New Brooms Sweep Clean

Prior to the invention of labor-saving devices that make it possible to clean floors, bathrooms, etc. on an as-needed basis, the average American housewife spent most of every Friday cleaning her home. There was a certain logic to this. With her house clean by Friday afternoon she was ready to welcome weekend guests or invite the pastor and his wife to Sunday dinner.

Brooms were primitive, sometimes hand-made out of broomcorn (a variety of sorghum), straw, or the thinnest branches of a birch tree.

                                        

Cleaning a privy was an especially odious task. In Part V of Never Done I wrote:

Clara helped Sophie clean the two privies. This entailed sweeping them out, scrubbing around the two holes in each latrine, and replenishing the paper supply with whatever they could find: catalogs, nickel weeklies, calendars, almanacs, newspapers, even dog-eared dime novels. Finished up top, Clara tossed a cupful of lye powder down the holes.

“Smell better now, Missus,” Sophie would say, even when it didn’t.

Since most houses were heated by wood and lit by coal oil or kerosene lamps, layers of sooty grime built up over time, especially during winter months. Spring cleaning, now a ritual of the past, was imperative.

The plip, plip, plip of melting icicles signaled the beginning of what amounted to spring in Ophir Loop. 

Inside the hotel, months of exposure to wood heat and coal oil lamps had left a greasy film on everything. Windows were thrown open and rugs and coverlets taken outside for a good beating. Curtains were washed, floors scrubbed, quilts boiled and stretched across tree stumps to dry. Every pillow and mattress was emptied, the ticking bleached, boiled, dried, and filled with clean hay or sheep shearing. The cans, cartons, baskets, and barrels that filled the cellar were shifted from one corner to another while the shelves were wiped down with vinegar water.

Vinegar water was also used to scrub floors, and scrubbing a floor wasn't a simple task when water wan't piped into the house. Most housewives had to haul water from a well or nearby stream in order to fill their wash pails. Mops were fashioned from heavy cord or strips of  fabric torn from discarded sheets or clothing. One of the first labor-saving devices welcomed by the American housewife was the mop bucket with an attached wringer. This protected the woman's hands from the cramping and achy aftereffects of having to wring a mop out, over and over, by hand.

                                                 

Whenever I'm having a bad day, I think about how hard my great-grandmother and other women of her generation had to work to keep their houses clean, and I stop crabbing. Attention: ladies and stay-at-home dads. We are SO spoiled.