I posted about a book I am enjoying right now: A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture Since 1929.: The author decided to document changes in rural agriculture and its impacts on our lives in the span of his lifetime. It is a good read I will recommend to you folks, too.
This pretty much encompasses the shift from true horsepower to the present technologies...and as he says, ag in 1930 had more in common with 1830 than with 1960. I would say that observation is spot-on in terms of domestic life inside the farmhouse, too.
When we bought the wood cookstove two winters ago, I started doing a lot of this retrospective reading, and that was about the time I started taking the historic preservation classses, too. When you take several weekends to spend time learning how old houses worked, it makes you realize how our ancestors lived...often very hard, brutish lives. They lacked the pace pressure we experience today, though. Everything that is an advance comes with a tradeoff, I suppose.
Preserving food in refrigerators and especially freezers was a huge change...no need to pickle, salt and smoke foods, or dry them in the sun anymore. I remember drying grapes on old windowscreens with my Grammar. I use her recipe for baking them into fruitcakes for Christmas...first step: "Wash your raisins."
Hog killings were scary and primal, and the only lock on the farm in those years was the one on the smokehouse door. Protein and fat was survival then. Gathering eggs was a part of every day for me as a little girl, and my children did it, too.
I never had pizza until I was about a high school senior. Started eating some Chinese and Mexican until in my thirties. Japanese steakhouse dinners in my forties. We just did not eat out growing up, and in retrospect, I really do not think our nutritional health improved much when it changed and got more "sophisticated." If we wanted to eat bread, someone had to bake it first.
I think it had to be most difficult to have to watch children succumb to diseases we can prevent or control with vaccinations now. I for one would have died in birthing my first child, as many women did back then. The survival of women and children is probably the greatest accomplishment of our society's advances, compared to the rest of our history.
One last observation: Most households back then were multi-generational, from my own recollections and what family members told me about. Single women woud have never lived alone, and often a young couple moved in with one set of parents, usually his. Caring for elderly family members, which is a big focus for a lot of us, was simply a matter of them fading away in the family's home...staying independent was not really a consideration, since everyone was interdependent.
No one needed daycare, since the whole family was there, and children were more or less expected to exist on the peripheries of daily chores and customs. No one hauled a child to a different afterschool activity every afternnon, for sure. You had chores, and maybe mid-week church or choir practice.
I am sort of looking forward to our society returning to some of these and other standards. Would love to think that when my grands do arrive, they will hang out here while their moms are busy. Writing this, I remember playing with spools on Grammar's chenille bedspread, learning the names of flowers in her small, fenced garden...I think that is where I learned to love Bachelor's Button blue.
Few farmwomen did it all alone...they had extended family and a batch of kids with chores to help them. Here in the South, there was a whole culture of tenant farmers and their families to help with a lot of chores, too.
