I have posted about The Homemaker and how the burden of being the perfect housewife brought Eva to the edge of a nervous breakdown. One hopes that she did not get hold of a book republished by Persephone about 18 months ago called How to Run your Home without Help by Kay Smallshaw or it would probably have finished her off. I have to admit that my first reaction when trawling through the pages of this book and seeing the lists of just what was expected of a housewife, was to hoot with disbelieving derision, particularly when coming across passages such as the following:
On mending: “That mending! When you are longing to relax with a book it seems like the last straw, but what man doesn’t expect his wife to take it in her stride? Buttons on shirts, darns to socks, patches to curtains, bed-linen, table-linen, kitchen cloths. They all take their share of time. And of course, there’s always the personal sewing, making over and freshening up”
On polishing tiles “ .. for glazed ones, colourless wax polish is excellent. For red, unglazed ones, a special tile polish is sold”. We must not forget to “Rub up the floor surround last of all”.
And “as you give a final proud glance you can feel that the room shouldn’t need more than the daily flick for the next week’
Now I don’t want anyone getting the idea that I am a slattern, but this kind of housework is totally beyond my ken. A monthly, or even bi-monthly clean, suffices as far as I am concerned. If the feeling comes upon me that my kitchen floor really should be washed and that the ironing, which is assuming the aspect of the leaning tower of Pisa really needs be dealt with, then I tend to lie down and wait for this feeling to pass
Kay Smallshaw’s How to Run the Home without Help was published because, firstly, the pre-war days of maids, servants and housekeepers had vanished never to return, and middle class housewives found they had had no idea of how to cope. A perfect illustration of one such bewildered housewife is Laura in One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes, surely one of the most elegiac descriptions of post-war country life ever written.
Secondly, it was written for those women who were now consigned back to the joys of the kitchen sink and the ironing board because the jobs they had held during the war were now needed for the men who were coming home. Kay Smallshaw’s book would have been an invaluable help for these wives who were just as helpless as Laura when it came to running a house.
The modern day woman might automatically assume that this return to domesticity was resented by all women. Not so. Though we might find it difficult to believe, there were ‘some young wives who had spent their girlhood as a conscript or a directed worker and asked nothing better than the kind of routine which her mother had found so frustrating and imprisoning’. The housewife was ‘quite willing to stay at home…. It was one of the things she had dreamed of when she had rushed to clock in or clip tickets on the first bus’. (A Woman’s Place - Ruth Adams- Persephone).
It is to be hoped that this enthusiasm was maintained after polishing unglazed tiles with special tile polish and rubbing up the floor surround….
