“Just like a man, I thought,
singing the familiar refrain about how wonderful everything used to be. I told him I didn’t believe
most women of my generation would agree. And I say it again, although I’m no
expert with a degree after my name, but only know what I’ve learned from 65
years of living on this earth, raising a family of 12, and watching 17
grandchildren come along. I know how life has changed in our country in the
past half century, and I admit that it isn’t like the good old days. I think
it’s a lot better.
Of course, I don’t say that
ever change has been an improvement. It seems to me that we are on the go too
much to think of spiritual things as often as we should, and as often as we
used to. If so, that’s our own fault, and not the fault of the times we live
in. If we stopped once in a while for reflection, we would look back at the road
we’ve traveled and give thanks for the blessings of life in America today.
I notice that it’s almost
always the men, anyhow, who say that things used to be better. Men remember
chicken dinners and home-baked pies an bread—but it was their wives who spent
hours plucking the chickens, kneading dough, and baking in a coal range.
After Sunday dinner, it was
the men who went to the lodge or the park, while the women piled the dirty
dishes in the tin-lined sink and heated cistern water on the stove for washing.
There were no automatic dish washers and dryers, no stainless steel sinks with
garbage disposal units, no ventilating fans to carry off cooking smells and
heat.
Men have forgotten how
floors were scrubbed on hands and knees, rugs cleaned with a broom or a beater,
clothes scrubbed on a washboard, fruits and vegetables canned all summer long
to provide the winter’s food supply. These were round-the clock, 7-days-a-week
chores which women of my day accepted without question, and which made many of
them old before their times.
Young housewives of today
take for granted a world which has been turned upside down for their
convenience, during the lifetime of people no older than myself."
–––Mrs. Emma Van Coutren, from her memoir essay, ‘This Beats the Good Old
Days,” The American
Magazine, August 1950: pp. 32-33; 104-106.
Mrs. Emma Van Coutren was a 65 year old mother of
twelve and grandmother of seventeen who raised her family in rural Missouri.
[She was born in Elmira, New York in 1885]. In the extensive article, in addition to her
describing the “good old days” (a man’s term, she says) and all of the hard
work she did as a housewife, she mentions that each of her twelve children
served during World War II—at home or abroad—and that all twelve came home. She was
honored in 1944 by the Mother’s Day Commemorative League as the woman who best
exemplified American motherhood.
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