Mary was a trendsetter for another reason — she was the first to own one of the ‘twin tub’ washing machines which, in their whirring, boxy white form, signalled one of technology’s answers to the perennial slog of keeping house in the 1950s. Soon, the Yorkshire-built mangle that sat by the outdoor coal scuttle disappeared, and with it the copper pot that doubled, at Christmas time, as a steamer of suet puddings, carefully wrapped in sheaths of muslin. Food rationing still had four years to run — the bananas that formed the centrepiece of Mary’s 1960s trifles were yet to arrive, and carrots still bulked up her Christmas fruit cake — but for the Greatest Generation, a brave new world had arrived on the doorstep in the form of electric carpet sweepers, skittering twin tubs and Morphy Richards electric steam irons.

It only fleetingly occurred to Mary, as she carefully pressed the turn-ups into my grandfather’s tweeds, that she missed the day-to-day conviviality of the munitions factory line in York. Life, after all, was tangibly easier for her than it had been for her mother Elsie. At Mary’s age, Elsie was struggling to maintain a household of small children at a time when husbands and sons returned wounded and shell-shocked from the First World War. One bright morning in 1921, three years after her husband Percival had returned from the Front, Elsie walked out onto the moorland surrounding the family’s Yorkshirestone farmhouse at Blackmoorfoot, slipped the cool barrel of Percival’s shotgun into her mouth, and pulled the trigger. The poacher who discovered her body would remark to a local newspaper on the shade of her hair: a glowing auburn that echoed the late-blooming heather on which she fell.

When pressed, in later years, about her mother’s death, my grandmother would softly repeat the family adage that Elsie’s was ‘a mother’s trouble’.

A mother’s trouble. I remember grappling, as a child, with this phrase, redolent as it was of things-between-women and gynaecological discomfort. It took me until adulthood to understand that my grandmother Mary had in mind two specific troubles: the episodic mental illness we’d now call postpartum depression, and the drudgery of keeping a young family fed and warm with a generation of men unable to work for a wage.

The Lost Generation’s lot on the home front was as brutal as it was on the deathly battlefields of France. Many of the young men who’d left in Kitchener’s Pals battalions for the Front — which included 1,659 men from Elsie and Percival’s small quarter of West Yorkshire — would never return home. Of those that did, many were broken by their experience: wheezing from chlorine gas attacks, haunted by the daily horror movie of nightmares and flashbacks. Amongst the young women of Elsie’s generation who were single at the outbreak of the First World War, only one in ten would marry.¹⁰ It fell to these ‘silent widows’ and ‘surplus women’ to hold domestic life together — and care for the sick and wounded — on a shoestring.

In 1921, only 6 per cent of British homes were wired for electricity. Coal-gas lighting — a feature found in 40 per cent of London working-class homes by 1937 — was a big breakthrough, putting paid to the laborious and ancient task of ‘lighting up’, but only a fraction of rural homes benefited from piped coal-gas in the 1920s. Homes such as Elsie’s made do with paraffin lamps, the filling and cleaning of which was a labour-intensive job: lamps needed to be kept half-filled to maintain a flame, and were vulnerable to being extinguished by the draughts that plagued rural dwellings. Cleaning equipment — mops made of old rags, brushes from pigs’ bristles, and birch-handled brooms — had barely changed since the 1600s, and washing up, in the era before modern surfactant detergents, was performed with soda flakes, which left hands cracked and raw. Particularly onerous was the effort to keep homes warm. Cleaning coal-fire grates, setting coal fires and disposing of staining and blackening coal-dust was a never-ending task, particularly in the regions, such as Elsie’s, that burned ash-producing, non-bituminous coal. Meanwhile, laundry day — traditionally Monday — was just that: extending through hours of backbreaking wringing and scrubbing, little aided by technology such as the ‘dolly’ (a wooden, three-legged fabric-twisting device) and ridged wooden scrubbing boards.

In her 1967 Fenland Chronicle, Sybil Marshall enumerates the labour that fell to women such as Elsie in the agricultural regions of Britain at the turn of the 20th century. Up at dawn to sweep, clean and set fires, these women were often called upon to work in the fields between their cooking, food production, washing-up, fire-setting, lighting-up and laundry duties. With menfolk relaxing at nightfall, it fell to women to prepare and clean up after the evening meal, put the children to bed, and make or mend clothes and spin yarn by candle- or lamplight. Women’s working days began when they rose and ended at bedtime. Leisure, for women, was non-existent.

