Sunday, September 1, 2013

What were houses like in the 1950's in the USA?

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Did they have electricity and indoor plumbing?

What were the rooms like?

Was the house kept tidy?

What kind of cleaning equipment was used?

Did they have vacuum cleaners, bleach and air freshener?



Answer
The houses in the 1950's had plumbing, vacuum cleaners, bleach, air fresheners, automatic washers and dryers and frost less refrigerators. Black and white TVs were in a lot of homes. Window air conditioners were used by a lot of people. The people that did not have ACs lived in houses with big windows and front and back doors that lined up with each other. The opened doors and windows pulled air through the houses. Porches and shade trees were important to keep houses shady and cooler. Box fans were put in windows to pull air inside. Attic fans were used to move air around in the houses.
Houses were different sizes and so were the rooms. Like today. The average amount of kids was four. Three bed rooms was needed. Bunk beds were common. In small towns windows and doors could be left unlocked. Not today. Things can disappear. Car keys could be left in the car. No one would steal them.
Some people had wall to wall rugs, some had carpet, some had linoleum and tile and varnished floors. The non carpet flooring was sweep, mopped and waxed. Wax buffers were used to shine the wax on the floors. Houses were tidy. When the floors were shiny, they looked great. A lot of women stayed at home and took care of the kids and the homes. Homes were kept clean. The rich hired maids. Women had time to have bridge games and other card games.
Skirts and dresses came down way below the knees. Clothes were made from cotton. Clothes were starched in cooked starch then sprinkled with water to make them damp and then ironed. They looked very neat. They were ironed with electric irons. Nylon stockings with seams down the back of the legs were wore. It was very important to keep the seams straight. In the very early 50's men and women wore hats with their suits. Kids wore real leather penny loafers to school that were polished and shiny and wore white bobby socks that were bleached. Men wore a lot of white shirts that were bleached, starched and ironed. And white blouses were popular. They were bleached, starched and ironed. Guys wore short hair. Jeans were starched and ironed. Girls wore different lengths of hair. The hair was rolled with bobby pins to make it curly. And there were electric hair dryers. It was very important to have white things white and clothes ironed and to look very neat.
Olsmobiles cars had 3 or 4 holes on each side of the motor. Each hole stood for a thousand dollars. Cars did not have AC's. Windows were put down and vents under the dash boards could be opened for air to blow in. Small windows by the large windows that were rolled down could be turned toward the face so the air could blow on you. So head scarfs and combs were nessasary to go somewhere.
White cotton sheets were common and they were bleached. They could be put in a dryer or hung on a clothes line to make them really smell fresh. So, bleach was very important then. The white sinks and bath tubs were bleached.

how did the great depression effect american families?




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Answer
In America's women, Gail Collins writes:

'The country had faced other huge economic crises, but this was the first to arrive since America had developed a large urban middle class, families who were dependent on wage income and who believed that the necessities of life included not only food and shelter, but electricity, indoor plumbing, and an automobile. Few of those people went hungry or homeless during the Depression, but they lived in a constant state of fear and diminished expectation. Diana Morgan, a North Carolina student, felt "the world was falling apart" when she came home for Christmas and found the phone had been disconnected. children were shocked by seeing their fathers put on overalls instead of a suit for work, or a mother trying to sell door-to-door products. The writer Caroline Bird said her worst memory was seeing a friend of the family, who she remembered as a proud captian in the US navy, taking tickets at the neighborhood movie theatre.

The average family income dropped 40 percent between 1929 and 1933, and while men took second jobs or searched fro ebetter-paying employment in an oversaturated market, most of their wives stayed home and struggled with what Eleanor Roosevelt called "endless little economies and constant anxieties. At the bottom of the middle class, women worried about losing their homes and falling back into the class of renters - in Indianapolis, more than half the families with mortgages had defaulted on them by 1934. Those higher on the economic ladder simply had to figure out how to keep up appearances without the help of servants. (An ad for bleach showed a pair of elegant hands in a tub of dirty laundry "doing it yourself these days?").

The issue of whether married women should work was chewed over constantly in the newspapers and magazines, with the consensus coming down on the side of not. Legislators in twenty-six states introduced laws completely banning the hiring of married women, although only Louisinanna actually passed a law, and it was quickly declared unconstitutional. More than three-quarters of the nation's public school district refused to hire married teachers - unless they were male.

Despite all this, the number of married women who worked continued to increase throughout the decade. Although most of these women struggled to keep poor families above water, a number were middle class and were attempting to preserve the good things they had gotten used to since World War I - like electric lights and gas stoves,a nd the abilitiy tokeep their children in school. it was an important cultural shift that sent married women into the workforce in greater and greater numbers. And for all th eendless debate about whether or not it was good for soceity, the issue was resolved not by social theorists but by the women themselves, determined that they and their families would not only survive but also move up.

The people who suffered most during the Depression were already poor, and now they quickly got poorer. "I have seen fear grip the people in our neighborhood around Hull House" wrote Jane Addams. Peggy Terry, a migrant worker, remembered seeing a "Hooverville" in OKlahoma City. "Here were all these people living in ol,d rusted-out car bodies. I mean that was their home. There were poeple living in shacks made of orange crates. One family with a whole lot of kids were living in a piano box. This wasn't just a little section, this was maybe ten miles wide and ten miles long." '




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