A Depression-Era Homemaker Describes her Life

This is one of the best first-hand articles I’ve ever read. It was originally a letter to the editor of a women’s magazine in 1932.

Is homemaking truly a job? When a wife says, “I’m a homemaker,” many people only hear it to mean “I don’t have to work.” How does a homemaker respond to that bit of ridiculousness? Nothing could be further from the truth! Unfortunately, this attitude has persisted for generations. This anonymous woman gives a description of the best profession she could imagine--a homemaker.

When the census-taking man called at our home, I parked the babies in the sandpile. Then, I sat for half an hour answering his questions. When he came to my occupation, he looked from under his brows in all solemnity and asked, “You don’t do anything, do you?” Without even awaiting a reply, he wrote, “Occupation--Housewife.”

I protest and refuse to be draply set aside! I demand the title of Homemaker and defy the world to say that homemaking is doing nothing. It is a profession, and those of us so listed labor at it. It is a labor of love. There is no monthly salary. The pay is merely the little sweetnesses of everyday family life, and I must sift them out of their attendant pains and sacrifices.

The business of making a home--an honest-to-goodness home, with cookies and pillow fights and firelit hours and books and beds and joys and tears--that is a job--a great, grand task.

I happen to be not only a Homemaker but a Farm Homemaker. I glory in it.

That I am only one among thousands of others is a point to be stressed. I am representative of my class, and I am decidedly not stooped nor wrinkled. I am sun-tanned and straight two pounds underweight from a summer of strenuous hours in Ye Olde Swimming Hole (I do a rather nice crawl stroke, too.) My hair has a natural wave, and doesn’t string, and I never wear sunbonnets. Instead of drab calico, I make my own house frocks of gay, fast-colored prints with fresh white collars, and I wear happy-looking aprons over them.

While we are getting acquainted, I might add that I have been at my present job for five years, and am still in my twenties. I earned my own living for five years before I married. At present I have two sons--husky young lads of two and three.

From a honeymoon of care-free happiness, I came to our Old Homestead, a rambling farmhouse built half a century ago, and typical of the times--high ceilings, plastered walls, no closets, wood heaters, not enough windows, coal-oil lamps.

There is a big zinc sink without a drain. Running water has been installed, but drinking water is still drawn from a well with a rope and bucket and pulley. There is a temperamental wood range for cooking, and you raise a door and go down a flight of steps into the dim, dirt-floored cellar.

No danger of unemployment for the farm woman. There is work of one kind or another always waiting for her, but it is certainly varied enough, and busy persons are usually happy ones. It seems to me that caring for your loved ones is a God-given privilege. It is not in the least degrading to preform every task connected with making a home, rather it lends a certain dignity to life.

The farm wife over her wash tub! How our novelists have harped on that plaintive theme

--a bent figure slaving away at endless piles of dirty clothes. Quite naturally there are days when it seems hard, when you wake up out of sorts and everything seems hard, but there are many more wash days that are fun!

Yes, kind sir, I do all of the washing for my own house and family, and as yet have no washing machine. I do it in tubs with the help of a washboard. I get as much satisfaction out of changing a heap of soiled, wrinkled clothing into fresh-smelling, orderly piles as I ever got out of eighteen holes of golf. Besides, I am sure that I get as much exercise. Hanging snowy sheets and shirts against a cloud-hung blue sky with fresh-clipped green grass under foot, and a vagabond breeze in the air, is fun!

Please do not gather from this that I am a low-brow drudge who knows nothing else. I play McDowell and Tschaikowsky because I love them, and I enjoy Sinclair Lewis and Edna Ferber and Thackeray and Wells. Washing just happens to be one of my sidelines.

Another sideline is being my own butcher and baker and candlestick maker. It is a good thing to learn complete independence, especially when there are no shops just around the corner, and no money to spend. At first this seemed a hardship. But I have learned my job so thoroughly that I can now serve a complete and well-balanced meal from soup to nuts without counting on anyone.

