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In this fast-moving era, everyone is concerned with saving time," emphasized a teacher who was submitting her favorite recipe to Forecast, the home economics magazine. "I, in company with innumerable other women, feel the pressing need of entertaining my friends well but with a minimum of time and energy spent in preparation." Her solution was to use a can of baby food as a lasagna ingredient. In the pages of Forecast and other magazines, it wasn't the arrival of sudden company that threw a household into emergency status —ordinary life was sufficient. "Baby fussing? Dinner to get?" inquired an ad in 1953. "When baby wants attention and daddy wants dinner, your best friend is quick-quick Minute Rice!" Soon no excuse at all was needed, and stories simply promised "Hot breads—in a jiffy!" "Quick fix desserts!" "Suppers that beat the clock!" Here was one claim that manufacturers could stand behind; and when it came to some foods, this was probably the sole claim that could be made with any credibility.

Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven

This excerpt from Laura Shapiro's book, Something From the Oven, shows how housewives jumped on the trend of ready-prepared and convenience foods in the 50's. The romantic ideal of housewives happily making dinner for their families, and convenience foods ruining this lifestyle, is false. Convenience foods were so readily adopted because preparing meals was intense work on top of all of the other housework and responsibilities.

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We have found in our experience, that when a husband leaves his home, he may be seeking refuge from an unpleasant environment. Could it be that your husband feels that he is not understood or appreciated in his own home? What might there be in your relations to him that could make him feel that way? Could you have stressed your contribution to your marriage in such a manner as to have belittled the part he has played and thus made him uncomfortable in his presence?

American Institute of Family Relations

This advice segment from the American Institute of Family Relations was written in response to a woman whose husband had cheated on her after 25 years of marriage. The husband's infidelity was blamed directly on his wife, rather than the husband or the other woman. Even "stress(ing) your contribution to your marriage" was seen as unacceptable and could have been the reason he was "seeking refuge." In this era, a woman advocating for herself was seen as enough reason for a man to break her trust and betray her after decades of marriage.

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In this household manual, The Art of Cooking and Serving, expectations are placed for housewives and how their family deserves to be treated every day. Manuals like this exemplify for me Ruth Schwartz Cowan's idea of shame and guilt being inherent in a housewive's life. Reading a manual like this would place guilt in the woman's mind if she couldn't perform all of these duties to the highest ability, especially when doing so would be incredibly difficult on top of all other household tasks.

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We employers realize how often the wrong wife can break the right man. This doesn’t mean that the wife is necessarily wrong for the man but that she is wrong for the job. On the other hand, more often than is realized the wife is the chief factor in the husband’s success in his career.

R.E. Dumas Milner, Good Housekeeping

R.E. Dumas Milner was a wealthy businessman in the automobile industry in the 40's and 50's. This quote was published in Good Housekeeping, and shows how much shame was placed on them for every part of their life including their own husband's success. Milner, rather than holding men accountable for their workplace actions and progress, places this expectation on the women. In the only part of men's lives that women don't directly control, the expectation is placed on them nonetheless.

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I found this chapter of Lowney's Cookbook to be particularly notable. Cookbooks of the early 1900s were meant not only as recipe books, but manuals on how to be a better wife and mother. Cooking was not so much a hobby as it is today, but an inherent element of being a wife and mother. The addition of the chapter "Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent" shows that a wive's duties in the kitchen were more than just cooking for the sake of making food, but that if necessary, her food should also be healing.

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Emily Mudd, for instance, outlined the many roles that women had to assume when they became wives. She approvingly quoted a “modern and prominent wife” who explained “To be a successful wife is a career in itself, requiring among other things, the qualities of a diplomat, a businesswoman, a good cook, a trained nurse, a schoolteacher, a politician and a glamour girl."

Kristin Celello, Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States

The knowledge has always been present that the wife has a set of expectations much greater than that of the husband. A wife must have all these qualities, but when contrasted with the expectations on the husband, they are worlds more responsibility. A man is expected to work a full shift at work, and this is valued higher because he makes money for it, but he is expected to do little else.

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Hosting for other families was a large part of keeping up a good image as a housewife in the early 20th century. These diagrams of plating setups for a 7 course dinner is intense enough to just look at, but speaks of a lot of inherent expectation beyond simply the proper plate set up. Several plates had to be warmed before being placed, and the cleaning and care of dishes meant intense work on the housewives part to be a good hostess and present an excellent public image.

