Product Information

How to Run Your Home Without Help

Product Code: HOW3O6XC64

 

Here's where we discover that work/life balance is not a new problem - and in Kay Smallshaw's 'How to Run Your Home …', first published in 1949, we find a wealth of thoughtful advice on how to compress the maximum amount of housework and cookery into the minimum number of hours - and to go through 'the daily round' without ever wanting to string yourself up from the drudgery of it all.

Written with the newly-married housewife in mind, this is in fact a useful handbook for anyone taking charge of their own domestic destiny for the first time. In the Twenty-first Century, much of the faux professionalism of 'wifely' housework has been thankfully demolished - but like it or not, male or female, single or otherwise, we all still have to shift for (and clean up after) ourselves!

Every detail of the business of running a home is covered, with thought even given to the way layout can greatly reduce the labour involved. Even if you only dip in for the odd tip here and there, this book will prove an invaluable source for both reference and recreational reading - and is guaranteed to save so much time and sweat into the bargain! Among very much more, chapters cover; what running a home entails, equipment needed and its care, how your circumstances will dictate what can and can't be done, time management, the importance of the sink, spring cleaning, technicalities of darning and laundry, efficient habits in shopping, a guide to the basics of nutrition, how to adapt to the arrival of a new baby - and even (tremendously modern) chapters on the 'Part-time Housewife' and 'A Man About the House'! Yes, really!

With a 2005 preface by Christina Hardiment setting out the historical background to the book, even at a remove of some sixty years this manual is an absolute essential for anyone faced with the sometimes overwhelming job of running a home. The perfect gift from an anxious mother to a fledgling child?

"With a married couple, unless sex differences are forgotten, and the work is shared fifty-fifty, the strain on the wife may well be too great. A man about the house usually makes more work than he performs! When there are children, outside help is essential, unless days are to become ceaseless toil.

So let's assume that you are a career woman with a small flat. You think you ought to be able to care for it on your own, if you use your brains as you do in the office. Right! Make your routine clean-cut, pared down to the bone. Plan so that you have time to enjoy your home as well as work in it."

1949? Not much has changed …

208pp Persephone softback reproduction of a book first published in 1949, illustrated, with endpapers and matching bookmark taken from a 1946 dress fabric.

 

£12.00

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All Content © Claire Leavey 2014-18

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