From my cellar I can bring tomatoes, corn, cured meats (venison in season), fruit, jellies, preserves, relishes, pickles, and vegetables. All of them are raised on our own farm. Of course all this is work, but there is only one difference in working for money with which to buy food, and working directly for the food itself. That, of course, is the immense pride that you take in your own products.

There’s a heap of preparation and excitement when the bees are robbed. Daddy dons his bee bonnet and gloves, and the babies are carefully corralled on the porch until it is over. How good the honey tastes when it is fresh--that means hot biscuits for breakfast. It is strained and put away in stone crocks, along with gallons of molasses, freshly-boiled from the ribbon cane that grows on our own brown acres. And part of my duty seems to me to be crisp molasses cookies and taffy.

There are strutting turkeys and garrulous White Leghorns in the barnyard, for a farm wife must often play poulterer, too. That means fresh eggs in abundance, and the tender flesh of cock and hen, but at times it means nursing senseless baby chicks through their period of babyhood, and they can be annoying though interesting. A small turkey is the most brainless thing that ever had the gift of life, but when it has attained twenty-seven pounds and a parsley trimming, it becomes worth while.

I do not milk, but I could in a pinch, and often do in the summer evenings so that we may all join in the evening swim. I do, however, attend to the milk, wash and scald all the utensils, make the butter and cheese, and put away the heavy golden cream that will add so much to tomorrow’s plain pudding.

Twice a week I bake in my temperamental wood range. How a stove as pesky as that one can turn out such crispy, crusty loaves, I don’t know, but it usually does. Often on baking day there are cinnamon rolls or coffee cake, which are really just bread dough all dressed up. Why I even make my own yeast cakes! Common everyday things like cornmeal and buttermilk are converted into that mysterious something that makes the bread rise.

Butcher? Just another sideline. Sometime before Christmas every year, hogs are changed into tender hams, spareribs, bacon, sausage, headcheese, and buckets of white lard, not to mention homemade soap. That soap is more magic. I am proud of it, for it is snowy white, faintly fragrant, and it floats--and I made it! Drudgery? No, achievement!

Lusty appetites must be fed, and the converting of wholesome food into sound minds and sturdy bodies is no child’s play. It demands time and thought and energy and imagination. In addition to food, there must be flowers and fresh linen and the wedding silver on my table for I want them to be an integral part of my sons’ education. Farm folk need to live as beautifully as any others, and doesn’t cost a bit more. It is wholly up to the homemaker.

With the help of my partner I have taken entire care of my babies. I have suffered when they cried, and laughed when they smiled; I have known the discovery of a first tooth, and the pride of a first step. It is to me they bring each baby joy or sorrow, and all the freedom in the world could not mean what their confidence means. Perhaps I shall some day do a lot of my lost adventuring through the eyes of my boys, but have quelled my own wanderlust in order to make the little valley a home that will always bring them back from their wanderings. I am sure that I could not have shared their babyhood with another no matter how efficient or well trained. It has been too precious.

It has not been all roses. There has been thousands of small annoyances like water fights on clean white linen suits and mud pies down the front of rompers that I had worked half an hour to iron. There have been brief spankings and the attendant howls of rage, and the breaking of bits of glass that I particularly loved, like the soft rose beige vase of Brookfield ware. There was one week of zero weather when I took bricks and broke the tiny frozen garments off the clothesline, and there were sleepless nights when both children had whooping cough, and I was sure that they were choking to death before my very eyes.

However, there have been plenty of compensations, and I would go through it all again to hear those baby voices saying their “Now I lay me,” and to get those good-night kisses. Did you ever hold a baby, all fat and bathed and sleepy and warm, and feel it go limp with the touch of the Sandman? Drudgery? That is Heaven! the heaven of your own creation.