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This series of advertisements are from 1918, 1922, 1928 and 1933, respectively. They show the transition in popular attitudes towards housework and the changes experienced in this 15 year time period. The first advertisement shows a housewife supervising a maid, but the maid is not present in any of the subsequent advertisements, showing how domestic help fell out of use. Mechanized "electrical gifts" were aimed towards housewives, and the household chores fell into the hands of the wife.

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This cookbook, titled "The Best Men are Cooks" states clearly in this introduction that when a man cooks, it is an inherently honorable and more dignified activity than when women do it. In this field historically dominated by women - home cooking was far more popular than restaurants for much of american history - men could still claim superiority. This shows how intensely misogyny permeated all of women's lives, even those aspects in which they were clearly more experienced.

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This article in the Saturday Evening Post, from here in Philadelphia in 1909, shows that people this early in the 1900s were aware of the hard work and long hours housewives had to put in. It emphasizes the longer hours worked by women compared to men, and the lack of payment and reward. Unfortunately, this knowledge wouldn't change the life of the housewife significantly until the 2nd wave of feminism, nearly 70 years later.

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After a survey found recently that young mothers long to be full-time home-makers, novelist Kate Kerrigan said: "Luxury is the time to stay at home and decorate cupcakes. We're not fighting for our right to work any more, we're fighting for our right to knit." Knitting, which is often used as a demonstration of radical feminism, can also be a demurely domestic pastime, like group crochet, cake-offs or joining the Women's Institute. "We long to put the clock back to the postwar years when life seemed prettier and nicer," writes another thirtysomething, who, like many of her contemporaries, has nostalgic fantasies about the pre-women's liberation era when mothers were never expected to juggle jobs and families. It is understandable that women today, who work long hours out of financial need, might yearn for more time at home. But distance has lent enchantment to that view of the 1950s and 60s. I remember those days very differently. A married woman's life was easier only in the sense that a prisoner's life is easy – difficult choices were made for you. Young mothers were not expected to have any job but childminding and housekeeping. Few women, and fewer married women, had real careers. But for every working mother now who fantasises about giving up work, there must have been a "captive wife" then, who felt utterly bored and frustrated by full-time domesticity. I was one of them. I was married a week after taking my Cambridge degree in 1959. I was 21, which didn't seem unusually young at the time. We had two sons and two daughters. Much as I adored them, I was not happy as a full-time wife and mother. Having achieved exactly what every girl was supposed to long for then, I knew I ought to be satisfied. Instead, I was prey to a mixture of undesirable emotions. There was boredom – you can dote on children, as I did, without wanting to spend every moment in their company. There was frustration – surely there ought to be something else? And there was shame – why wasn't I happy when I had everything women were supposed to want? Then I read Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, and found I wasn't alone. My feelings exactly matched the description of what she called "the problem that has no name", which turned out to be felt, but not admitted, by many of my contemporaries. Jump forward a generation and my daughter is looking after her two small children, cooking and cleaning, just – give or take some gadgets and machines – as I once did. Lavinia juggled work and babies for a while before becoming a full-time housewife. She is lucky she can afford to do this. But one of the most enduring aspects of motherhood is the feeling that "whatever mother does is wrong" – I felt guilty for not being fulfilled by life as a full-time mother, Lavinia feels guilty about enjoying it: "I know you wanted me to have the choices your generation missed out on so I worry that it's a disappointment to you that I've abandoned my chance to 'have it all'." But she hasn't. When the children are older, she will be able to return to work. One of the achievements of the women's liberation movement was that it became possible to start again, or start from scratch, later. That is the real difference between my disgruntled domesticity as a young woman, and the life Lavinia has chosen: she knows that it is not for ever. I had good reason to fear that, for me, it would be. All the same, Lavinia says: "Society seems to make women feel there is little kudos in being a mother or housewife – in fact, quite the opposite, which is why harking back to easier times like the 1950s is superficially beguiling." Easier times? Hardly. Unless you think life is easier when one has fewer choices. As for the actual work of housekeeping and childcare, it was much harder labour than nowadays – there were no dishwashers, driers, supermarkets, food processors or washing machines. We made beds with sheets and blankets – duvets came much later – boiled the towelling and muslin nappies, at least 10 per baby per day. As for cooking, not even the keenest contemporary cup-caker could possibly hanker for hacking fat and gristle off the stewing steak and mud off the cabbage. Supermarkets, with their trimmed, washed packages of raw materials, completely changed the nature of cooking, which I learned to do from scratch when I was married. It is another generational difference. Settling down at a later age means that you know how to do things properly. Lavinia and her contemporaries approach housewifeliness as they did their careers – they devise strategies, agendas and look for the best recipes, the best homework regime. But many still have the feeling that they ought to be in an office. Lavinia admits: "It's embarrassing to be asked what I do. Either you say 'nothing' or 'I keep two children alive', both of which leave you feeling defensive and inferior." Until the mid-70s, as a married woman, I really was inferior. No matter how liberal-minded and generous a husband might be (and mine was, and is) wives were subordinate. We could not take out loans or mortgages or hire purchase agreements. Even on the consent form for a caesarean section my husband's signature was required. The idea of working mothers with paid maternity leave would have been beyond fantastic. The family allowance (child benefit) was paid to the mother, but I knew women who were made to hand the money straight over to their husbands. A wife who walked out faced destitution. As the suffragettes had complained before the first world war: "Husband and wife are one person and that one is the husband." I have a faded newspaper article from the early 60s instructing wives how to welcome the heroic breadwinner home. It includes such gems as "Let him talk first – remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours," and "Remember, he is the master of the house ... You have no right to question him." This is the recent past, within living memory, but it really seems like a foreign country. Lavinia remembers me only in post-liberation days, and says she can't imagine me putting up with it all for so long, asking: "Why didn't you all protest sooner?" It took our younger sisters, the post-war baby-boomers, to recognise the discrimination we had taken for granted, and start the fight against it. Earlier this year, the Fawcett Society organised the first protest demo in its nearly 150 years: marchers in 50s housewife gear – rubber gloves, headscarves and full-skirted frocks – took to the streets, in towns and cities all over Britain. The message was that austerity measures  proposed or passed in parliament will turn back time – to the 50s – on women's rights. It was a timely and probably necessary reminder that the price of women's liberation is eternal vigilance. The restrictions and limitations that I grew up with may seem like history, but equal rights can always be whittled away. Nobody who knows what life before the feminist revolution was really like could seriously wish to put the clock back to a time when women were second-class citizens. I want my daughter, and she wants hers, to have the self-determination and freedom of choice that women did not have when I was young. Life wasn't easier, prettier or nicer in the 50s and 60s, and those were not the good old days.

