Kay Smallshaw
Author of How to Run Your Home without Help
Works by Kay Smallshaw
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“1-2 ½ hours for the daily tidying; 3-4 hours for shopping, cooking and washing-up, and 2-3 hours for house-cleaning, washing and other big jobs. That’s good enough as a starting point.”
Starting point?!
Image: The daily round
“You should be free of the kitchen between 8 and 8.30pm. And is the rest of the day yours? Well, don’t forget the ironing, and mending or knitting. But you can sit down for these.”
Fascinating, funny, horrific.
Time and place
This was published in the UK in show more 1949:
“In some ways it has never been harder; in others it’s much simplified from the days of plenty.”
It was for a very specific readership: middle-class women, raised with live-in staff or daily help, who have silverware, furs, and maybe a little chandelier to care for, and will be familiar with the works of Dickens. The author was a former editor of Good Housekeeping, which has always tried to add glamour to domesticity, and many of the line drawings show women dressed more for allure than chores.
Image: Dolled up for the washing
These women now had to run a home to high standards, unaided, during austerity and rationing, and they hadn’t been taught:
“Those who must be both mistress and maid.”
The tone is relentlessly cheerful about the daunting, exhaustive, and exhausting regime of solo housewifery.
“Bedmaking can be quite a pleasant interlude from the dusting and sweeping.”
It’s comical from a distance of 70 years, but shocking to contemplate for real.
“Who wouldn’t rather be bodily tired out than mentally exhausted?”
On the cusp
What I found so interesting was the competing demands of a society in transition, on multiple fronts:
• Nostalgia for domesticity in days of plentiful help and supplies versus excitement at technological improvements to the tools of housewifery.
• Aspiration (“It’s rather pleasant to get a reputation for doing one or two dishes extra well.”) versus trying to be realistic about when and where you can cut corners.
• Making necessary drudgery empowering: careful planning to ensure efficiency, but with adaptations for different circumstances and tastes.
• Men are necessary (breadwinners, advisors, and for occasional help with washing up) but also pretty useless: “A man about the house usually makes more work than he performs”.
• Passively accepted misogyny and strict gender roles versus equality: a wife must defer to and pamper her man, but also have her own “time for talk, for outside interests, and for plain fun”, and when giving chores to children (from the age of five!), "Don't differentiate between boys and girls".
Image: One thing the husband can help with.
Content and format
There is a lot of information in under 200 pages: plans and routines; tools and equipment; floorplans (kitchen and whole home); cleaning; laundry; budgeting (time, money, and ration points); meal-planning, shopping, and cooking; entertaining; mending; adapting when pregnant, with a small child, or if working part-time outside the home; “beauty while you work”, and a chapter about getting one’s husband to pitch in.
“Weigh up the value of leisure, and the health and happiness a little more of it may give you.”
Image: How to do a calico patch
It’s organised for busy readers to find relevant information quickly. The table of contents has a two-sentence summary of each short chapter. There are clear subsections, plenty of illustrations, and an exhaustive appendix of equipment (eight pages about different types of water heaters alone!), another of useful information (replacing a fuse, stain removal), plus index.
Image: Electric kitchen, designed for the small contemporary house
This edition, republished by Persephone Books, has a preface from 2005, giving background context.
See also
• An Edwardian approach for men to make time for self-improvement (because the women are doing all the domestic work) in Arnold Bennett's, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, which I've reviewed HERE. show less
Starting point?!
Image: The daily round
“You should be free of the kitchen between 8 and 8.30pm. And is the rest of the day yours? Well, don’t forget the ironing, and mending or knitting. But you can sit down for these.”
Fascinating, funny, horrific.
Time and place
This was published in the UK in show more 1949:
“In some ways it has never been harder; in others it’s much simplified from the days of plenty.”
It was for a very specific readership: middle-class women, raised with live-in staff or daily help, who have silverware, furs, and maybe a little chandelier to care for, and will be familiar with the works of Dickens. The author was a former editor of Good Housekeeping, which has always tried to add glamour to domesticity, and many of the line drawings show women dressed more for allure than chores.
Image: Dolled up for the washing
These women now had to run a home to high standards, unaided, during austerity and rationing, and they hadn’t been taught:
“Those who must be both mistress and maid.”
The tone is relentlessly cheerful about the daunting, exhaustive, and exhausting regime of solo housewifery.
