AND^PMiM|
Three generations of an Alexander County farming family,
Like their mothers and grandmothers before
them, most North Carolina women at the begin¬
ning of the twentieth century lived on farms. The
w'ork they performed was crucial to family wel¬
fare. Routine domestic tasks required strong
muscles and the mastery of many different skills.
Farm women's work fell under a broad um¬
brella of activities. They grew, cooked, and pre¬
served most of the food that graced their tables.
Besides gardening, they fed chickens, gathered
eggs, milked cows, and churned butter. Farm
women also made many of the clothes that cov¬
ered their family's backs, pieced together quilts,
sewed mattress ticks that they stuffed with straw
or soft downy feathers plucked from geese each
spring, and hooked rags into rugs. The products
of their labor, moreover, often served as a form of
money in a bartering system. Butter and eggs
were swapped at country stores for coffee, sugar,
and the few other staples that could not be pro¬
duced at home.
Performing routine housework — like cooking
three meals a day, washing dishes, and cleaning
house — required stamina and a great deal of ef¬
fort. Every drop of water used for cooking, clean¬
ing, and bathing had to be drawn from a well or
hauled from a spring. Over the years, a woman
. could accumulate appreciable mileage merely
ca. 1934.
Tick. The fabric case of a mat¬
tress or pillow.
fetching pails of water. One observer in the 1880s
calculated that a woman whose source of water
was sixty yards from the house and who made
six round trips for water a day had walked more
than 6,000 miles during her forty-one years as a
farmer's wife. All this while she toted heavy
buckets in winter's cold and summer's heat.
Housework was, without a doubt, arduous
and often monotonous. But many domestic tasks
called upon a host of artisanlike skills. Consider
the examples of soapmaking and washing. Be¬
fore soapmaking even began, a woman might
make one of its essential ingredients, lye, by
dripping hot water over ashes. Lye, animal fat,
ashes, and water combined to make soap. The
ingredients had to be boiled, the lye content ad¬
justed, cooked until done, allowed to harden,
and then cut into squares. "It will be dark," a soap
recipe warned, "but no matter, it will make
clothes clean and bright." Making soap was an
occasional activity, often performed after hog
killings when the supply of fat was plentiful or
when there was a sufficient amount of kitchen
grease. Making clothes clean and bright w'as a
job that came as regularly as sunrise on Monday
mornings.
Washing without the aid of a machine was a
long, detailed process that required the intricate
*
"North Carolina Museum of History Intern.
17