Jessica Mann for The Guardian, 2012

Jessica Mann was born in 1937 and became a housewife in 1959 at age 21. Her essay for the Guardian tells her own firsthand account of being a housewife during this era, and her disdain for the trend of women today wishing for this life. Being a housewife is often idealized as being easier than and similarly fulfilling to that of a working woman today, but Mann draws from her own experience to tell us that this is not the case.

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This excerpt from Ruth Schwartz Cowan's paper, "The “Industrial Revolution” in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century" is most notable for the statistics on domestic work when contrasted before and after World War II. Theoretically, the advent of the industrial revolution would have brought mechanized machines to the home and made the life of the housewife easier, but as Cowan states, "new jobs were substituted" and "time expenditures for old jobs increased because of higher standards." A woman's job instead became more time consuming during this revolution.

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When America entered the twentieth century, almost half of its population lived on a farm (compared with approximately one percent in the year 2000). It was a hard life. There was little industrialization to help with the chores and no electricity to illuminate the darkness. The majority of farms were family-run, providing subsistence and hopefully an income through the sale of any surplus. "I am not a practical woman." The following description of farm life was written at the turn of the twentieth century by an anonymous woman who had secret aspirations to be a writer. At the time she wrote this she was in her early 30s and had been married about 14 years. She and her husband, whom she describes as "innocent of book-learning," have two children. In addition to providing insight into life on a farm, she reveals a much different attitude towards the marital role of women than we have today: "I have been a farmer's wife in one of the States of the Middle West for thirteen years, and everybody knows that the farmer's wife must of a necessity be a very practical woman, if she would be a successful one. I am not a practical woman and consequently have been accounted a failure by practical friends and especially by my husband, who is wholly practical. We are told that the mating of people of opposite natures promotes intellectuality in the offspring; but I think that happy homes are of more consequence than extreme precocity of children. However, I believe that people who are thinking of mating do not even consider whether it is to be the one or the other. We do know that when people of opposite tastes get married there's a discordant note runs through their entire married life. It’s only a question of which one has the stronger will in determining which tastes shall predom­inate. In our case my husband has the stronger will; he is innocent of book learning, is a natural hustler who believes that the only way to make an honest living lies in digging it out of the ground, so to speak, and being a farmer, he finds plenty of digging to do; he has an inherited tendency to be miserly, loves money for its own sake rather than for its purchasing power, and when he has it in his possession he is loath to part with it, even for the most necessary articles, and prefers to eschew hired help in every possible instance that what he does make may be his very own. No man can run a farm without some one to help him, and in this case I have always been called upon and expected to help do anything that a man would be expected to do; I began this when we were first married, when there were few household duties and no reasonable excuse for refusing to help. I was reared on a farm, was healthy and strong, was ambitious, and the work was not disagreeable, and having no children for the first six years of married life, the habit of going whenever asked to became firmly fixed, and he had no thought of hiring a man to help him, since I could do anything for which he needed help. . . . I was an apt student at school and before I was eighteen I had earned a teacher's certificate of the second grade and would gladly have remained in school a few more years, but I had, unwittingly, agreed to marry the man who is now my husband, and though I begged to be released, his will was so much stronger that I was unable to free myself without wounding a loving heart, and could not find it in my nature to do so. . . . Later, when I was married, I borrowed everything I could find in the line of novels and stories, and read them by stealth still, for my husband thought it a willful waste