Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [74]
Within the farmhouse, electricity would have made an even greater difference to daily life than in towns and cities, where homes usually had been connected to municipal gas, water, and sewage systems before they were electrified. City wives could take advantage of servants, laundries, bakeries, stores, and butcher shops. For farmwomen, hauling water—a four-gallon bucket weighed more than thirty-two pounds—was one of the more demanding tasks. "I would have to get it ... more than once a day, more than twice; oh, I don't know how many times. I needed water to wash my floors, water to wash my clothes, water to cook.... It was hard work. I was always packing water," commented a Texas farm wife. Another said, "You see how round shouldered I am? Well, that's from hauling the water."
Besides cleaning the house and cooking meals, farmwomen canned fruits and vegetables, which meant hauling wood or coal for the fire and standing over a hot stove almost daily in high summer. When the peaches were ripe, the corn was also ripe, and the beans and tomatoes, and they rotted quickly in the heat. But cooking and harvesting and canning were the least of it. "I have always lived on a farm except the first five years of my marriage, and I think I might almost as soon have been in jail, because the work is so hard and is never done. The hardest is the washing," remarked one woman. Doing laundry not only required hauling and heating water. Farmwomen soaked and scrubbed their entire family's clothes on a washboard in a zinc tub. "I got up many a time at three o'clock in the morning, when I had the family, to wash clothes," one recalled. They heated more water for rinsing, and wrung out all the clothes by hand or put them through a mangle, or wringer, before hanging them to dry. "By the time you got done washing your back was broke," one woman remembered. "I'll tell you—of the things of my life that I will never forget, I will never forget how much my back hurt on washdays." Women then spent another day pressing the family's clothes with their cast-iron sad-irons. Once again, the stove would be heated and enough wood hauled to keep it going all day.
As for light, farmwomen still had to polish the globes of their kerosene lamps once or twice a week and deal with the smoke and soot the flame created. Over time, the brightness of oil lamps had increased—the Aladdin lamp, with its delicate mantle, was advertised as giving off the same light as sixty candles—but it was still work and still fussy. Former president Jimmy Carter wrote:
Our artificial light came from kerosene lamps, and it was considered almost sinful to leave one burning in an unoccupied room. The only exception was in the front living room, where we had an Aladdin lamp about five feet high whose asbestos wick miraculously provided illumination bright enough for reading in a wide area. We turned this flame way down when we went to eat a meal, both to conserve fuel and to avoid the lamp's tendency to flame up and blacken the fragile wick with thick soot. When this happened—a mishap for which someone always had to be identified as the culprit—we had to endure an extended period of careful flame control while we waited in near darkness for the soot to burn off enough for us to read again.
And kerosene lamps carried another ancient danger for mothers: "You know, you couldn't leave a baby that could move around at all in a room with a lamp or a candle. So you either had to keep the baby in the dark or stay there with him."
There is a difference between living such a life before the development of electricity and living such a life because you are deprived of it. By the 1920s, farmers knew full well that their isolation existed in