How To Run Your Home Without Help :: Buy from Oxfam on The UK High Street

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'Some of the smartest lessons in how we live now are to be found not in government speeches or fashionable film releases, but in the small grey-covered books published by Persephone Books,' wrote Andrew O'Hagan in the Daily Telegraph. 'The volumes are usually lost classics of female writing; they promote the notion that understanding the past is a reasonable way to go about identifying the present, and I have been looking at their newest release as a way of getting a handle on the idea of British domestic bliss.' The book he was looking at was How to Run Your Home without Help (1949). This, as its title implies, is a book about housework: we have republished it because, even today, it is extremely useful (Kim and Aggie of Channel 4's 'How Clean is Your House?' would approve). After the war "a woman's place" was understood for the next couple of decades to be in the home.' As a result, 'lives that had been relatively leisured between the wars were now hectic with housekeeping' says Christina Hardyment in her Persephone Preface: 'How to Run Your Home without Help offers an enthrallingly detailed picture of their duties: laundering techniques "from whites to smalls", methods of darning, bottling fruit, scouring pans and managing children's tea parties. Although the author of the book, Kay Smallshaw, was herself a career woman (she was editor first of Good Housekeeping and later of Modern Woman) she knew that she was in the minority and that most women were at home wishing that the new labour-saving machines were indeed more labour-saving and that pre-war standards could adapt to a post-war world. But this was not to happen for another twenty years; meanwhile Kay Smallshaw's readers continued to keep up appearances and to go on running their homes to the standards of the time when they had both cook, maid and daily help. For many years the values encapsulated by How to Run Your Home without Help were 'mocked as a life of drudgery, but now they are fashionable again, with every other programme on weeknight British television devoted to how women might better clean their bathrooms or rule their kitchens in the manner of a domestic goddess' continued Andrew O'Hagan. 'Our cultural heroes at the moment are not the suffragettes or the bra-burners but those, such as Kay Smallshaw, "who left their bras to soak in warm soapy water for an hour or so before flat-drying them, then folding them away in a well-dusted drawer, preferably on top of a perfumed drawer-liner."' It's a fantasy of course. Most of us fulfil Katherine Whitehorn's classic definition of a slut - someone who removes clothes from the dirty linen basket in order to wear them again. But it's nice to think that we would soak our bras for an hour if we could. And presumably the reason for the success of Kim and Aggie is that millions of television viewers would in theory like to follow their precepts and would echo Christina Hardyment's words when she concludes: 'I agree with Smallshaw rather than the feminists who rubbished housework so comprehensively in the 1970s: "Running a home may seem unspectacular and ordinary, but making a success of it, so that the home is a happy one for all who live in it, is creative work to rank with the best. Exhausting though it may be, it enriches the personality."' Not everyone would go as far as this. But a witty and helpful book about housework, which this one is, may be of practical use; and if, it tells us a bit about how we used to live as well as how we live now, that is all to the good.
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