of time to read anything and that it showed a lack of love for him if I would rather read than to talk to him when I had a few moments of leisure, and, in order to avoid giving offense and still gratify my desire, I would only read when he was not at the house, thereby greatly curtailing my already too limited reading hours. . . . It is only during the last three years that I have had the news to read, for my husband is so very penurious that he would never consent to subscribing for papers of any kind and that old habit of avoiding that which would give offense was so fixed that I did not dare to break it. . . . This is a vague, general idea of how I spend my time; my work is so varied that it would be difficult, indeed, to describe a typical day's work. Any bright morning in the latter part of May I am out of bed at four o'clock; next, after I have dressed and combed my hair, I start a fire in the kitchen stove, and while the stove is getting hot I go to my flower garden and gather a choice, half-blown rose and a spray of bride's wreath, and arrange them in my hair, and sweep the floors and then cook breakfast. While the other members of the family are eating breakfast I strain away the morning's milk (for my husband milks the cows while I get breakfast), and fill my husband's dinner pail, for he will go to work on our other farm for the day. By this time it is half-past five o'clock, my husband is gone to his work, and the stock loudly pleading to be turned into the pastures. The younger cattle, a half-dozen steers, are left in the pasture at night, and I now drive the two cows, a half-quarter mile and turn them in with the others, come back, and then there's a horse in the barn that be­longs in a field where there is no water, which I take to a spring quite a distance from the barn; bring it back and turn it into a field with the sheep, a dozen in number, which are housed at night. The young calves are then turned out into the warm sunshine, and the stock hogs, which are kept in a pen, are clamoring for feed, and I carry a pailful of swill to them, and hasten to the house and turn out the chickens and put out feed and water for them, and it is, perhaps, 6.30 A..M. I have not eaten breakfast yet, but that can wait; I make the beds next and straighten things up in the living room, for I dislike to have the early morning caller find my house topsy-turvy. When this is done I go to the kitchen, which also serves as a dining-room, and uncover the table, and take a mouthful of food occasionally as I pass to and fro at my work until my appetite is appeased. By the time the work is done in the kitchen it is about 7.15 A. M., and the cool morning hours have flown, and no hoeing done in the garden yet, and the children's toilet has to be attended to and churning has to be done. Finally the children are washed and churning done, and it is eight o'clock, and the sun getting hot, but no matter, weeds die quickly when cut down in the heat of the day, and I use the hoe to a good advantage until the din­ner hour, which is 11.30 A. M. We come in, and I comb my hair, and put fresh flowers in it, and eat a cold dinner, put out feed and water for the chickens; set a hen, perhaps, sweep the floors again; sit down and rest, and read a few moments, and it is nearly one 0' clock, and I sweep the door yard while I am waiting for the clock to strike the hour. I make and sow a flower bed, dig around some shrubbery, and go back to the garden to hoe until time to do the chores at night, but ere long some hogs come up to the back gate, through the wheat field, and when I go to see what is wrong I find that the cows have torn the fence down, and they, too, are in the wheat field. With much difficulty I get them back into their own domain and repair the fence. I hoe in the garden till four o'clock; then I go into the house and get supper, and prepare some­thing for the dinner pail to-morrow; when supper is all ready it is set aside, and I pull a few hundred plants of tomato, sweet potato or cabbage for transplanting, set them in a cool, moist place where they will not wilt, and I then go after the horse, water him, and put him in the barn; call the sheep and house them, and go after the cows and milk them, feed the hogs, put down hay for three horses, and put oats and corn in their troughs, and set those plants and come in and fasten up the chickens, and it is dark. By this time it is 8 o'clock P. M.; my husband has come home, and we are eating supper; when we are through eating I make the beds ready, and the children and their father go to bed, and I wash the dishes and get things in shape to get breakfast quickly next morning. It is now about 9 o'clock P. M., and after a short prayer I retire for the night."

