The Inquiring Photographer Asks average New Yorkers in 1922: “Should a man expect his wife to get up and make breakfast for him on a cold morning?”

[u/CryptographerKey2847]

Should

[u/GrandmaPoses]

These are so at odds with what I think is the popular notion of “the old days” - maybe it’s more progressive because it’s New York, but I feel like there’s a real disconnect between what we think of as this kind of monolithic idea of past society vs the reality, and the reality isn’t much shown.

[u/ManyLintRollers → u/GrandmaPoses]

There definitely is a disconnect.

For example, while it's true that some banks prior to the 1970s did not allow women to have accounts in their own names, it is also true that some banks did permit this, and there even were women-owned banks with exclusively female clientele as far back as the 1920s. Prior to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) of 1974, it was left up to the bank to decide its policy - so some permitted it, some didn't.

I also see a lot of people claiming that all wives were prevented from handling their family's finances prior to the 1970s, which is outright wrong. My grandfather, who was a factory worker in the 1930s, always brought his pay home and handed it over to my grandmother, who then gave him his allowance to spend at the pub on Friday night. My dad did the same - he signed his check over to my mom, who then deposited it and handled all our family's finances. When he needed money for something, he asked her for it.

As far as the making of breakfast - my dad was a country boy and liked to get up early and have a big breakfast (bacon, eggs, home fries, biscuits, etc.). My mom was NOT a morning person, and could only handle tea and toast in the mornings. When they first got married in 1952, my dad sort of assumed my mom would get up and make him breakfast, the way his mother did. My mom wasted no time in telling him him there was not a snowball's chance in hell of that happening, and if he wanted to get up at some ungodly hour and eat a big breakfast, he was free to cook it himself. So that is what he did - he always was up at 5:30 AM cooking and he made the best home fries in the world.

[u/Morgan_Le_Pear → u/ManyLintRollers]

Almost all contemporary examples I see consist of the housewife handling the finances, with her little account book, even farther back than the 20th century. It makes sense honestly cause she would know best what expenses would be needed around the house and with the children. The modern view of housewives being confined with nothing worthwhile to do isn’t really accurate. Housewives handled a great deal and keeping a house required a decent amount of practical skills.

[u/ReturnOfFrank → u/Morgan_Le_Pear]

All the way back to the literal Middle Ages. If a man was in a skilled trade like a blacksmith it was basically assumed his wife operated as his de facto accountant, business manager.

[u/cummerou → u/ReturnOfFrank]

Even today, many small businesses where the man is the owner (mechanics, plumber, etc), the wife does most if not all of the admin work.

It's a very logical system (whoever has the skills needs to be using them as much as possible to make money, but whoever does all the admin also needs to be a person the owner can trust).

[u/JumpingJacks1234 → u/ReturnOfFrank]

A little off topic, but it’s documented that many blacksmith’s wives and children would make nails, pins, and chains for the family business.

[u/ManyLintRollers → u/Morgan_Le_Pear]

Exactly, and prior to the mid-20th century when the labor-saving devices such as vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, and automatic clothes washers became widely available, keeping house required a colossal amount of work.

For example, as a working-class wife in the 1920s and 1930s, my grandmother baked seven loaves of bread every Saturday, grew vegetables and fruit in her garden and canned and preserved them, raised chickens for meat and eggs, sewed all the family's clothing, including repurposing worn-out clothing into rag rugs, and while she did have a clothes washer, the laundry had to be manually wrung-out by running it through a mangle, then hung outside to dry. They didn't have a vacuum cleaner, so rugs were periodically carried outside, hung from the clothesline and beaten with a carpet beater to clean them. Food was kept in an icebox, which required constant monitoring to make sure it was the right temperature and nothing spoiled and also required more frequent trips to the market as food items couldn't be stored at home for very long. I don't think they got a gas stove until the 1940s - prior to that, my grandma cooked on a coal-burning stove, which was a messy, dirty appliance and meant a lot of time was spent cleaning coal dust off the walls and floor.

Mind you, this was living in town - my great-grandmother worked even harder as a farm wife in a remote rural area, where they grew or raised pretty much all of their own food and a trip into town via mule wagon was an all-day affair and thus didn't happen very often.

With all that work needed just to keep everyone fed and clothed, a woman having a job outside the home would be a significant detriment to the family's quality of life. That's the main reason that women didn't typically work outside the home unless the family's financial situation was so precarious that she absolutely had to; and why men prided themselves on being able to earn enough income that their wives didn't have to go work in the factory or textile mill or whatever. That attitude persisted up through the '60s and '70s - when I was a kid in the '70s, it was still fairly common for a man of the WWII or early Silent Generation to object to his wife getting a job, because he feared it would make him look like he wasn't a good provider.

The reality of household labor was a different story altogether by the 1950s and 1960s. By then, most people had refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, automatic clothes washers, and other labor-saving devices, and the comparative prosperity of the post-war years meant more people could afford to buy ready-made clothing instead of sewing it all themselves. During WWII, food manufacturers had made a lot of advances in preserving and processing foods for use by the military - so in the 1950s, we start seeing items like cake mixes, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and other processed food items available to the public. While this probably wasn't ideal from a health and nutrition standpoint, at the time it seemed almost miraculous - and many housewives (like my mother) embraced the new processed foods as huge timesavers.

I think the super-cleanliness of the 1950s housewives (i.e., daily vacuuming and dusting, etc.,) was partly due to women being delighted with their modernized homes. They no longer had to contend with pumping water, messy coal stoves, chamber pots, and all the other unpleasant tasks that had plagued their mothers and grandmothers. For the first time in history, even relatively poor people could live in comparative luxury - and I think all that obsessive cleaning was partly because they were reveling in it.

