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The Way We Worked

"Women's work" got done a little faster with innovations that streamlined chores for generations past, a fascinating exhibit reveals.

By CHRIS SHERMAN
Published June 23, 2007

IF YOU GO
Domestic affairs
What: "Quick & Easy Gadgets for the Home, " an exhibit of labor-saving devices from the past.
Where: Heritage Village, 11909 125th St. N, Largo
When: The exhibit, a permanent display in the Ralph Reed Gallery, will be updated periodically. