example, Italian marriage customs prescribed that the

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V IC TOR IA N
A ME R IC A
example, Italian marriage customs prescribed that the bride's
trousseau provide hand-sewn, heavily embroidered bed linens.
Beds, as ornate and high as possible, sometimes required a stool to
climb into them. Margaret Byington found a "high puffy bed with
one feather tick to sleep on and another to cover" typical of the
workers'homes in Homestead.s3 The bed also played a part in the
rituals of death. Italian families often laid out their dead ceremoniously at home. Thus, the embellished bed served as a symbol of
three crucial events of everyday life: birth, marriage, and death.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, nurseries and
children's bedrooms, new to middle-class homes, housed various
new devices. In this child-centered environment, furnishings included special wallpapers and pictures; child-scaled chairs, rockers, and tables; and, of course, toys. There no longer was a cradle,
the bedstead of colonial American children; it had been replaced
by the metal or wooden crib. So completely had the crib eclipsed
the cradle that a 1890 volume of The Upholsterer, under the
unequivocal heading, "The Cradle Is No More," asserted that "a
cradle is a thing unknown nowadays. Go to the furniture store, and
ask for cradles, and they will show you cribs, perambulators, hammocks, and bassinets."5a
DAILY CHORESAND SEASONALTASKS
Since antiquity, the word "attic" referred to the story above a
classical cornice and the space under the roof. Victorian attics had
many uses: as places to dry fruit, flowers, and laundry; as bedrooms
for adolescents, unexpected visitors, or a housemaid; and as playrooms for children. A storehouse of discarded, outgrown, but notquite-useless items, the attic attested to the vagaries of a consumer
culture. Here householders stored furnishings they deemed still
functional, if not fashionable. Basements, by design and default,
served as storage and servicing areas for home life. Fuels as well
as foodstuffs filled their confines. Basements, like attics, also doubled as children's playrooms and occasional sleeping quarters.
Much everyday housework involved daily, weekly, and seasonal
home maintenance. For example, a six-day experiment, conducted in 1899 by Boston's School of Housekeeping, concluded
that operating a "modern" coal stove required at least twenty
l l ,ttt.si ttg,
131
rrrirrtrtesspent in sifting ashes,twenty-four minutes in laying fires,
,
'rrc hour and forty-eight minutes in tending fires, thirty minutes
rrr crnptying ashes, fifteen minutes in carrying coal, and two hours
;urtl nine minutes on blacking the stove to keep it from rusting. It
n'rrs heavy work: in the six days 292 pounds of new coal and 14
g,,rrrrrdsof kindling were put in, and 27 pounds of the ashes sifted
,ut.r'5 Waste removal also demanded daily attention. Someone-a
',r'r'Vcrrt,a child, or a housewife-also had the daily task of carrying
plrrrlrage,rubbish, and liquid waste (dirty dishwater, cooking slops,
;rrr<1,
of course, the contents of chamber pots-"the most disagree;rlrlc task of domestic labor" according to Catherine Beecher) out',irlc to the manure pile, garden plot, privy vault, or street.
( )leaning house also took enormous time and effort. In 1908,
l',llcn Richards, in a study typical of the era's fascination with
',lrrtistics,calculated how long it took to clean an average house. To
r('nrove dust and tracked-in dirt, an eight-room house required
,'ighteen hours a week. If the house had a furnace as well as open
lircplaces, it needed four special cleanings of twenty hours each
,f rrring the course of the year. More time was required if oil light,rrs fixtures, with their omnipresent lamp soot, were used. Washrrrg the windows took ten hours a month. All told, concluded the
,rrrthor of The Cost of Cleanness (1908), these tasks took about
f rrrrrteen hundred hours ayear, or twenty-seven hours per week.56
Victorians customarily swept rooms and stairwells twice a
11'1.1-.ft-snFriday or Saturday, in preparation for the Sabbath, and,
rl ltundry was hired out, on Monday. The carpet sweeper, one of
tlrc late nineteenth century's most efficient and inexpensive innor;rtions in home technology, somewhat lightened the cleaning
.lrores. Immediately popular and affordable, hand-pushed carpet
,,\v()epers(such as those manufactured by the Bissell Company)
lrlt'rally swept the nation beginning in the 1880s. Numerous inr crrtors attempted to improve on the hand sweeper by designing
\':r(:uum cleaners, but only when it was electrified (as was the first
lloover in 1908) did the vacuurn sweeper begin to become a
l;rlr<>r-saving
device.