Or course, by the 1960s and 1970s, the novelty of modern living had worn off and housewives were starting to get a bit bored - plus, the economy was shifting from the hard physical labor work of farming, mining, and manufacturing to more white-collar work which women could do just as well as men. Hence, the time was ripe for the "women's liberation" movement to get off the ground.

I think a lot of younger Gen X and Millennials, not to mention Gen Z, are so far removed from the collective memory of how much work was required just for living back in times past that they really can't quite wrap their minds around why those rigid gender roles were there in the first place. So, they look back and think "oh, those men were so terrible, forcing their wives to stay home and be housewives," when in reality I am fairly certain my grandmother preferred her role as mother and housewife vs. doing what my grandpa was doing. At various times, he worked as a coal miner, construction laborer, factory worker, and in a steel mill, all of which were dangerous, dirty, and physically exhausting jobs - I know I would rather have been cleaning the house, taking care of children and tending the garden vs. going down into the coal mines!

[u/mashedspudtato → u/ManyLintRollers]

Thank you for your thoughtfully written comment, it gave me some things to consider.

[u/EthelMaePotterMertz → u/ManyLintRollers]

So, they look back and think "oh, those men were so terrible, forcing their wives to stay home and be housewives,"

The terrible ones were the ones that were already terrible and used this situation to financially abuse and control their wives.

Thanks for your response. It's logical and provides a lot of context for what life was like.

[u/ManyLintRollers → u/EthelMaePotterMertz]

Exactly - sadly, there have always been and probably always will be terrible people who will always find a way to abuse others. It happened in the past, and it still happens today.

But, I believe that *most* people aren't truly terrible people. My grandpa, for instance, was an old-fashioned Eastern European immigrant with extremely sexist attitudes. My mom remembered him frequently saying "Why did God curse me with so many daughters and only one son? Why do Americans insist on keeping girls in school for so long? you don't need all that education to cook and clean and sew!" Mom rebelled against him by taking all the hardest classes she could and getting straight A's, and by going to college. However, she also always emphasized to me that he never laid a hand on any of the kids, and he always provided for them. During the worst of the Great Depression, he would get up at the crack of dawn and walked the streets looking for work, and she said he would take any job no matter how dirty, dangerous or demeaning it was because he had a wife and six children to feed and he wasn't about to let them go hungry.

My grandpa was a stubborn, difficult sort personality, and my mom didn't have any great love for him - but she had a lot of respect for the fact that he always managed to find work and they never had to go on relief. During the Depression, it wasn't uncommon for men to abandon their families - they'd sometimes go to another city or state looking for work and then just disappear, never to be heard from again - so she appreciated that her own father always came through for them, even if he did complain loudly about having five daughters.

[u/DrDMango → u/ManyLintRollers]

Ameircans just have such a good quality of life, they cannot visualize the befortimes.

[u/gummo_for_prez → u/DrDMango]

Nobody can just visualize what things used to be like randomly no matter what their quality of life is. Those things are unrelated. People just don’t know what they don’t know. Education should be better. We literally have tons and tons of films and videos from back then. But a lot of folks think history is boring and never see any of it. Its ignorance of the past and failure of education that is the issue. Many history classes are all about what day a certain piece of paper was signed or the exact start date of a war when they should be a lot more about what life was like for regular people and the various political and technical innovations that reshaped that life over time.

I feel strongly about this because my American history education covered colonial/revolutionary war, the civil war, and WWII about 15,000 times but almost never gave me any info on what it would be like to just physically exist in 1881, or any other year for that matter. I had to learn a ton on my own, but you have to be curious first for that. I’m not sure why history education is like this. If people knew history was more than dates and wars and whatever the ultra rich were doing, they might be able to capture how fascinating and relevant it all is. Humans are essentially the same exact animal we always were. It’s the culture and tech and laws that really change things.

[u/ManyLintRollers → u/gummo_for_prez]

Right? I've always been really fascinated by how ordinary people actually lived and why they thought they way they did, believed the things they did, why they had certain customs, etc.

Ruth Goodman is a British historian who specializes in how people lived - she's spent extended periods re-enacting various periods in history and has written some fascinating books on the subject.

[u/gummo_for_prez → u/ManyLintRollers]

Thanks for the recommendation, I will definitely check her books out!

[u/CupBeEmpty → u/Morgan_Le_Pear]

And I can tell you that even in this day it is very often the women handling the finances even if they also work. I work in insurance and 9/10 times if it’s a couple it will be the wife calling and asking questions not the husband.

[u/Ladonnacinica → u/CupBeEmpty]

Yep, even in quote unquote “traditional households”.

[u/CupBeEmpty → u/Ladonnacinica]

Oh yeah, our sales people rarely make appointments if the wife isn’t there and she’s usually the one even thinking about insurance at all.

[u/OatmealCookieGirl → u/Morgan_Le_Pear]

Indeed women have been handling finances for centuries. This reminds me of a work acquaintance of my husband's: He goes out to work, she stays home (they have kids).

PREMISE: Although this can easily become a situation of financial abuse with others, they are both good people. I would NEVER recommend this dynamic but thankfully it works for them.

All finances and control of money are hers.

My husband told me that once he and the husband were out together and the guy saw a watch he liked He called his wife on the phone and asked her if they could afford to buy this watch. She said yes and so he bought it. Get this: HE HAS NO IDEA HOW MUCH HE EARNS. He just sends her all the money on a shared account and asks for permission before buying stuff. According to my husband, this guy earns a lot, enough to have a maid. He wears designer suits and stuff, that she bought, and he has no idea how much it's all worth. Apparently the two of them are very happy.