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Dillards 84: Craving Attention


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1 hour ago, JordynDarby5 said:

Although I will completely buy women falling in love with a washer.

Gotta say I fell in love with my washing machine (as did my husband). When our motel was open, I had a heck of a lot of towels to wash. Getting my LG washing machine was the best thing to me. I can imagine what it was like when mechanical washing machines were invented. Heck even the wash board was a step up from beating the washing with a bloody rock!

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Jill has Israel & Spurgeon clearly playing together ‘for the first time in a while ‘ on her instastory while Jessa goes to great trouble to pretend they were social distancing by taking pictures from a distance. Get your stories straight ladies.

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On 4/24/2020 at 8:05 AM, JordynDarby5 said:

Also, who do they think were running farms and businesses when men were off fighting in the Civil War? Or Revolutionary War? Because her husband was away Abigail Adams took over their financial matters. She was far from the only woman. 

In the eighteenth century people of most classes did not expect wives to do nothing. Women weren't expected to be professionals, and wouldn't have received that sort of education, but in a world where there was very little if any division between your domestic and your professional life/finances, there was no way they couldn't get involved, and this was desirable. Daughters were extra hands and brains to help out in the office or the workshop - after all, sons might be too busy with formal education or apprenticeships, and in their turn the girls were gaining skills that would make them more valuable to suitors of their own. Wives were expected to understand their husbands' work and to oversee it when he was away or perhaps when he died until her sons reached majority. They ALWAYS ran the household financially. Even Emma Hamilton, while she was a kept mistress, wrote out her household accounts. Early modern and onward is my era so I can only speak for that, I'm sure there are earlier examples, but Defoe was writing in the 1690s about how important it was for merchants' wives to know all about their business.

There's almost no historical precedent for women to just sit at home. It might have been an ideal at certain times in history, but it was very few peoples' lived experiences. Mind you, our definition of 'going to work' has changed hugely too: before the industrial revolution there was far less of a division between 'home' and 'work' anyway - as I say, many businesses were family businesses, run in the home or nearby; and rurally you had your land or the land of your landlord to attend to, so labour was always going on and certainly not a nine-to-five thing, more the fabric of live. The concept of travelling to a place of business and clocking in and out at set times is relatively new: a lot of women would have worked ad hoc but not necessarily thought of it that way.

I read an interesting paper recently about the introduction of household appliances after the second world war, in the context of London but it probably applies more widely. This was a point in time when on the one hand the upper classes no longer had teams of servants, and when even homes which had previously employed one or two helpers had learnt to do without during the war. At the other end of the social spectrum, slums were being cleared and working class people who had previously lived in very poor, cramped conditions found themselves in possession of a kitchen and a bathroom, and the space to do their own laundry which before they'd probably have sent out. Basically all this labour became sited in the home and the duty of the wife: before she just hadn't had to do it all, either because she was too upper-class to need to, or too lower-class to have the means. For many women these labour-saving devices came at at time when their domestic load was increasing, not decreasing.

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On the topic of women doing the household finances. I have a book called 'Round about a pound a week' which is an early 20th century study in to how the working class on the average wage of one pound a week spent their money. It is fascinating social history. In all the cases studies the man hands the wages over to the wife every week (minus some pocket money) and the wife spends it. It is quite harrowing reading sometimes, seeing how little the women ate/lived off of. And the thing is, teh compilers of the study deliberately avoided the poorest families, because they wanted a study of general/average etc life.

Here's the link:

http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/round-about-a-pound-a-week.html

and here

http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/content/persephoneforum/persephone-book-no-79-round-about-a-pound-a-week-by-maud-pember-reeves-2/

(just in case you don't know: 20 shillings is one pound and 12 pence or d. is one shilling, so 240 pence in a pound)

Edited by medimus
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@medimus And you also have to know what a florin was (2 shillings) a crown(5 shillings) half crown (2 shillings and six pence) guinea (1pound 1 shilling, used in the upper class shops)

Then there's the slamg, quid =pound, Tanner =sixpence.

Thanks for the memories. You had to be good at your 12 times table.

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1 hour ago, Bad Wolf said:

@medimus And you also have to know what a florin was (2 shillings) a crown(5 shillings) half crown (2 shillings and six pence) guinea (1pound 1 shilling, used in the upper class shops)

Then there's the slamg, quid =pound, Tanner =sixpence.

Thanks for the memories. You had to be good at your 12 times table.

:D

For the book above you are much more likely to need to know ha'penny (half-penny) and farthing = quarter of a penny!

Yes 2,3,4,6 and 12 times tables very necessary!