In her 1982 history of housework in the British Isles, A Woman’s Work Is Never Done, Caroline Davidson notes the weighty domestic labour burden that, until the late 20th century, fell upon country women such as Elsie. Unlike city-dwellers, country women typically kept animals and cottage gardens, adding food processing to their list of chores — alongside the production from scratch of goods that could be bought readymade in the city, such as tallow or rush candles and lye, a detergent extracted from wood or plant ashes. Laundry services to ‘put out’^* the weekly wash, common in cities by the 1920s, were unknown in the British countryside, and fuel was often harder to come by than in cities and suburbs, where horse-and-cart coal delivery men plied their wares.

The spectre of social attitudes will also have haunted Elsie’s daily grind. Even if the men at Blackmoorfoot had been willing to alleviate the domestic labour burden, in the 1920s the taboo of male involvement would have been a powerful inhibitor.

In Elsie’s day, the first Housework Cult held sway. The 19th century had spelled the end of the pre-industrial ‘family economy’, in which most labour was conducted in and around the family dwelling. With the arrival of industrial capitalism, work was divided into two categories: that which was undertaken for a wage and conducted outside of the home; and that which was unpaid and conducted at home. The latter became a new occupational category of nonwork — or ‘Occupation: Housewife’, as the census records termed it. Emerging as a by-product of this development and reaching its zenith in the 1880s — but persisting well into the 20th century — the Victorian Housework Cult invented the term ‘housework’ as we understand it today: a specific set of tasks ascribed to women that were carried out within the home or on its periphery, unpaid and (supposedly) discrete to the male domain of productive labour. Although men and women seldom shared housework on an equal basis, diaries from the 17th and 18th centuries talk of a climate in which men pitched in at home. The diaries of Nicholas Blundell of Little Crosby, Lancashire, written in the early 1700s, describe the author laying the Christmas table, dressing decorative flower pots for chimneys, making preserves, managing servants and keeping household accounts to make life easier for his wife Frances, who bore him two children in quick succession.

By the 1890s, however, a rigid gendered division of labour had been established in much of the West. In his 1935 memoir, Yorkshire Days and Yorkshire Ways, J. Fairfax-Blakeborough paints a picture of late-Victorian rural Yorkshire in which it was a marker of household honour that men did not lift a finger at home. Wives were expected to address their husbands as ‘master’ and serve them obsequiously – even, as Fairfax-Blakeborough describes it, within days of giving birth. Husbands compelled by character or sympathy to help out on the home front often did so in secret: Caroline Davidson notes that husbands in 1890s Manchester who were caught in the act of pitching in domestically were mocked as ‘mop rags’ and ‘diddy men’.^*

The Housework Cult led to the extreme and neurotic state of affairs encapsulated in Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, a strange and despotic advisory that prescribes, amongst other pointless tasks, the washing of stair bannisters daily and the zestful ‘shaking’ of curtains. Amongst the middle classes of this era, domestic femininity was frequently performed through the collection and maintenance of dust-gathering lace and knick-knacks (signalling a woman’s ability to afford and manage servants).

Similarly, for working-class women good housekeeping was performed through the propriety and outward appearance of their family’s front step. Styles of doorstep finish varied from region to region — in Salford a substance called ‘blue mould’ was popular; in Wales, chalk was in vogue; and orange-red ruddlestone found favour in the West Yorkshire region where Elsie lived. What united these women was the effort of donning their aprons and getting down on hands and knees with buckets and brushes, to scrub away the thankless muck and grime of industrial streets. In the 1950s, according to historian Virginia Nicholson,¹¹ visitors to working-class terraces would still be greeted by the sight of crouching women scrubbing and chalking their stoops, a space, as Nicholson describes it, where working-class women found happy camaraderie. As late as the 1970s, my grandmother’s neighbour Hilda, in my mother’s recollection, got down on her knees to soap and ruddlestone her Yorkshire-stone threshold. ‘She was set on getting it to what she called a “clean fettle”,’ my mother recalls. ‘She did it into her eighties and I suppose her knees held up because she’d rub them with liniment afterwards.’

Working-class women’s step-scrubbing, in historian Robert Roberts’s interpretation, was designed to broadcast ‘the image of a spotless household into the world at large’ — a spotlessness that was intimately associated with religious and moral virtue. ‘Cleanliness is close to godliness’, the motto of the 19thcentury sanitary reformers,^* was accepted wisdom, with dirt and sin the twin moral battlegrounds of the respectable home.

