MY mother ...
... HATES these stylized portrayals of Midcentury homemaking.
She wasn't a housewife until the late '60s, but she was certainly around for the '50s, and she cringes at how we all look at that era through the stylized Hollywood/Madison Avenue lens.
Homemaking back then was actually a lot more work than it is today. Most middle class homes really didn't have an "automatic" washer (despite Hollywood and Madison Avenue portrayals) until well into the late '60s. That meant wash day was often an all-day chore with a ringer washer, depending on the number of loads (and of course, no dryers, either).
And EVERYTHING needed to be ironed. Another full day of work.
We also tend to forget that about 80% of what we see in the supermarket didn't exist back then, either (neither did "supermarkets", really); no convenience foods, very little in the way of processed ready-to-eat foods. You bought your meat at the butcher and your produce and baking ingredients from the grocer. For store-bought breads and other baked goods, you went to the bakery. But that could get expensive, so you usually baked all of your own bread and other goods.
That's a lot of running around ... and COOKING (the old-fashioned way, in pots and pans, mind you -- microwaves weren't a standard fixture in *most* American homes until the early '80s because they still cost roughly as much as a new refrigerator -- about $1300 in today's dollars).
While we were growing up, my mother stuck to the weekly schedule that most housewives kept to religiously for generations:
-- Monday: Laundry
-- Tuesday: Ironing
-- Wednesday: Shopping/Bread Baking
-- Thursday: Misc. Baking/Upstairs Cleaning & Linen Laundry
-- Friday: Downstairs Cleaning
And don't forget, after you've fed the husband and children and sent them off to work and school, cleaned up the breakfast dishes, and answered any correspondence (by hand, with a pen and paper, or if you were a "writerly" woman, a typewriter), it was often going on 10 AM by the time you started tackling the day's chores. But you pretty much had to be finished no later than 3:00 PM, so you could start dinner, which often took at least a couple of hours (depending on your level of expertise and the complexity of your menu) if you expected to have dinner on the table by 6:00 PM.
Oh yes, and if there were small children in the house, add in the universe of child chasing after/cleaning/feeding/etc.
Not. Enough. Hours. In. The. Day!
Great video!
