Modern ways for modern days
Oh, how life has changed over the last 70 years
Well, there’s my work for the day done!
A toasted English muffin with peanut butter and jam. I moved laundry from the washer to the dryer; there’s no ironing these days, just fold and put away later. I opened a ‘bagged salad’ for supper with bottled garlic and parmesan and some extra ‘olive oil” (formerly only available from dispensaries or chemists since it was only used for earaches except by the Italians). Checked my emails and paid the bills, texted my daughters, phoned Mom long distance, and called my friend to make plans for later. Now, sit and write this story and read my book. May even fit in time to walk Buddy.
No big deal – it’s a normal day living in the 21st century. But, have you stopped to consider how different life has become in the last 50-75 years?
I’ve been watching this TV series, “Back in Time for Dinner.” Besides the 2018 Canadian version, we’ve downloaded a 2015 British and a 2017 Australian version. Based on a six-week experiment, food historians and others recreate meals, fashions and morals of the time as it was lived from 1940s to 2000.
Each family’s home is renovated reflecting the decade, authentic carpet, wallpaper, kitchen and appliances or lack thereof. Family life, diet and world events are incorporated.
‘A woman’s work is never done’ was never truer than in the 1940-50s. Statistics show women put in 77 hours of housework a week and leisure was unheard of. It went down to 60 hours in the 1960s and it’s more like 18 hours a week nowadays. It broke my heart listening to the Australian woman describe the tiredness, isolation and frustration doing everything solo as patriarchal husbands never entered the kitchen.
Who else takes their refrigerator/freezer for granted? Women shopped every day for fresh food until refrigerators came along. Mostly they shopped at local markets. It wasn’t until supermarkets came along that people had a choice.
‘Leftovers’ didn’t exist previously. My mother recalls they had a refrigerator by about 1946 and she definitely had a new one when she married in 1953. However, the British show claimed still only one in three families had refrigerators in 1964, costing about 11 times the average weekly wage.
What about washing clothes? No doubt some of you remember the old wash tub and ‘scrub board,’ heating and carrying hot water and hanging out the Monday wash. I recall getting my Nanny’s old ‘wringer washer’ and how much easier it made my life no more laundromats for me.
From there we got washer/ spinners and later the automatic washer and dryers of today. Thinking back, I remember hanging long-johns on the outdoors line and bringing those frozen headless corpses back into the house to thaw. You can hardly call laundry work nowadays.
The food was quite different back then and much less ethnic than today. One of the children on the show couldn’t believe there were ‘no snacks.” Potato chips weren’t even invented in the 1950s. A common meat group of the ‘thrifty fifties’ was “offal” and it included kidney, heart, tripe and liver. Common fare for us farm folk. People may go to Colette’s or Mike’s Lunch for liver and onions but it’s hardly everyday food today.
A recent Angus Reid survey shows poverty in Canada has 25 per cent of people borrowing money for groceries. I’d suggest returning to old-fashioned types of meat but these days, buying pork tenderloin is often cheaper than beef liver.
Along with refrigerators came the problem of ‘leftovers’ and how to store them now that they could be safely stored. Who enters the picture? Tupperware. What began as an important social event became a rite of passage into marriage back in the 60 and 70s. They found an elderly Tupperware representative who actually came and ‘put on a party’ for the families on the show. Plastics were a new concept of the times too.
Refrigerators have been said to have brought on women’s liberation. One-third of income used to be spent on groceries, compared to 12 per cent today. And kitchens have been made more ergonomic after scientists discovered women were walking up to 21 km a day just from working in the kitchen.
How we eat truly affects every aspect of our life. We haven’t even gotten to processed, packaged foods or microwaves yet. But when these and “laboursaving” appliances and TVs came along, life greatly changed for women and families. Leisure time, that previously unknown concept allowed women to watch ‘cooking and how to be good housewife’ shows. Many more meals were eaten in front of the TV. So far, I haven’t heard of anyone making ‘blanc mange’ or ‘floating island’ like I remember Mom making for us as kids.
Well, must go set my slow cooker for supper so I can bingewatch my show before I drive out to the beach with my friends and a good book.
I remember the old advertisements that said, “you’ve come a long way, baby.” Have we ever.