors that popped by unannounced, a woman had to be ready to greet the public at any moment. Oy.

After chalking "The Great Housekeeping Experiment" up to failure, I felt inspired again last spring and started looking around for a housekeeping manual designed for women with a war job, perhaps - a routine that might be useful for a woman like myself in 2008 who works outside the home 40 hours per week. I didn't have any luck, but I did find another manual published in 1945 and decided to pick and choose between the two routines to try and put something together that worked for me. I also decided to start slow. Pick up one new step every week and try to build something lasting. Habits that would at last bring some blessed order to my household. Would it be possible to get to a place where I actually enjoyed housework? Where cooking and cleaning were not the torture they've always been?

I read the chapter in my housekeeping manual on laundry and the instructions were soooooo detailed. There were different procedures for every possible kind of cloth --- and we have so many more kinds of manmade cloth today! I usually just cram my whites/lights in one load and my darks in the other load. I'd try sorting mine by type to see how long it would take me to save up a load, but I'd run out of clothes first! My laundry experience today is much quicker and easier than it was in yesteryear, but I doubt my clothes last as long (or smell as fresh coming out of a hot dryer as they would on the line).

I was worried at first that my clothes would be wrinkled again by the time I wore them --- I've always ironed my clothes just before putting them on and leaving the house! --- but wrinkles haven't been a problem with most pieces.

I don't own anywhere near the amount of tools the 1945 housekeeper would have had to make the job a little easier. No dust mop, no upholstery brushes, no special brush thingies for cleaning blinds (Where is that Fuller Brush Man when you need him?). My equipment was much less specialized. Though the special tools would have been nice, it must have been quite a chore just to find space for all that additional cleaning equipment, especially in cramped post-war housing.

Thank goodness for fitted bed sheets!!!!! They didn't have 'em yet when this housekeeping manual was written in 1945. Just for experiment's sake, I decided to follow the manual's step-by-step instructions for making a bed. They only had flat sheets to work with, so the bottom sheet had to be fitted to the bed with hospital ("mitered") corners on all four corners. It'd be a lot of work to keep those corners in place every day!

The experiment failed this time, too, though I managed to keep it up and running - a piece at a time - for almost three months. I had a midsummer houseguest and the break in my routine just threw everything out of place...

So I'm starting from scratch. Due in part to a little inspiration from Marzipan, who's conducting her own experiment at "My Decade Year." (Thank you!)

http://mydecadeyear.blogspot.com/

There are a couple things that keep nudging me in this direction. As a historian, I'm always thinking about the present in relation to the past. I'm interested in every era, but I think 1930s and '40s America have a lot to offer us here in 2008 - in a country facing recession (and quite possibly depression) and in a country at war. I wouldn't go back for anything other than a visit, mind you! There's plenty about the past that's ugly and repressive, but I do think it has a lot to offer us.

The only thing that really makes this possible for me, I think, is that I don't have a husband or children with lives and needs of their own to work around. As a single woman, I have the luxury of doing whatever I like with my lifestyle. And though you'd think from my vetching that I had a 30-room house to keep up with, it's actually only an apartment! I would love to have been born with the genetic make-up to love housekeeping, but it's always been a drag for me - and unfortunately that means I'm constantly losing things (in my own house) and I probably spend way more than I need to on food every week. The chaos at home breeds chaos everywhere else, and it's exhausting.

So I'm headed back... Destination 1940. I'm armed only with two housekeeping manuals, a stack of vintage magazines, and a fabulous pop-up toaster (thanks, Sara). Wish me luck!