Home is a very good place for a wife. It is cheaper for her to be there than wandering around the shops and she will come to far less harm in the kitchen, parlour, boudoir, drawingroom or salon than in a bookmaker's office or a cocktail bar . . . While she is there she cannot very well be killed in a lift or crushed in a revolving door . . . The only serious danger which threatens her there is that she may set herself on fire."
- Irish Times, July 12th, 1938. Editorial on Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's statistics that twice as many women as men are burned in the home while men are involved in twice as many accidents.
Things have come a long way both for women and for the home since this editorial was written sixtyone years ago. While new labour-saving devices were hailed as godsends to the housewife of the 1920s and 1930s, most of us would be mopping our pampered brows at the contemplation of the sheer toil involved. By the 1920s, advice on home decoration and news of the latest fashions were regular features in newspapers and magazines. In November, 1925, Mary Gwynne Howell reported on the increase of labour-saving gadgets such as the metal U-shaped hook, which she declared "a real boon to the home laundress".
"After washing or rinsing, the article is just hooked round one prong, and both the worker's hands are thus free to wring it as dry as possible. The little wringing device acts, in fact, as a third hand."
While a third hand would have been a bonus indeed to the overstretched housewife of the mid-1920s, the thought of all that wringing and hooking is too much to bear for the modern mind. The introduction of mop shampoo to the marketplace in 1925 was also hailed as a boon by Howell, who described the drudgery of mop cleaning as "a real bugbear" to the housewife. Favourable reviews were also given to the latest liquid floor coverings and washable, waterproof and fadeless wallpaper.
And as if women did not have enough on their plate, they didn't get much help from their menfolk, according to the July 12th, 1938 editorial about accident statistics:
"Men try to do jobs for which they are not qualified, or without the proper tools and they slip. They fall off ladders, balconies, porches, and roofs. Another of their weaknesses is to search for gas leaks, or to try and repair them while under the influence of liquor . . . Wives who disturb their men, making them stand on chairs and ladders and tables to hang pictures or wallpaper or to fix gaspipes and window sashes, must be regarded in future with grave suspicion."
When one author, known simply as MPB, demanded that women get paid for the struggle and strife of "unlimited hours of work and no pay" in her 1925 book The Great Unpaid", Irish Times writer Evelyn Grogan hit back:
"[She] asserts that the `growing resentment of intelligent women against such impossible conditions in the home is alarming' . . . Have we both forgotten love? . . . Love is so strong in a woman that she keeps at it and no `little salary' would alter it . . ."
No pay, unsupportive husbands, toil and hardship . . . what else could go wrong? Being told, perhaps, that you should have bought tasteful traditional furniture instead of the gaudy modern stuff. While sleek modern furniture, often made with steel, aluminium or laminated wood, was easier to keep clean and very fashionable - it was not to everyone's taste.
The decorative charm of this modern furniture may tempt one to forsake its ancestors, wrote Elizabeth Kent on September 4th, 1922, but "it can never wholly take the place of lovely old things".
Too frequently, said Kent, "the modern woman's fancy is caught and held by some trivial bit of mediocre modern furniture or ornament . . . take for instance the most hideous of objects, the modern dressing-table, with its tawdry little handles and meaningless carving. Why should one not substitute the delightful little table of the eighteenth century, set on slim and shapely legs?"
The more discriminating observers cannot but see, says Kent, that "the very best of these modern pieces is inspired by, if not actually adapted from, other times which were more prolific in charming and original designs than our own." Ouch! Another sceptic, K W, wrote on June 12th, 1922:
"The stripe with its myriad possibilities is a favourite theme with Paris now; but we, in our islands, have old fashioned leanings towards the soft flowery colourings which shed an atmosphere of fragrant lavender and the harmonious restful designs beloved of the great period decorators."
However, the new furniture had its fans too. A 1932 editorial entitled "The House Beautiful" reported on Sir Robert Witt's advice to those attending the opening of the Civil Service Exhibition of Arts in the Victoria and Albert Museum to "purge their homes of accumulations of the years and make more room for modern furniture." He preferred "an elegant paucity" over "the fusty abundance which was admired by our Victorian ancestors" - an eye opener for those of us who thought that minimalism and decluttering was a recent phenomenon.
Mindful that some people had to settle for the cheaper mass-produced furniture, K W told readers in 1922 not to despair. "The use of decorative fabrics as a rule so enlivens a room of mediocre furniture that it becomes refreshing and stimulating to the minds of the persons abiding therein." And to help lift the gloomy spectre cast by civil war she advised, "What we require in our homes these days is cheerfulness and plenty of it and so it is natural enough that we turn to the gay chintzes and cretonnes which have a friendly fashion rescuing us from a dull and drab existence."
But it wasn't just the poor housewife that had it rough. Sharing a small flat could be a tricky business for singles wrote "Aileen" in a letter to the paper on March 11, 1932. She was alarmed to meet her friend Phyllis on Grafton Street with "dark smudges" under her eyes where once she was brimming with the adventure of being in the big city.
"I wondered if it was too many late nights or overwork; but the truth came out over coffee. The flat partnership [with Doreen] wasn't a success as the small size of the flat meant they had to share a bedroom with little privacy."
The solution? The realisation that "clear-cut business arrangements are a better basis for friendship and comfort than an easy-going muddle . . . If there are only two rooms, each should have a bed-sittingroom, to which the other comes only by invitation or previous arrangement. Suppose one room is much the larger, it may be agreed that meals should be served there, and that it should be used when a joint party is given . . ."
Another nugget of advice for those sharing a flat that came equipped with a servant: "If a servant is engaged for daily work, or for certain days in the week, one person, not two, must give the orders - of course, after consultation - otherwise haphazard orders will conflict and friction will be the result."
Servants, German servants to be more specific, were very much on the mind of Fraulein Elsa Olga Hollis when she wrote a bilingual book on housework called Mistress and Maedchen in 1937. According to Fraulein Hollis; "The thorough doing out of any room is an ambitious programme; yet is no more unsusceptible of achievement than the programmes which tourists lay before railway porters." The Irish Times reviewer of Mistress and Maedchen appeared hard pressed to keep pace with the author's zeal for housework:
"Quickly we find ourselves sweeping the hearth rug and carpet with vacuum cleaner (Straubsauger), carpet sweeper or brush; vacuum cleaning (or brushing) couch, chairs, cushions, curtains and then covering the whole shoot with dust sheets (Straubdecken). The work goes on.
We are polishing linoleum and surrounds and dusting the skirting board thoroughly . . . but now we come to her first mistake . . . Fraulein (Frau) Hollis got carried right away. She was dazzled by very clean polishers (sehr saubere Poliertucher) and glistening grates . . ."
If all that thought of strenuous manual housework has you worn to a frazzle then take heart - while you might never achieve the glistening grates of Fraulein Hollis, at least you will have more time to spend wandering around the shops, in the cocktail bar or the betting office, dodging lifts and revolving doors.
