This post is ultimately going to be about how life for women prior to 1900 was nothing but drudgery and toil unless they were fortunate enough to be rich and have servants, but first some background.
I’ve been having exciting adventures with the Viessmann boiler that not only provides hot water to my house, but also heats the house through the in-floor system. Turns out the boiler had a fatal fabrication flaw that had necessitated a recall. The plumbing company that installed it and myself should have been informed in a timely manner so we could have worked with Viessmann on either repairing or replacing said boiler — Since It Was Recalled. But they didn’t and then it began to fail. Constantly locking out, requiring me to reset it over and over. They kept trying to hide the actual problem from us, but they finally had the plumber get the internal serial number. That’s when they sent him back a message that was basically this SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW!!!!. Of course this was after the plumbers had installed a very expensive new pump thinking that was the problem.
Upshot is that I have no hot water until they locate and send us a new boiler. Hopefully next week. They had wanted to just send us a new heat exchanger from Germany which would have arrived in the middle of January That was a big no especially since things are getting stuck for weeks in customs not to mention Trump and DeJoy doing their level best to destroy the post office.
I am unbelievably fortunate in that my house has a casita with a separate on-demand water heater so I will be able to shower because there is no way in hell I would go to a hotel or go into a gym right now with Covid rampaging across the country. I’m also lucky that in addition to the air conditioning and heating units on the roof (my husband the architect like to have backups) there is a fireplace in my bedroom in the main house.
None of this, however, solves the dishwashing problem. The only way to have hot water to scrub dishes is to boil it. This morning I tried it using the electric tea kettle, but it took multiple kettles to get enough water. Tonight I guess I’ll try a really big pot on the range so I have more water, but first you have to have sufficient hot water to wash and then you need more hot water to rinse. It took me an hour to wash up a handful of dishes, and I’m one person. I can’t imaging the time it would take to wash up for a family.
So anytime I hear some sexist jerk sniff about how women really don’t have the brains, talent, skills to be great composers, or musicians, or theoretical physicists, or chess masters, or great painters, or write great novels because there weren’t many famous women throughout history in those fields; I’m going to make them have to do basic household chores without the conveniences of modern technology for a week. Of course women are largely absent from the lists of great — fill in the blank — All their time was taken up with trying to keep clothes, dishes, people, homes, clean. They had to cook meals. Care for children. Because they were considered less then and forced into a domestic role they didn’t have any energy or time left over for opining on philosophy. Also, educational opportunities were largely denied to women.
So yeah, I’m never nostalgic for the past (apart from wishing that we held balls so I could waltz with a handsome partner), and I wish we could finally achieve a world where the wonder of modern conveniences are available to all people. Who knows what those women might achieve and how they might better the world with their talents and abilities and inventions for all of humanity.
I realized I need to add an addendum to this. Women also had the dangers of childbirth which often significantly shortened their lives which again makes it hard to make an impact. On one trip to Britain Walter Jon Williams and I were wandering around a graveyard reading headstones and came across an elaborate cenotaph of an 18th century sea captain. He lived into his seventies, and around him were the 8 wives he had buried. Almost all them died in their twenties.
Melinda, I just love you. Thanks for continuing to be a smart and outspoken woman!
It really hit me today just how much freedom technology has granted us when I realized I was going to have no time to actually work on a book today because of the simple lack of easily available hot water. I had someone on Twitter sort of miss the point and think I was being insulting. I’m being insulting to sexists who always imply that women just aren’t very creative or brilliant because we don’t have a plethora of women making advancements in art and science back in the past. Yeah, because they were all lugging the laundry down to the river to beat the clothes on a rock. I used to tease George all the time about Beauty and Beast. They’d have a scene of Father and Vincent reading Shakespeare of discussing philosophy and then cut to a scene of women doing the laundry down at the underground river. Uh… guys, not cool.
I learned this watching 1900 house on PBS many years ago.
I never got a chance to watch that show, but it looked interesting. Where I got a bit of a feel for that was when I watched the Downtown Abbey movie on a flight. The scene where they are polishing all that silver. I collect antique silver, and when I see the tarnish forming… I usually avert my eyes and put off cleaning it for another day.
My maternal grandmother had a small ranch without indoor plumbing. Chamber pots under the bed and the outhouse. We drew water for cooking and drinking from a well. As a little kid I took a bath in a big galvanized tub on the back porch with grandma bringing in kettles of hot water while you scrubbed up as fast as you could because it was really cold except at high summer. I’m glad I experienced it — useful for writing, but man, let’s hear it for indoor plumbing.
P.S. She also had a wood burning stove. Splitting and bringing in the wood to get the stove ready to cook breakfast was a thing as well.
