Historical Housewife

For some reason today I felt like it was necessary for me to live out the daily life of a 50's housewife - except for in 2011. I ran some loads of laundry, cleaned my kitchen and bathroom, did some minor vacuuming, sewed a burp cloth, paid the bills, taught a voice lesson, started a blueberry pie, made curry chicken salad, cooked dinner, and groomed the cat. My butt hurts. Really really really hurts. I am currently sitting on a heating pad.

I was thinking about how these household chores, although the same, are so different from how my mother and grandmothers did them. Laundry probably took me half the time it did my mom. Where my grandma would have hand washed dishes with rubber gloves so she could get the water hot enough to cut through the grease, I just put my dishes in my energy efficient dishwasher. My mom would have pulled out a 20 pound mostly metal vacuum to vacuum her house. My carpets weren't too bad so I just went over them with the swiffer carpet flick. It probably weighs less than 5 pounds. I paid my bills online. My foremothers would have had to mail checks or money orders days in advance. Dinner was a frozen bag of pasta and shrimp that I just had to heat up to eat on the stove, a meal that not only could my grandmothers not afford (even though it was around $10 for two bags) but would have had to make from scratch which would have taken hours.

There seems to be a new trend to live more like our grandmothers did it seems. I've noticed more people cooking from scratch, cleaning with more basic cleaners, and pushing to be more simple. What I find really interesting is that my choices for mothering are probably closer to my grandmothers than to my peers. I'm having an unmedicated childbirth with a midwife, something that was fairly common in the 50's. I'll be breastfeeding and wearing my baby in a sling or wrap. I remember my grandma carrying me around in a baby sling. Most women in the 80's breastfed, all women did in the 50's. My mom and grandmothers used cloth diapers. They made their own baby food and had wooden toys for their kids. I just find it interesting that even though I'm "so different" from many women having their babies today, I'm in fact much more traditional than I initially thought. It's kind of a cool to feel like I have so much in common with the women who came before me.

Now I'm going to attempt to make homemade pasta and finish baking my pie with blueberries I picked myself last summer. Yeah!