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@Someone Out There and @AprilQuilt have both pointed out that the whole idea of women staying home arose during the industrial revolution and that jives with what I learned in my history classes.  Prior to the industrial revolution, most business was based in the household.  The middle class arose during the industrial revolution when fathers went out to factories and offices to work.  If you were a middle class family, you probably could afford for the mother to stay home during the 1800s.  Less affluent families still needed the income that the mothers and unmarried girls would earn and they might work in factories or in offices.  Women did go to work in large numbers during WWII, but the Fifties in the US were relatively prosperous time for many US families. While there were undoubtably societal pressures for women to go back home and let the men have the jobs, it's also true that many families could afford to live on one income and some of the women who did War work were glad to be able to quit and raise their kids now that their husbands were back.  In other words, it's complicated.  

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I agree it's complicated.

Yes, women had been staying in the home long before WWII. And the women in less affluent families who did work outside the home, would have preferred not to. Which is why the Rosie the Riveter image was needed to get middle and upper class women out of the home and into the factories. As a group, women hadn't thought of themselves as factory workers or professionals. They were used to being in the home, as pointed out by many.

During WWII women as a group kind of started liking their power and independence, even though they were still paid less than what men would have made. Sure, many were happy to go back home. And many families could afford only one income.

But my key point here is, both during WWII and afterward, there was a concerted media effort to DEFINE what a woman IS. And the post-WWII definition of true femininity as being someone who lives and breathes to prepare a nice home for the family was also a strong message that any woman who desired to be a professional outside of the home, wasn't truly feminine and wasn't a real woman. And this message was a very convenient one for religious fundamentalists such as those we snark at on FJ.

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I think this idea of “leisure women,” was strongly advertised and supported by (oddly) Queen Victoria’s rule. She worked hard to set a precedent that women wouldn’t “work,” despite the fact that she denied Albert access to the Queen’s daily updates (written by the most informed Brits,  everywhere, to keep the Queen informed). 
But useless (in  A vague sense of the word) was the ideal. Women who sat around doing very little besides sewing was an ideal. 
It’s a bit overwhelming to consider QV v her followers in their economic circumstances. 
william Blake taught his wife to read and help with his amazing poetic productions. Not under QV, but still...someone with progressive ideals using them in his real life scenarios.

History is so much about our understandings of the times and our realizations of their BS.

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My maternal Granny didn't get and indoor bathroom until 1984, she also didnt get a washing machine until this time either. Granny at this point was 81.

When Mother left my Father and we stayed at Grannys for many months, I at the age of 6 used to get my bath in the tin bath in front of the coal fire, and the toilet was across the back yard ( I was terrified of this hut as it had mahoosive spiders!) . We had just left a fully modern and centrally heated house in Germany for this living history museum in Belfast, in winter! My kids find it so weird because that sort of life went out in the 19th century lol 

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7 hours ago, apandaaries said:

I think this idea of “leisure women,” was strongly advertised and supported by (oddly) Queen Victoria’s rule. She worked hard to set a precedent that women wouldn’t “work,” despite the fact that she denied Albert access to the Queen’s daily updates (written by the most informed Brits,  everywhere, to keep the Queen informed). 
B
ut useless (in  A vague sense of the word) was the ideal. Women who sat around doing very little besides sewing was an ideal. 
It’s a bit overwhelming to consider QV v her followers in their economic circumstances. 
william Blake taught his wife to read and help with his amazing poetic productions. Not under QV, but still...someone with progressive ideals using them in his real life scenarios.

History is so much about our understandings of the times and our realizations of their BS.

But Queen V occupied a unique position, and everybody knew this - she was if anything the exception that proved the rule. She HAD to be sole monarch and Albert HAD to be subject first, then consort, never King, precisely because of the conflict between the 'natural' subservience of women and the 'natural' supremacy of the monarch. It was a huge conflict of interest, to the point that Victoria even had to propose to Albert - she wasn't a hypocrite, she was just in a uniquely impossible position of being torn between duty to her husband and duty to her country. Nobody saw it as an argument for women's emancipation or empowerment: she just had to model both roles simultaneously and perfectly.

Queen regnant has always = man trouble, you either take a husband who becomes King and throws his weight around (Mary II was actually offered the throne alone but she felt it would be embarrassing for her husband William of Orange to be her social inferior, so she made him King), or you don't take a husband and seem weird and unwomanly and suspect. Victoria/the machinery around her knew she needed to seem like a 'natural' woman, but also inviolate as the body royal, so excluding Albert was the only way of achieving the balance.

Victoria's advantage was that a) family life was already more celebrated than it had been in the past and b) there was already a template for queen regnant as wife and mother in the shape of Princess Charlotte of Wales, the daughter of George IV and heir to the throne until she died in childbirth. Charlotte was beloved and celebrated during her life and when it looked as if she would be queen, a LOT of legwork was put into creating an iconography that appealed. There was a vacancy in the popular imagination for a girl-queen which worked out really well for Victoria at the start of her reign, and as years passed the increasing importance of the comfortable middle class made domestic 'just like us!' schtick meant the royals could endear themselves in magazines and public appearances, as they still do today.

