Is life today significantly different for women than it was one hundred years ago?

[Photo: my grandmother with her second husband in about 1940]

My grandmother bore fourteen children with my grandfather, who was a railroad engineer, gone much of the time. Some of their children died, but over eighteen years, they created a houseful; sometimes twelve people were living in what was a small three- or four-bedroom home. I never knew my grandmother, but I was acquainted with my grandfather; he briefly lived two blocks away from my childhood home.

Not many people in the US live such a severe lifestyle today, so you’d think that “things” have changed a lot. In writing my historical novel, A Wolff in the Family (published October 2024), based on my grandparents’ relationship, mostly in the 1920’s and 30’s, I did extensive, detailed research on the economics of a lower middle-class family and how they would have lived. I researched through census records what their paid work was, and what their education levels were (scant). I knew what the attitudes of my mother, some of her siblings, and my grandfather were regarding race and gender roles and how it was to live through the Great Depression, even if one had limited work.

The family in the 1920’s and 30’s only took a bath once a week. I had a daily bath or shower all my life. Mother told me that they had one tub of water that all the kids bathed in on Saturday nights, and the oldest children went last, regardless of gender. My mom was the eldest; she hated being last, especially as a teenager. I wondered, when did my grandmother bathe? Was she the very last? Or did she get to take a bath after my grandfather did, in his dirty bath water? Fortunately I’m sure they all used a wash basin or sink as well.

My grandparents hadn’t had indoor plumbing for the first nine or ten years of their marriage, 1908-1918, in rural Kansas, but in Ogden, Utah, they did enjoy it. My grandmother must have been excited about that move. In Salina, KS, there had been an outdoor pump where my mother got her tongue stuck when dared to lick the handle in the winter (plus an outhouse). Can you imagine caring for seven children, making all their meals, and carrying water in pails into the house as well, just to bathe? Or wash dishes? Especially in the winter with snow on the ground? (It is not lost on me that people in many parts of the world still live like this, and may not even have a pump near their home. I am only looking at life in the US.)

Aside from creature comforts or discomforts, there was constant work on the part of a lower middle-class wife. My grandfather did work long hours out on the rails as first a fireman and then an engineer, but when they stopped in some town along the way overnight, his time was his own, as it was when he came home. I remember him reading the newspaper quite a lot in the 1950’s, as did my parents. So I imagine that he came home, took a bath, put his feet up, and waited for his dinner, his breakfast, or his lunch. His children were expected to be seen and not heard, and they mostly spoke when spoken to. But it had to have been progressively harder to keep a growing brood quiet. How much control could my grandmother have had when she was doing laundry, gardening, housecleaning and cooking all day? Most women in her class also did meagerly remunerative things like taking in laundry or sewing, or providing childcare for others in addition to their own children.

Family stories say that my grandfather had affairs with women all along the rail route, which was common in those days for railroad men, much like traveling salesmen through the decades.

But what about my grandmother? She had at least one affair. Maybe two, but the scant info I’ve found indicated it was probably just the one, and she did live with her lover later as a spouse under common law marriage, and eventually they tied the knot officially. The picture I have of the scandalous two portrays their complete happiness. For her transgression, she was banished by my grandfather and shamed by some of her children, including my mother. Divorce was not easy or condoned, so women had affairs outside marriage even to a greater extent in the early 1900’s than married women do today, in order to get their emotional needs met (and possibly physical ones as well).

I cannot blame my grandmother. Perhaps going outside her marriage was not the most Christian thing to do, which mattered greatly to my mother’s family, but how Christian is it to leave your wife at home for weeks on end, have affairs yourself, and expect her to manage a dozen children alone? My grandfather was also a vindictive man. I knew this from his behavior in my childhood, and given most people mellow a bit with age, I believe he was probably even more spiteful as a younger man. Some of the stunning actions he took toward my grandmother and his children, as re-imagined in my novel, underline this.

In those days, one hundred years ago, women were frequently treated like chattel. We can point to the old feudal systems in Europe, where the man owned everyone in his family; kings and “noblemen,” or at least those who already owned large amounts of property, sold off their daughters to gain property, military or other influential community connections. People in upper classes married for the same reasons, so that they could gain access to property or power.

No better in Africa, where in many communities it was traditional for men to hunt, bring home game, maybe till a garden, and the rest of the time sit around and talk, while the women did most of the work to keep the family fed, clothed, warm and healthy.

And what do we have today?

I have heard recently that men are upset about more women going to college and getting the better jobs. That young women are “not nice” to young men, and sometimes even abusive. I have not witnessed this myself, but I don’t know many young women in their thirties. A significant number of young women are choosing to remain single and live with their parents. Young men often do not have jobs that are sufficiently paid to support a family. Given that half of marriages end in divorce, many of those marriages leaving single mothers supporting children, I can see how those examples encourage young women to go to college and get the best jobs they can get. Even without children, women would like the same access to travel, culture and comfortable homes that men (especially single, child-free men) have typically been able to afford throughout the last century.

I have seen since my younger days that much has stayed the same as it was in the early 1900’s; that women still often are the ones doing most of the domestic chores, organizing the household, and caring for children. Post-World War II, most women have also worked, and usually full-time. Women went to work in factories in the late 1940’s to support their families while the men were overseas, and to help create munitions for the war. When the men came home, women had become accustomed to being able to buy better food, material for clothing, and a few things for themselves without asking their spouses for funds. Sometimes this meant the paycheck was no longer being drunk up. Many women did not want to go back to being “just homemakers;” there was a government campaign to discourage that attitude and persuade women to give up their jobs for returning male veterans. This era was also the beginning of women as paid social workers, with many wives now being widowed. This was a profession they were well-qualified to take on, even without higher education.

I remember so often hearing in the 1980’s that the concept of doing it all and being it all for women was just too much. Perhaps we had electric washing machines and refrigerators, and could drive, and we had time to go to a gym or have lunch with a girlfriend while the kids were in school or on our lunch breaks from work, unlike our grandmothers or great-grandmothers. But wasn’t there still an assumption of superiority on the part of men? That we were “choosing” to do all that? Were we? Or did we choose love and family and then find that the rising cost of housing, and the hope for perhaps a vacation or an occasional latte, required us to work a job as well as manage a home?

Some of this is invisible to those who keep it in place, on the part of both sexes. It is also not easy for men to suddenly pick up the mantles of childcare and meal planning if they were not raised to assume these roles as appropriate and necessary for the well being of the family. There are men who took on domestic roles all of their lives, particularly if raised by single mothers. This is definitely not meant to be a “woman:good, man:bad” piece. I’m just looking at how things are and how they were one hundred years ago.

Personally, I love having a nice home and good meals, and accept that if I want that, it’s “my choice” to cook, manage a house and have a garden, as a semi-retiree married to a working man who has learned some domesticity as an adult. Women are now also expected to stay connected via all manner of devices and communication tools, and see that our kids, if we have them, are healthy, have the best opportunities in education and social life, and are safe. If we’re under seventy, we do all this while working full-time and may also be caring for our parents.

So, I imagine that being a person who manages domestic life, when paired with the new stresses of the 21st century, is sometimes nearly as tiring as it was in 1925, despite all our mod-cons.

Thoughts? I invite your comments.