Anonymous Farm Wife, 1900. EyeWitness to History

This personal account from a farm wife in 1900 shows how in lower-class and farming families, work was likely more equally split. Since this farm wife has a stake in producing food and tending to crops on her own, and the husband works on the other farm during the day, her work is not entirely different from his. During the mid-early 20th century, especially in middle-class households, the man took on all of the work and the woman's tasks changed to be entirely serving of her husband.

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a 1937 Fortune survey showed “70 percent of the rich, 42 percent of the upper middle class, 14 percent of the lower middle class, and 6 percent of the poor reported” hiring help.

Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945

This Fortune survey shows how attitudes towards domestic help have changed since the early 1900s. Much of the rich today don't even have hired domestic help, which shows that hiring and paying for this service has mostly fallen out of fashion. Once this work stopped being delegated to maids and caretakers, housewives now bore the entirety of cleaning, cooking, childcare, and pleasing a husband.

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Betty Crocker's "Homemaker's Creed," published in 1944, shows a notable acknowledgement for the hard work that goes into being a housewife. By noting the "art" behind homemaking and its nature as a "noble and challenging career," this creed helps bring to light the labor and effort put into being a housewife. This showed some appreciation, but also increased the pressure for anyone in the position of homemaker to live up to these standards.

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ADVANCE: How to be a Good Wife HAVE DINNER READY: Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal--on time. This is a way to let him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned with his needs. Most men are hungry when they come home, and having a good meal ready is part of the warm welcome that is needed. PREPARE YOURSELF: Take fifteen minutes to rest so that you will be refreshed when he arrives. He has just been with a lot of work-weary people. Be a little gay and a little more interesting. His boring day may need a lift. Greet him with a smile. CLEAR AWAY THE CLUTTER: Make one last trip though the main part of the house just before your husband arrives, gathering up children's books and toys, papers, etc. Then run a dust cloth over the tables. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest and order, and it will give you lift too. PREPARE THE CHILDREN: If they are small, wash their hands and faces and comb their hair. They are his little treasures and he would like to see them playing the part. MINIMIZE ALL NOISE: At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise from the washer, dryer, or vacuum. Encourage the children to be quiet. SOME "DO NOT'S": Don't greet him with problems and complaints. Don't complain if he is late for dinner. Count this as a minor problem compared to what he might have gone through that day. MAKE HIM COMFORTABLE: Have a cool or warm drink ready for him. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or suggest that he lie down in the bedroom. Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing voice. Allow him to relax and unwind. LISTEN TO HIM: You may have a dozen things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first. MAKE THE EVENING HIS: Never complain if he doesn't take you to dinner or to other entertainment. Instead, try to understand his world of strain and pressure and his need to unwind and relax. THE GOAL: TO MAKE YOUR HOME A PLACE OF PEACE AND ORDER WHERE YOUR HUSBAND CAN RELAX IN BODY AND SPIRIT.

Home Economics Textbook, c. 1950

This excerpt from a 1950s home economics textbook explicitly details "How to be a Good Wife" and shows the extreme emphasis placed on a woman's role as a wife. Changing the reality of the household through "clearing away the clutter," "minimizing all noise," and "preparing the children" both placed more expectation on the wife and decreased the husband's need to help: if things were perfect when he got home, as they should be, there is no need for him to put in equal work.

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By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Anne Morrow Lindbergh was born in 1906 and was a pilot as well as an author on women's life in the 20th century. This quote is from her 1955 book, Gifts from the Sea, and tells an important aspect of the lives of women. In unpaid domestic work, there is never time off because the husband and children are always present and need tending to. When the husband doesn't contribute, the american woman never had time off.