My mother grew up before electricity reached her rural area, and yeah, she had plenty of stories about how hard things were. Every bit of water had to be pumped out of the well by hand into a bucket. For a bath, which happened once season or so, the buckets went onto the propane stove (they’d upgraded from a wood stove for the kitchen, though the main heating was still the wood stove in the living room) and when they were warm, were dumped into a large washtub. Then everybody in the house took a bath, one after the other, because it was just too much work to fill the washtub twice. They only did this once a season, the rest of the time they took “yankee baths” heating up water in a small washpan and washing off with a washcloth, which doesn’t really get you that clean but it’s what was feasible.
Washing clothes… same deal. Pump water from well into bucket with hand pump, pour it into the washtub. Repeat.
It was a hard life. When electricity reached the hill country, they embraced all the modern comforts of running water and water heaters whole-heartedly. I remember talking to my great-aunt about the shotgun house she’d lived in up on the hill behind my back pasture, and how it was moved across the pasture for my great-parents to live in after electricity came and they built a new larger house on the corner closer to the electrical poles (the poles didn’t go down that little dirt road behind my pasture). She talked about how she had set up washing equipment down at the spring in my back pasture — which is *way* down the hill — and how they had to haul every bucket of water they used in the house from that spring up that hill to their house. And that was regardless of the weather.
It was a hard life indeed. But don’t think it was hard just for the women. Everything the men did was just as hard. They didn’t have electric saws to build that house. Every single board got sawn by hand. Every wooden shake on the roof got shiv’ed off a block by hand. Every rock that was in the foundation got hauled over there by hand, and the mortar mixed by hand. The sawmill had a steam engine to drive the saws via a McGuyver arrangement of shafts and belts, but once the boards got to the construction site, it was all hand work. No forklifts to get it on and off a truck. In fact, no truck — they bundled the boards up and put casters under the bundle, and hauled the bundle with mules, I have the pictures. And that shotgun house that moved across the pasture? They used mules to pull it… but they picked it up bodily with people power to put it on the telephone pole rollers, and rolled it across, with people picking up the poles it rolled off of at the back end and running them to the front end. Fifty years later I came across the rotting telephone poles where they’d been hauled (by hand) to rest alongside the fence, and wondered what they were. Then I got the rest of the story…
I’m not arguing that prior to modern conveniences life was hard, brutal and short, But it was really short for women because they also had the added danger of childbirth, and for women the work never stopped. Not even when the sun went down. Also if families could scrape together the funds to send a child to be educated it was inevitably going to be a son who was given that opportunity. Honestly the point I was trying to make, perhaps in-artfully, was that misogynists using the lack of famous women through history apart from queens or concubines is a shit move because women just didn’t have the opportunities afford to a majority of men.
Why not Wash the dishes in cold water?
It’s not sanitary. I want really hot water to both wash and rinse to kill any germs or bacteria.
I grew up in Mexico. We had maids… until something happened and we didn’t… then it was “all hands of YOU” to the work. I visited extensively in “provincia” (everything outside Mexico City) in the 60s 70 and 80s. Where families had oil-drums for water and might get potable water turned on once a day or three days and might get as much as 70 gallons for the next period before more water arrived.”
And it was noticeable how many girls/women didn’t get very far in school, because they were “needed at home.”
I have a lot of friends who like to camp, but… find it hard to do things the way they are used to. For me, it’s just an extension of what I always did. When we moved to this house in Tacoma in 2017, the dishwasher broke, and we didn’t install a new one until a few months ago. But, yes, we had hot water on the tap.
If we hadn’t, though, I can wash a pile of dishes from a meal of four people (and all the prep dishes) with one 3 gallon pot of hot water.
So, when I write AH or fantasy (or edit it) I’m always on the lookout for those things that get missed or passed over.
I love to camp for three or four days. We used to go to Chaco Canyon every year. It was fun — for a few days. We had a two burner propane stove, Carl always brought a bottle of port. We’d sit with our friends in the big tent we had and play bridge or a role playing game. During the day we hiked until our legs practically fell off. We usually went with our friend who is an archeologist which made it even more fun and educational. But I wouldn’t want to live that way long term.
I’d point out that life for men was nothing but toil and drudgery as well unless you had wealth and servants. Just that their toil and drudgery was outside of the home (and usually in the fields until the early years of the twentieth century).
Childbirth was a dangerous exercise for most of human history. But there was something that caused it to be much less so far earlier than you may think: the addition of beans and peas to the diet, which in Europe happened about a thousand years ago or so. Prior to that, men tended to have longer life expectancy because many women died in childbirth. But the addition of that extra bit of protein to the diet made all the difference. This also led to the three-field system you may have heard about in school because beans and peas help fix nitrogen in the soil. Crop yields increased from 2:1 to 4:1, and this fueled the development of things like cities and universities and the grand cathedrals we marvel at in Europe today, not to mention specialists in things like civil, canon, and common law!
The main benefit for most women was that they become more likely to survive childbirth thanks to better nutrition; their life expectancy surpassed that of men, and it’s been that way ever since.
That is an incredibly oversimplified view of declining maternal mortality rates. No mention at all about the role of proper aseptic techniques among many other developments and practices to prevent unnecessary death. It’s a bit more complicated than increased availability of protein sources.