>>>>As a woman, I can really appreciate many of the inventions since the victorian period! There are some things I love about that period, but I wouldn't want to be a woman without money (and maids and servants) during that time. :o)
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>>>This'll make the guys cringe, but in my view, two of the best inventions of the 20th century were the sanitary napkin and the tampon.
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>>>Tamar
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>>I'd agree. They had a TV series a few years ago, where a family had to live in a Victorian house, restored to its original state, and live the Victorian life for several weeks. The girls hated the rough soap (made from animal fat) and the state of their hands and limp, lifeless hair.
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>>The programme, I think, did touch on the lack of modern conveniences like you mentioned. I think there was a lot of boiling going on in the house :-)
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>>We've also had an American similar series with pioneer families.
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>One of the memorable passages in Robert Caro's magnificent biography of Lyndon Johnson describes the daily life in the part of Texas where LBJ grew up, before electrification. (Presumably the same applied to most other rural areas as well). It was as backbreaking for the wife as it was for the husband, if not more so. He estimated the daily energy required just dealing with water -- how many steps from the farmhouse to the well, the weight of each bucket, the number of pots boiled and then cooled, etc. You couldn't drink the water directly without getting sick so practically everything but bathwater had to be boiled first. And even the bathwater had to be warmed up. The work went on from sunrise or before until long after sunset. We really have it incredibly easy today.

As a kid we used to wake to the sound of my grandma scraping out the fire grate to set the fire, so the living area would be warm when we got up. I'm not absolutely sure but I seem to recall her using two cast iron flat-irons to do the pressing. I remember her mangle, and the 1st time we got a twin-tub washing m/c. That's just part of the drudgery I can recall, albeit in austere post-war Britain. Now she'd raised 7 kids alone, during the Blitz, in the middle of Liverpool. And I never heard her complain once. Can you imagine the modern house-spouse (PC eh?) doing that?