At the Curtiss Museum is an 1860s “Star Washer,” manufactured in Hammondsport. I’ve studied the thing, and as near as I can figure this is how you work it.
1)Haul water and fill up the tub.
2)Add soap.
3)Put in the dirty clothes.
4a)Rock one handle back and forth vertically, while simultaneously
4b)Working the other handle in and out horizontally… thus agitating the clothes and squeezing them between two big paddles on the ends of the handles. Do that until you figure the clothes are clean enough, or until you figure that you yourself are tired enough.
5)Pull the plug at the bottom of the tub, and drain the soapy dirty water.
6)Haul more water.
7)Mangle the clothes again to rinse them.
8)Drain the water.
9)Mangle the clothes again, to wring out what water you can.
10)Haul the clothes out.
11)Hang the clothes out to dry.
12)Start all over again for the second load.
And THIS is the way we wash our clothes, wash our clothes, wash our clothes, every Monday morning.
So imagine yourself as the housewife of those days, hauling all those buckets of water, and then wrestling all of that wet laundry. It’s a lot of lifting and lugging – hard labor and heavy carrying. THEN imagine doing it in the icy weather, getting some of it splashed on you and on your clothes. Imagine sinking your hands and arms into the almost-freezing water, and then getting soaked with it as you try to get things hung out to dry.

Then think of yourself trying to cook. Maybe you’ve got someone else to chop the wood, and bring it in to fill the woodbox. But you’re probably going to be laying and lighting the fire yourself. Then you’ll be tending both the fire and the food. With no reliable timers, and no way of checking temperature. Cookbooks will tell you to bake or roast things in a hot oven – or a warm oven – if that’s any help.
Imagine that you’re doing this in 90-degree weather – and you HAVE to use a fire, because that’s the ONLY way to cook food. Your kitchen temperature is going to be a lot more than 90.
You COULD throw doors and windows open. But since no one has yet invented screens, you’re inviting every fly for miles around to come feast on your meal.
So as a wife and mother, you’ve got a good chance of being felled by heat exhaustion, or worked up to a heart attack, just by cooking. And that’s assuming that you DON’T actually get burned in the process.

So just the routines of housekeeping threaten your life and health by heavy lifting (wood, water, soaking wet clothes); by cold, and by being soaking wet in the cold; and by burning and overheating. You also run the risk of blade injuries if you chop your own wood.
The sign of the middle class in the late 19th century was employing a full-time maid… not someone prancing around with a feather duster, but someone to cut wood and haul water.

As if all that weren’t enough, the very clothes that women wore sucked the life out of them. For men and women alike, clothing was heavy in terms of both weight and heat – it also hindered you if you fell or had to run, and especially if you fell into water.
Corsets, at least in the extreme positions, injured the spine and the internal organs.
Long skirts and furbelows could get caught in anything, leading to injury or death. And those floor-length skirts dragged along through everything, picking up dirt, ticks, and the effluvia of a thousand horses (plus a few oxen and mules).

All of which contributed to that horrifying truth about those “good old days”: that most women – MOST – over fifty per cent – died before their children were grown. And this would be true right up to and including the girls born in 1919.
And we haven’t even talked about childbirth. Which we will, in some unscheduled future blog, once I’ve done some very interesting, but horribly depressing, research.