Using Bleach Like a 1950s Housewife

If there’s one substance most associated with “old-fashioned” cleaning, it’s bleach. Throughout the 20th century, homemakers relied on bleach for its powerful germ-killing abilities.

And, despite a mild obsession with 20th-century homemaking, I almost never use it.

An early Clorox ad promoting using bleach with the headline "A Clorox-Clean Home is a Safer Place to Live In!" and a personified bottle of bleach with a smiling face holding up cards with science facts.

I didn’t grow up cleaning with bleach, I hate the smell, and it’s always seemed…scary. It’s poisonous and corrosive, both things I generally try to avoid.

But we live in interesting times, my friends, and the coronavirus has caused me to investigate, and ultimately, change my position. I decided to learn how to disinfect my household with bleach.

Continue reading →

Housewife Week 2: Report

So the 1950s Housewife Life continues. This week was much like last week. I kept up with the daily cleaning, deep cleaned two rooms, and made some discoveries along the way. OH YES, and a pandemic broke. More on that later.

Overall, my perception is starting to change and I think I’m beginning to see things like my tidy-person spouse does naturally. Case in point, I looked at this sink, and thought, unironically, “The dishes are really starting to pile up, ugh!”

A sink with lots of empty space, a mug of silverware, one bowl, two plates, one glass jar and a cup. — I don’t even know who I am anymore.

Continue reading →

Housewife Week 1: The Report

I completed the first week of my 1950s housewifery experiment! I have now been attempting to be an ideal housewife for seven days!

Things are getting sparkling around here. I did the basic daily cleaning (dust/sweep/tidy) every weekday and did the deeper weekly cleaning in the kitchen and living room. AHB suggests I should be able to deep clean every room in two days, but that wasn’t quite do-able. I suspect that once every room has been deep cleaned, future cleaning sessions will be shorter.

Continue reading →

Daily Cleaning: Housewife Ideals

No one can be dogmatic about the daily cleaning of various rooms in the house. So many things influence the amount of work that can be done–the quantity of dust or soot in the air, for example, the philosophy of first things first, the number of rooms that must be cleaned, the size of the family, the age of the children, and the help or lack of it that the homemaker has.
…
…[W]e set before you an ideal. How nearly you can approach this ideal, especially as to daily cleaning, we cannot know.
America’s Housekeeping Book, 1941

Me neither, AHB. Me. Neither.

Rows of upright straw brooms. — We’re going to need more brooms.

Just as it would be silly to take Martha Stewart as the prototypical homemaker of today, looking to the home management books and magazines as an “authentic” guide to what every homemaker did in the mid 20th century is a mistake. As our pal, the AHB tells us, we’re talking about ideals. The mere fact that all these manuals exist speaks to the fact that “how to housewife” was not universal knowledge.

Continue reading →

My Life as a 1950s Housewife

Happy Women’s History Month!

Woohoo, it’s March! The time we take to remember that women have existed for all of history.

Seriously, we’ve been here THE WHOLE TIME.

Generally, Women’s History Month focuses on the women who were remarkably ahead of their time. The Elizabeth Cady Stantons and Harriet Tubmans of the world. But here at Retrofitting Vintage, we’re leaving the luminaries to actual historians, and focusing on an everyday woman of the mid-20th century.

That’s right, we’re talking about housewives.

And how shall we do so?

Why, with an ill-advised guinea pig journalism approach, of course. That is, in fact, how I roll. That’s right, it’s 1950s Housewife Month.

Continue reading →