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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21865 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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So... cooking, cleaning, shopping, taking care of husband and children, being involved in elder care, maintaining the house - that's all "sitting around doing nothing?

Yes that is relatively nothing compared to the work women had to do in the past. Compare the ease of starting an oven and going to the fridge/pantry and then setting a timer for your food to stir every once in a while vs having to pile up firewood in your wood burning oven (or more likely, you're using a hearth) and it's extremely hot and you also have to monitor it far more because the temperatures were rather variable between meals. You might spend four hours a day just on work related to the stove

Throughout the day, the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of coal or wood - an average of fifty pounds a day. At least twice a day, the ash box had to be emptied, a task which required a woman to gather ashes and cinders in a grate and then dump them into a pan below. Altogether, a housewife spent four hours every day sifting ashes, adjusting dampers, lighting fires, carrying coal or wood, and rubbing the stove with thick black wax to keep it from rusting.

Cleaning is a bit harder too, you'd probably be making your own soap (and like many women would not have great knowledge on it so you'd hurt yourself from the lye), and using stuff like vinegar and rum as cleaning aids. You don't have vacuum cleaners, there's soot and ash everywhere from the aforementioned wood ovens, stoves and hearths, no dishwashers, and like I explained in the previous comment laundry is way harder. People complain about doing the laundry now when it's basically just "put soap and clothes into machine and press button" easy, imagine doing it all by hand and having to seriously worry about colors blending and mixing and coming off because the detergent tech wasn't there yet either for mixing to go well. The skin peeling off your hands after laundry day because of the hours (often over days it was that intensive) of work scrubbing the clothes in abrasive poorly made soap.

It's not literally nothing, but life is way way easier nowadays and much of that labor shifted from domestic chores to other work.

Gosh, I had no idea my house miraculously looked after itself so all that scrubbing I did this morning was completely unneeded and was

this morning

It only took you the morning huh? I guess the evening was to manage and prepare livestock, haul some water, mending your children's clothes, pounding sugar loaves, sifting the flour, and plenty of other chores.

I mean you know workers in the workforce also work fewer hours, right? We're a wealthier society and people don't work as long.

Honey bun, I grew up with no running water and my mother washing clothes for a family of six by hand. Don't tell me I have no idea about the difficulties of past labour, it wasn't in the past so far as I and the neighbours around me were concerned.

There's still a lot of work to be done in households now; we expect washing to be done regularly, not just on one specific day. The house should be cleaned every day, not just once a week or longer intervals where you would take up carpets. All the modern conveniences did take the physical labour out of things, but there is still work to be done. And as Parkinson's Law states, "work expands to fill the time available". Just as mechanisation in the office did not mean "gosh, now I can get all the letters typed in the morning that used to take all day to write by hand, I can go home at twelve o'clock now with my work day over!" but rather "now there is even more work to be done because now instant replies to letters is the new expectation", so with housework.

Fewer hours, but not fewer expectations. Someone pointed out that women now spend more time with their children than 1950s full time housewives, and that's just one of the 'expansion of expectations' - now you have to manage all the extracurriculars your child/children should be doing, for one thing.

We only wash/clean once a week, but we don't invite people over without advanced planning. There was a time when I had a baby in a 500 sq ft apartment, and would only go to the laundromat once a month (and I don't have a huge amount of clothes), but I suppose I was to some degree slumming it at the time.

You're pretty much either really really old, not American, or were the super poor and rural folk if you grew up a substantial amount of time without running water. I'll believe it, but it's definitely rare enough to be questionable. But even with that, you were a kid and not experiencing all the adult parts of life for yourself. You were the one being taken care of, not the caretaker so it's bound to look and seem a lot easier from your life perspective anyway.

Additionally while "without running water" is worse off than people have it nowadays, that's only one of the various improvements that technology has brought to household work. Unless you wanna say your mother also cleared out the ash and soot from a wood stove, killed and defeathered live chickens from the market, and hauled tons of firewood on top.

There's still a lot of work to be done in households now; we expect washing to be done regularly, not just on one specific day. The house should be cleaned every day, not just once a week or longer intervals where you would take up carpets

If you're spending a whole morning every day cleaning up now, then your family is either top percent dirty or you're OCD. That is not common or necessary for most families.

And as Parkinson's Law states, "work expands to fill the time available".

Exactly, many women with newfound time available to them got jobs to fill that time with new work.

Fewer hours, but not fewer expectations. Someone pointed out that women now spend more time with their children than 1950s full time housewives,

Exactly! Women, thanks to technology, are spending less of their time in hard labor tasks and more of their time bonding directly with their children. It is in some way "work" still yes, but this comes about because there's so much more free time when you don't have to beat the rugs or mend the shoes or make the soap.

She's Irish.

Well I got no idea what conditions would have been like for the Irish housewife then. I would guess it's rather similar but I can't say for sure.

And as Parkinson's Law states, "work expands to fill the time available". Just as mechanisation in the office did not mean "gosh, now I can get all the letters typed in the morning that used to take all day to write by hand, I can go home at twelve o'clock now with my work day over!" but rather "now there is even more work to be done because now instant replies to letters is the new expectation", so with housework.

Fewer hours, but not fewer expectations. Someone pointed out that women now spend more time with their children than 1950s full time housewives, and that's just one of the 'expansion of expectations' - now you have to manage all the extracurriculars your child/children should be doing, for one thing.

It's kind of sad, isn't it? One of those things that makes me think mankind's problems are inherently unsolvable.

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