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!