Housekeeping in the 1890s

So I was cleaning my house and feeling a little sorry for myself this weekend. I know, I have a great house, but still, cleaning bathrooms is cleaning bathrooms and not alot of fun. So anyway, I started thinking that I should probably be counting my blessings because I’m sure housecleaning in the 1890s when my character Irena did it wasn’t as easy as cleaning now.

Well, that really depended on your class. The Good Housekeeping magazines of the time have articles featuring how a family ever managed to live a day without a maid along with tips on how to manage the housekeeping staff. For those people house work wasn’t so bad.

For everyone else it wasn’t so fun. By the 1890s some people  in the cities had flushing toilets, and cleaning them was about the same as now. Really, porcelain is porcelain. We might have fancier scrubbers, but let’s face it, it isn’t a job any of us like. However, flushing toilets were a big improvement on the ‘privies’ where an entire household, or an entire building, would relieve themselves in a cesspit, either a dug hole or a wooden barrel. A nightman’s job was to come and clean out the cesspit and carry the ‘nightsoil’ away to be used as fertilizer. OK, cleaning my toilets sounds like a fun job now.

So does doing my laundry. If you were wealthy you had a laundress. If you had means, but weren’t so rich you might have a washing machine. Before 1900 there were washing machines that could be hand operated to scrub the laundry, but they still had to be filled with heated water, emptied, filled with rinse water. Then the laundry had to be wrung out and hung on the line. If you were too poor for a washing machine that meant a tub and a washboard and a whole day’s work. No wonder people changed their inner clothing more often than their outer clothing. It was just too hard to wash. I liked Seamus even more when he helped Irena with the wash even though it was women’s work. Nothing sexier than a man who helps out.

Irena does alot of dishes too. I grew up without a dishwasher, so I have a bit of a clue how she felt. However, I did have running hot and cold water and didn’t have to haul it in or heat it up on the stove.

As for the rest of the cleaning – the dusting and washing floors ect, that also depended on your class. If you were poor and working all the time you might not be able to keep up, and if on top of that you lived in a tenement it might not be possible to be clean. Though germ theory was getting started, and both Sammelweis and Pasteur were working to prove germ theory and to promote asepsis, it really didn’t catch on in a big way until 1900 after which there was a a huge push for cleanliness. Before 1900 and even into the 1920s and 1930s diseases such as cholera and typhoid that swept through poor neighborhoods were blamed on the immoral character of people living in tenements, not the fact that close quarters and poor sanitation caused illness.

Alright, I feel downright pampered now. I may still complain when I clean again, but I know that I have it good.