(Blake is a total outlier in many ways but his focus on literacy was not unusual. The C18th middling classes were pretty literate, and so were working classes from artisan or nonconformist backgrounds: Blake's own family was not wealthy but he was exposed to art and literature by his parents from childhood, and then through his training as an engraver. His self-directed education and passion for the arts wasn't unusual, and many other great minds of the C18th (Samuel Johnson springs to mind) had a similar trajectory. His issue was more with a narrowing of knowledge brought about by the industrial rev and educational standardisation - the idea that learning could only happen in a classroom, that reading was less pleasure than duty, and that the enjoyment and preservation of nature was not a worthy pursuit. It's not at all a surprise he taught Catherine to read, but a literate woman wasn't that radical a concept in itself, and for many women it would have been hard not to function without the skill.) 

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On 4/24/2020 at 5:03 AM, motelmum said:

Gotta say I fell in love with my washing machine (as did my husband). When our motel was open, I had a heck of a lot of towels to wash. Getting my LG washing machine was the best thing to me. I can imagine what it was like when mechanical washing machines were invented. Heck even the wash board was a step up from beating the washing with a bloody rock!

I got my first washing machine as well as a dishwasher for $10 total at a garage sale. Had a teenage boy at the time and it was like, Holy Cow! There's a reason people want these things!
No dishwasher now but a little one is on my wish list (just me now), and if I never have to set foot in a laundromat again in my life I can die happy.

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I took a module last semester about women in Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Something I found particularly interesting was that many women who could afford to chose to become housewives in the early twentieth century because it gave them more autonomy. There was more housework to do than ever before because housing was improving and there were national initiatives enouraging better hygiene. There was also increased focus on childhood and education, so there were more responsibilities with regards to raising children. 

As a result, a lot of women decided that there was no point in going out to work all day, to earn less than their male counterparts, then come home and do all the housework anyway. Instead they could be in charge of their home and like @medimus said, they were also largely in control of the household finances. 

This is pre-war, and only reflects one place, but it's an angle I wouldn't have thought to consider, especially because it's so easy to think that working outside the home equals more independence.

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@elissaeugenia I believe that is one of the critisisms that has been placed at some of the initiatives for poorer women starting their own businesses in various countries around the world.  They are good in theory, in practice it can just mean that a woman has even more work to do.

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On 4/26/2020 at 2:05 PM, patsymae said:

I got my first washing machine as well as a dishwasher for $10 total at a garage sale. Had a teenage boy at the time and it was like, Holy Cow! There's a reason people want these things!
No dishwasher now but a little one is on my wish list (just me now), and if I never have to set foot in a laundromat again in my life I can die happy.

I had a dishwasher growing up, and in all the apartments I lived in, but didn't have one in the 1st house DH & I bought, 6 years, 2 infants, hundreds and hundreds of bottles, nipples, nipple rings, UGH. We put one in our house when we were trying to selling it. I scored a top of the line dishwasher for $200 (in 2004) because it had a "ding" on the bottom panel, I was like I have preschoolers if it doesn't come dented it will be shortly. 

As for Washers/Dryers I'm so proud of my current washer and dryer, we got the dryer about 0 years ago a $700 dryer we paid $350 for then last year we got a $900 washing machine for $325. they are different brands and models but who cares, they are in our basement, AND they work so much better, than the 15 year old machines we had.  

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18 hours ago, elissaeugenia said:

I took a module last semester about women in Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Something I found particularly interesting was that many women who could afford to chose to become housewives in the early twentieth century because it gave them more autonomy. There was more housework to do than ever before because housing was improving and there were national initiatives enouraging better hygiene. There was also increased focus on childhood and education, so there were more responsibilities with regards to raising children. 

As a result, a lot of women decided that there was no point in going out to work all day, to earn less than their male counterparts, then come home and do all the housework anyway. Instead they could be in charge of their home and like @medimus said, they were also largely in control of the household finances. 

This is pre-war, and only reflects one place, but it's an angle I wouldn't have thought to consider, especially because it's so easy to think that working outside the home equals more independence.

I'd be super interested if you had any links/recommendations for reading about this?

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Even if there were some wealthy "leisure" women, they employed a staff of mostly women working out of the home (cook, governess, nanny, maid, etc). 

The Victorian idea of "spheres" of work still had women working and really only applied to wealthy women for the reasons stated above. Even the woman at home was acting as a manager while her husband was out. 

