Re: Microfiber sheets

Candide wrote:

Remember watching "1900 House" and that poor wife and mother with her
family moved into a restored period Victorian/Edwardian house complete
with a copper off the kitchen. It was one of those real life back in
time bits, where a modern family tries to live the way it was back then.

The only training the family, especially the mother had of housekeeping
was day or two at a country estate run as it was back in 1900 or so,
with the housekeeper and maids.

Well NOTHING could have prepared that woman for doing laundry via a
copper, wash tubs, mangle, iron (heavy cast iron jobs, heated on the
range). She did know that even as recent as her grandmother's day
schools were almost totally absent of girls on Mondays, because they
were kept home to help with the wash. One of the fist things the woman
did when returning to modern times, was make a bee line for her modern
washer and dryer. According to the voice over during the program, a
modern washing machine can do in about an hour what took a housewives
one, two or even three days.


As for us having more clothes today than back then, I don't know about
that. Certainly we have more, many more outer garments than say even the
average middle class person. This is when owing more than five or six
gowns was considered "rich"; but there were all those undergarments,
especially for women, which added up to lots of laundry.

IIRC, since many outer garments like dresses, pants and such were either
non-launder in water, and or so complicated that one often didn't bother
for a year or so, that many clean undergarments were required, as they
were changed more often to help keep down the BO level.

Remember reading about a mother in the South, around 1920's or so that
literally sewed her sons into their long undergarments at the beginning
of winter, and didn't release them until Spring; much to the relief of
the children's schoolmates and probably everyone else in the
area/downwind of them. *LOL*

Candide



Getting a bath was no simple matter, either. The water had to be pumped, then put on the stove to heat, then carried to the tub and poured in. Everyone bathed in the same tub, in the same water, taking turns. IIRC, the father was first. By the time the little ones went in -- all at once -- the water was tepid at best and not too clean. This was ordinarily done on Saturday so that everyone would be clean for Sunday. There were no daily baths. No showers at all. Underwear was changed when the person bathed.

My mother grew up in such a house. No plumbing, no electricity, a wood and coal stove in the kitchen that did for everything, except when laundry was done in the yard and the water heated over a coal fire. There was scrap coal to be picked up. The lights were kerosene lamps. The men who worked in the coal mines did wash at the end of their shift, but didn't take a full bath. The work clothes went back on in the morning before going off to work again.

Most people had two outfits. Everyday, and Sunday. Closets were tiny because there wasn't much to go in them. One set for summer, one for winter. If you had one or two more, you didn't wear it and put it in the wash - I didn't even do that when I was in high school and we had an electric washer. My mother wouldn't have stood for that.
--
Joanne
stitches @ singerlady.reno.nv.us.earth.milky-way.com
http://members.tripod.com/~bernardschopen/
.

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