llousekeeping intensified at week's end, baking and cooking
lr.ing done to avoid servile work on Saturday or Sunday. Many
\\'()rnen also baked on Tuesdavs or Thursdavs. Even those women
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V IC TOR IA N
A ME R IC A
who had a domestic servant usually did their own baking, since
most considered this culinary art a special demonstration of their
domestic skill. In 1850 commercial bakeries produced less than l0
percent of the bread consumed in the United States. By 1900 the
figure had risen only to 25 percent.
truel procurement, a continual task for most people, expanded
in the late summer and early fall, when rural families cut and
stockpiled wood supplies for winter use. By the 1880s, most urban
dwellers placed their autumn orders with coal dealers. In 1869
Catharine Beecher advised that an average urban family needed
three tons of anthracite in the Middle States and four in the Northern, for heat during the winter.
Coal dust and ash, along with other outside filth (mud and manure) and inside dirt (oil and gas soot) made spring and fall housecleaning a semiannual ordeal. F ew housekeepers liked this
"general house wrecking process," as one home economist described the usual week-long cleaning onslaught: "It breaks
women's backs and causes men to break the Ten Commandments." "House's being cleaned," wrote the poet Emily Dickinson
one spring. "I prefer pestilence."
Spring cleaning, as Susan Strasser documented, entailed more
domestic disruption and manual labor than its autumnal counterpart.s7 Beginning usually in April or May, it generally involved
removing carpets and heavy draperies for cleaning; washing all
windows, mirrors, and floors; moth proofing and packing winter
clothes; polishing furniture; removing winter stoves; scouring
painted walls; and cleaning pantries, bins, and the furnace (if there
was one). trall housecleaning entailed removing screens, reinstalling stoves, and sweeping chimneys. Bedding received special attention: blankets, comforters, and ticks were washed, mattresses
were cleaned, and pillow feathers were rejuvenated.
While houses might be repainted prior to winter's coming, such
maintenance normally took place in spring or summer. Porches
often received an annual painting, and some house features were
given a yearly whitewash: the front facades of southern rural cabins, the interiors of soddies on the Plains, and many (as Tom Sawyer knew well) a picket fence. Done only approximately every
four to six years, painting the entire house was labor intensive,
133
Il.)u,ring
pru'ticularly as the palette of available colors expanded and the
rr'oodwork of the Eclectic Manse became more elaborate. By the
l,ri70s,the American paint industry perfected machinery to grind
lrigrnent fine enough to remain suspended in oil. Also developed
\\'(.re tight-sealing metal cans in which this "ready-mixed" product
.'.,rrld be shipped safely over long distances. (Heretofore, home()\vners depended on local painters who mixed a white lead base,
lrrrseed oil, turpentine, and color pigments for each job.) Two
tlt'cades later, national firms, such as Lucas, Seeley Brothers, and
Slrt:rwin-Williams, began promoting their standardized paint
pr'oducts via colorful sample chip cards, brochures, and architectru'al pattern books.
lly then, a middle-class house built in Central City, Colorado, or
irr lliloxi, Mississippi, could be painted in the identical color tones
,l'greens, olives, grays, yellows, and browns-colors much darker
;rrrclricher than those advocated by pre-Civil War architects. Two
color schemes dominated house painting in postbellum America.
'l'lre "brown decades," aptly chronicled by Lewis Mumford, fealrrred russets,ochres, and maroons during the period 1870-90. A
rrceslnssicalvogue, prompted by colonial revival architecture and
tlrt-. "white cities" created at the Chicago (1893) and St. Louis
(1904) world's fairs, made white and pastels stylish by 1900-20.
l\4uny owners of homes built in the 1870s gave their residences a
r'ornpletely new look after the turn of the century. A case in point
is the seaside resort of Cape M"y, New Jersey. The clapboard
r'ottages, hotels, and churches that were once a riot of polychromy
lrlcl almost universally been repainted white by World War I.
House Exteriors
l '()IIC H E S :
F R ON T
AND
OTH E R
'l'he American sitting porch, the most prominent feature of all
Victorian house fronts, first appeared on southern houses in the
,'ighteenth century. House types elsewhere featured only stoops
,r' small entranceways that were often not roofed. As an early
,'rrltural and environmental response to its region's hospitality and
subtropical summer, the southern porch underwent a national