“Bedmaking can be quite a pleasant interlude from the dusting and sweeping.”
It’s comical from a distance of 70 years, but shocking to contemplate for real.
“Who wouldn’t rather be bodily tired out than mentally exhausted?”
On the cusp
What I found so interesting was the competing demands of a society in transition, on multiple fronts:
• Nostalgia for domesticity in days of plentiful help and supplies versus excitement at technological improvements to the tools of housewifery.
• Aspiration (“It’s rather pleasant to get a reputation for doing one or two dishes extra well.”) versus trying to be realistic about when and where you can cut corners.
• Making necessary drudgery empowering: careful planning to ensure efficiency, but with adaptations for different circumstances and tastes.
• Men are necessary (breadwinners, advisors, and for occasional help with washing up) but also pretty useless: “A man about the house usually makes more work than he performs”.
• Passively accepted misogyny and strict gender roles versus equality: a wife must defer to and pamper her man, but also have her own “time for talk, for outside interests, and for plain fun”, and when giving chores to children (from the age of five!), "Don't differentiate between boys and girls".
Image: One thing the husband can help with.
Content and format
There is a lot of information in under 200 pages: plans and routines; tools and equipment; floorplans (kitchen and whole home); cleaning; laundry; budgeting (time, money, and ration points); meal-planning, shopping, and cooking; entertaining; mending; adapting when pregnant, with a small child, or if working part-time outside the home; “beauty while you work”, and a chapter about getting one’s husband to pitch in.
“Weigh up the value of leisure, and the health and happiness a little more of it may give you.”
Image: How to do a calico patch
It’s organised for busy readers to find relevant information quickly. The table of contents has a two-sentence summary of each short chapter. There are clear subsections, plenty of illustrations, and an exhaustive appendix of equipment (eight pages about different types of water heaters alone!), another of useful information (replacing a fuse, stain removal), plus index.
Image: Electric kitchen, designed for the small contemporary house
This edition, republished by Persephone Books, has a preface from 2005, giving background context.
See also
• An Edwardian approach for men to make time for self-improvement (because the women are doing all the domestic work) in Arnold Bennett's, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, which I've reviewed HERE. show less
I just finished How to Run Your Home Without Help - one of Persephone's 'oddities' that I picked up second hand for a few dollars on line.
It was, I thought, both very entertaining and very sad. I was raised by a mother who might've owned an original copy of this book, who washed every Monday, ironed every Tuesday, polished the front step, cleaned the grates, darned and mended in front of the television at night, and who even kept up with her paintwork, routinely wiping off fingerprints and show more dusting skirting boards. Unfortunately I inherited her work ethic. As a younger woman I also struggled with the wringer washing machines, ironed everything I wore, polished my shoes, and in my first Swinging London flat, carried coal and cleaned a fire grate every day.
I also worked and somewhere in the late 60s decided, along with Erica Jong, that 'because my mother's minutes were sucked into the roar of the vacuum cleaner' I would be content to 'live in a dusty house'. I gave up housework. 'Clean house, boring woman' I said until I bought my own home and overnight reverted to being houseproud.
So while I wouldn't encourage anyone to spend 12 quid on this book, if you see it second hand, don't hesitate. This is the life women lived until comparatively recently. This is the life we sacrificed careers, talents, and political equality for. Worse, this is the life that swallowed my own mother alive. show less
It was, I thought, both very entertaining and very sad. I was raised by a mother who might've owned an original copy of this book, who washed every Monday, ironed every Tuesday, polished the front step, cleaned the grates, darned and mended in front of the television at night, and who even kept up with her paintwork, routinely wiping off fingerprints and show more dusting skirting boards. Unfortunately I inherited her work ethic. As a younger woman I also struggled with the wringer washing machines, ironed everything I wore, polished my shoes, and in my first Swinging London flat, carried coal and cleaned a fire grate every day.
I also worked and somewhere in the late 60s decided, along with Erica Jong, that 'because my mother's minutes were sucked into the roar of the vacuum cleaner' I would be content to 'live in a dusty house'. I gave up housework. 'Clean house, boring woman' I said until I bought my own home and overnight reverted to being houseproud.
So while I wouldn't encourage anyone to spend 12 quid on this book, if you see it second hand, don't hesitate. This is the life women lived until comparatively recently. This is the life we sacrificed careers, talents, and political equality for. Worse, this is the life that swallowed my own mother alive. show less
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