My grandmother Mary and her husband Thomas were brought together, in part, by a cruel coincidence. Six years after Elsie’s suicide and barely two miles east, 33-year-old Hilda Barker had knelt on the cool flagstones of her kitchen floor as her seven-year-old twins Tom and Bob ran errands for customers in the family’s grocery shop downstairs and her newborn son John, the shop pet, giggled on her sister’s hip. The same sister, with an animal scream that her nephew Thomas could still recall as an old man, discovered Hilda an hour later: her head drooping into the oven drawer of the new coal-gas range.

Thomas and Mary married 15 years after Hilda’s death and a few months after Thomas’s return from the front at El Alamein, where he’d been an army engineer. Home life during early marriage, she told me as a child as she reminisced over orange-hued photographs, was happy. Through 50 years of marriage, my grandmother kept more-or-less patient house, tolerant of Thomas’s muddy boots and expressing bright gratitude when he made her a cup of tea; and he rose at 6 a.m. to build the tower of twisted-newspaper kindle to light the coal fire that warmed their 18th-century stone cottage. Thomas served sherry at Saturday-afternoon gatherings with extended family, when they’d put wood shavings down on the floor of the ‘lean-to’ garage and dance to the strains of the new 16-inch gramophone.

Twenty-five years after her mother took delivery of that gleaming twin-tub, my mother Anne, a Home Economics teacher with a good line in sausage plaits, embraced the domestic vogues of the 1970s: the chest-freezer cookbook and the backyard chicken coop. The Home Economics syllabus at the Church of England girls’ school where she taught included ‘family egg dishes’ as well as crafting tasks such as crocheting oven gloves and hand-beading dinner-party napkin rings. At home, she baked hemp-seed biscuits with her hand-reared eggs; rustled up fine salads with the blushing tomatoes that fruited, too briefly, on our suntrap patio; filled the freezer with single portions of coq au vin; and made homemade vanilla yoghurt that my brother and I would steal from the back of the fridge, unscrewing the little yellow jar tops to guiltily eat the contents with our tongues.

It didn’t matter that our chickens Hen, Holly, Sammy and Hilda (and their several avian successors) were cruelly torn apart, limb by limb, by suburban foxes; their carcasses melancholically strewn across box hedges and pampas grass. The coop, and the neatly serried rows of spring beans, were my mother’s bid for the Good Life. If my grandmother’s pocket advisory was Housekeeping Monthly, my mother’s was John Seymour’s Self-Sufficiency, the suburban smallholders’ bible that advised how to press cheese, spin flax and properly construct a goat coop (at a wise distance, apparently, from the caprine peril of the rhododendron bush). Anne’s ambition was her generation’s: to return to a largely imagined British Golden Age of allotments, buttered spuds and hand-reared cattle stock. Much of this misty-eyed nostalgia was, as we’ll see, a backlash to the pace of social change: to British women abandoning the kitchen for the workplace, and all of the anxieties that provoked around how — and by whom — families would be clothed and fed. Keen-eyed feminist readers won’t miss the irony of a generation who’d never had it so good in terms of domestic comforts and technology, and in which men were beginning — however half-heartedly — to pitch in on the domestic front, nostalgically harking back to the ‘natural living’ of an Edwardian era that had been, for many, back-breaking and hard.

Yet my mother hummed as she vacuumed the hessian matting around our ginger Habitat scoop chairs with her upright Electrolux, relieved that the inefficient carpet sweepers had gone the way of her great-aunt Lily’s punishing corsets. She viewed her life, as did many of her contemporaries, with mixed grace. Following a package holiday to the Tarragona resort town of Salou, my father Kenneth had started to produce Friday-night suppers of half-collapsed egg scrambles he optimistically called ‘Spanish’ omelettes. Kenneth also made a stab at the nightly washing-up, tapping Condor Ready Rubbed pipe ash into the gathering suds. He offered a then-generous three hours a week to the labours required to maintain our three-bed semi in the least posh part of Solihull. That said, my mum wouldn’t — as she tells me now — have called herself a feminist. She liked her padded bras with their cups like the Great Pyramid of Giza, and she vaguely imagined feminism might deny her the benefits of her Maybelline Great Lash mascara. Feminism was for other — metropolitan — women.

These days, women of my generation have three times as many gadgets to ease household burdens as my mother did, and five times as many as my grandmother enjoyed.¹² We have gadgets to automatically vacuum overnight, or to shush a screaming baby with a mimic of her mother’s heartbeat or by rocking her according to the pitch of her wails; we have technology that controls the heating in individual rooms and warms the oven for our return fro...