At one time in history, and not all that distant, household chores were looked after by household staff retained for that very purpose by the aristocracy. That still pertains, in fact, that people of wealth own and live in large houses whose care is relegated to people hired as permanent household staff to carry out those cleaning and upkeep duties the owners are too busy, too pretentious or just too incapable of themselves performing. Living in houses large enough to challenge any one person's capacity to maintain does in fact, lead to the necessity of hiring cleaning staff.

On the street where our house is located there is a mix of houses; single detached, condominium attached houses and both medium-sized and small-size houses, any of which can be handily cleaned by the people who inhabit them. On the other hand, elderly people live in some of those houses, and families where both partners/parents work, making it difficult to attend to regular household tasks. Which is why in many of those houses once-weekly cleaning sessions take place through individual cleaning arrangements or through franchised cleaning services.

Mind, physical upkeep of a house at this time in history is relatively simple in comparison to centuries past. Those tasked to clean their own homes or who hire others to do that for them, have a multitude of mechanical, advanced-technology aids that never existed even in the minds of those living fifty years ago and more.  Household chores back then really were numerous, fundamental to existence and difficult, with duties encompassing actually producing and preserving whole foods before food preparation and table-presentation could even begin. Cloth-making and home-made clothing were common duties. Candles and soap-making routinely as well. And laundry? A hand-scrubbing affair. Floors saw vigorous on-your-knees scrubbing, the same with windows and stairs by house-proud and weary inhabitants -- or their household staff.

A document dated 1757 by Elizabeth Graeme of Philadelphia read like this: "Miss Becky desires to know how I like my New Servant which I hired; she seems sober And Modest, but I have had so much trouble about Servants that I hate to enter on the theme; for if I had Not my Father, and the children I hate Housekeep[ing] so much that I Never would encumber mySelf with it in any degree, for I find it a very great Trial to the temper."

A good many women of today would have no problem sympathizing; at least with the "Trial to the temper" bit. Neither men nor women are particularly fond of the routine and necessary steps required to keep a household in good shape and functional, let alone clean and habitable for those who are house-proud. Personally, I don't at all mind any aspect of cleaning, its routine nature becomes habitual and in that sense not to be avoided, and tackling cleaning jobs in a disciplined way can be efficient and in a sense rewarding.

George Washington gave instructions in 1759 to his new bride before returning with her to Mount Vernon: "You must have the House very well cleaned . . . You must also get out the Chairs and Tables, and have them very well rubd and Cleand . . . the Stair case ought also to be polished in order to make it look well...", and of course this was a woman's list of chores, no man could be expected to use his ample physical energy to lend a hand, neither George Washington nor anyone else of the male gender. Scouring, polishing, washing, sewing, cooking were all routine and necessary accomplishments of the average female.


"People lived and moved and had their being in one room in winter then" [Salem, Massachusetts, 1804, commented Anne MacVicar Grant speaking of the cozy winter parlor where the fireplace warmed the home and all other chambers were winter-cold.  The parlour "afforded a refuge to the family during the rigours of winter, when the spacious summer rooms would have been intolerably cold, and the smoke of prodigious wood fires would have sullied the elegantly clean furniture".

"What with their Opening & shuting ye doors & the Noise they Made in the rooms threw everything into confusion & one old woman that was thair wou'd have talked but I cou'd hear Nothing for ye bawling round me", wrote Grace Growden Galloway in 1778, on entering the home of a neighbour with five children, at an invitation for afternoon tea.

Nicholas Maese

In the summer the family would gather close to a window or doorway to take advantage of daytime light and air. "The houses are built of wood, painted white, clean and comfortable, roomy and airy very good for summer, but not well calculated for the extreme cold of winter", observed a European visitor passing through the Hudson River valley in 1841.

"One suffers no where so much from cold as in a warm climate, since the dwellings are well calculated to resist heat, but in nowise suited to repel cold", observed Lieutenant Francis Hall in  1820, as he remarked further that "The cold in Canada is so completely subdued by stoves within, and furs without doors ... whereas in Carolina, where I expected to have escaped its dominion, it made travelling highly disagreeable. The houses are all built of scantling, and are worse than any thing in the form of dwellings ... for they are penetrable at every crevice; while, from the usual mildness of the weather, doors have become altogether released from the duty of being shut."

"The insects and dust of the hot summers and the smoke and mud of the cold winters were swept away in a biannual house cleaning -- an undertaking of almost Herculean proportions which left the female members of the household exhausted despite any extra help they might have been able to hire". Emily Dickinson moaned, "House is being cleaned. I prefer pestilence. That is more classic and less fell", explained Elizabeth Donaghy Garrett, writing  for publication in The Magazine Antiques, December 1985 edition.

"House cleaning was great fun to Jonny and me, except whipping carpets, lugging all the chairs out in the sun and then back again, and cleaning the cellar", wrote Steven Walkley, born in 1832, the youngest of nine children.  "The walls are stripped of their furniture -- paintings, prints and looking-glasses lie in huddled heaps about the floors; the curtains are torn from their testers, the beds crammed into windows, chairs and tables, bedsteads and cradles crowd the yard; and the garden fence bends beneath the weight of carpets, blankets, cloth cloaks, old coats, under-petticoats, and ragged breeches", wrote Francis Hopkinson  in her essay on spring cleaning.  The walls were whitewashed then, to cover flyspecks and smudges from winter fires, and flues were cleaned, windows lathered, floors swept "twice over", then scrubbed, moaned Sarah Butler Wister in 1861.

And then the dusting of furnishings and their polishing touches preparatory to being placed in their season positions: "Wednsday, and Thursday, and Fryday , all up in Arms a cleaning House, whitewashing, rubing Tables, cleaning silver, China and Glass, etc. And poor I am almost tired out of my senses", Esther Burr groaned in June of 1755.

Those quotes and observations lifted from a fascinating article published in The Magazine Antiques, December 1985 issue, which also touched on the never-ending plague of fleas and bedbugs, all of which made the cleaning process more essential, albeit essentially futile.