When the cottage industry/ home business gave way to industrialization, many young women did work in factories (this is before WWII "Rosie) or doing secretarial work. Others still went out to be nannies/governesses/tutors/maids for wealthier families. Once married, these women then worked at home raising children or aiding their husband's job if they had a family business. 

Women's work has always been in the home, and usually ALSO outside the home. It wasn't until AFTER WWII that women, thanks to men coming back home with their egos and the rapid new industries/education, that men felt they should be out as breadwinners and women should be inside the home with their new inventions getting back to being "feminine". And even then, MANY women were still working outside the home at various jobs or attending college. Perhaps many of these women were unmarried, and eventually ended these jobs to be mothers, but even in THAT case, families who needed money would have women working from home or part time. 

The more fundies homeschool, the more their history gets twisted thanks to Bob Jones University and Abeka etc. and the more they spin a fantastical tale of the history of gender roles. 

 

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1 hour ago, medimus said:

I'd be super interested if you had any links/recommendations for reading about this?

It wasn't the topic I focused on, so pretty much everything I know came from lectures, but I went back through the reading list and found these few.  

Joanna Bourke, Husbandry to housewifery. Women, economic change and housework in Ireland, 1890-1914. (1993) - I only skimmed this, but there's a chapter called 'From the Beginning: Housework' that talks about domestic changes. I'm also not sure how easy to find this will be? I get access through my university, not sure if it's available without something like that? 

Clair Wills, 'Women, Domesticity and the Family: Recent Feminist Work in Irish Cultural Studies', Cultural Studies 15:1, (2001) 33-57 - 'The Family' section talks about the way women were encouraged to remain in the domestic sphere and how housework changed - https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380010006745

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On 4/24/2020 at 3:05 AM, JordynDarby5 said:

Although I will completely buy women falling in love with a washer. My grandmother pretty much did when they finally able to afford one. Washing clothes was long pain in the butt before then. She was so happy. All you had to do was throw the clothes in, put soap in, start and walk away.   

Back in the early 2000s I saw an interview with a woman over 100. When asked about the best invention of her lifetime (radio? cars? planes? computers?), she answered "the washing machine."

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4 hours ago, shesinsane said:

Back in the early 2000s I saw an interview with a woman over 100. When asked about the best invention of her lifetime (radio? cars? planes? computers?), she answered "the washing machine."

I can not imagine life without a washing machine.... indoor plumbing would have to be high on that list. Though I’m not sure when that came in. 

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4 hours ago, AussieKrissy said:

I can not imagine life without a washing machine.... indoor plumbing would have to be high on that list. Though I’m not sure when that came in. 

Depends on where you live and at what class, also what you mean by indoor plumbing.  For example the modern sewerage system in London is apparently late 19th Century, but a lot of houses in the 1950's in the UK were demolished and replaced with houses with indoor plumbing (which they hadn't had prior).  I believe a lot of houses also still had the night man coming in the 1950's.

That being said apparently one of the Ancient Greek civilisations had some sort of indoor plumbing (according to wikipedia).

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47 minutes ago, Idlewild said:

Jill appears to be accompanying Derick on his GrubHub deliveries. During a pandemic. 

That obviously isn't a smart choice and I wouldn’t advice anyone to do that. Jill shouldn’t tag along now of all times! However, in case Derick gets ill, most likely so will Jill. Corona is incredibly contagious and until he has symptoms, his whole family might already be infected. So as long as Jill stays in the car, I don’t think their risk is much higher. 

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8 minutes ago, FluffySnowball said:

That obviously isn't a smart choice and I wouldn’t advice anyone to do that. Jill shouldn’t tag along now of all times! However, in case Derick gets ill, most likely so will Jill. Corona is incredibly contagious and until he has symptoms, his whole family might already be infected. So as long as Jill stays in the car, I don’t think their risk is much higher. 

I agree but the point being made here (UK) is about non essential car journeys. Derick’s would be classed as essential as he’s working but non essential passengers are not wise- if there’s an accident that’s extra people for already stretched emergency departments to deal with. I don’t know if the boys were in the car too ( they shouldn’t be in someone else’s household) but adults really need to take responsibility. I get it’s tough but they don’t think things through. 

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27 minutes ago, FluffySnowball said:

That obviously isn't a smart choice and I wouldn’t advice anyone to do that. Jill shouldn’t tag along now of all times! However, in case Derick gets ill, most likely so will Jill. Corona is incredibly contagious and until he has symptoms, his whole family might already be infected. So as long as Jill stays in the car, I don’t think their risk is much higher. 

It's not about their safety for me.  People who order from Grub Hub are already taking a calculated risk by getting deilvery.  He has no right to bring another person who increases the risk of potential asymptomatic carrier.  

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