I couldn’t begin to name all my various undertakings, but I did enjoy being interior decorator. The house was quite the most drab and uninviting I every stepped into, but it has changed. I painted the dark woodwork a rich ivory, (and decades later, we’re scraping that paint off! :) and tinted the plastered walls. I have ruffled curtains and made and framed silhouettes. I have made footstools of coffee cans, and book shelves from apple crates. I have smoothed and varnished floors, and refinished old walnut furniture that I brought for a song. I even learned to weave cane seats for stubby dining chairs that many have since admired, and an old walnut rocker that I found in the barn loft is now a lovely thing with high back and seat of cane.

I have made shades for the kerosene lamps, and added countless gay candlesticks and candles. My living room is a north room with maize colored walls, and a beautiful view. The single oil painting on its walls was exhibited at the Philadelphia Exposition. I took second prize on this room last year in a County Living Room contest, and my only expenditure was my own work and one dollar and a half.

All my linens are handmade, and will wear for years. I take great pleasure in keeping the beds snowy and fresh, and I am not at all above piecing together bits of the blue shirt I liked on John, and the babies’ first rompers, and my old blue frock and the yellow kitchen curtains and making a quilt of them that will later be tufted into feathery softness. There is something soul-satisfying about sleeping beneath bits of your life sewed together into stars.

Sewing is part of my job, too, for I have to do all my own in order to make the most of the money we have to spend. I sew for myself and the children, and we are not especially “country looking,” either. My machine is an antiquated relic, but it sews a straight seam with a bit of persuasion.

I am not a huge success as a gardener, but I am learning, and it is certainly a pleasant task in the early spring to dig and putter in the warming earth and to plan and plant. What gorgeous things it does promise after you have read the seed catalogues, and even if it never lives up to them, still if you are a faithful gardener, you can have green things a-growin’ for your table, and beauty for your eyes. Beans and beets and spinach and carrots are important foods for the body, but just as important to me are the early pansies and violets, the purple and pink and white of larkspur and cosmos and phlox and zinnias. They are food for the soul.

Life isn’t all work and no play, nor do we lack for social divertissement. I attend regularly a reading club, Home Demonstration Club, and a dramatic club which produces two plays a year. We play cards an evening or two a week, either at a neighbor’s home or our own, and we attend as many good shows, concerts and art exhibits as our finances and babies allow. There are frequent barbecues and picnics, and an occasional barn dance or school entertainment, most of them impromptu and real fun.

I find at these gatherings a number of women like myself, all doing their own homemaking and enjoying it. They are as a rule, healthy and intelligent wives and mothers. They drive their own cars, and are actively interested in many activities outside their homes. They are partners to their husbands in every sense of the word, and are helping to make it a success. Divorce? We never hear of it except in the daily papers. We haven’t enough leisure to feel ourselves mistreated or abused.

Perhaps men and women grow nearer and dearer to each other on a farm--I do not know--but depending entirely on each other for companionship must make it true. Hardships draw people closer, I happen to know. The nearest I ever felt to my husband was during a terrific hailstorm that shattered every window, splintered the shutters, and crumpled the roof, as well as destroying every living and growing thing on our farm. We stood there, or rather crouched, behind the shelter of two inner walls and a mattress, each holding a terrified baby, and though not a word was exchanged--well, we were sharing both fear and courage.

We farmer folk who are standing by our land, are feeling a bit as the old-time pioneers must have felt. We hear a lot about farm relief and depression and low prices, and all of it is real enough. The past few years have held heartache and sacrifices. We have almost forgotten what money looks like, and would probably shy at a ten dollar bill as old dobbin shied at the threshing machine. Our products are exchanged for the few bare necessities we do have to buy, and often are inadequate.

Once in a great while I save enough pennies for a new book or a new sheet of music, and how we do enjoy them,--reading them carefully so as not to lose one precious word, hoarding their bits of beauty and wisdom as we hoarded the pennies with which to buy them.

The wise farmer and his homemaker, if they are healthy and intelligent, are not going hungry, and we are glad that this going without has come to us while we are young. This isn’t a tale of hard times, but a story of a farmer’s wife, who is doing her best to make the old Homestead into a home worth having.

THE END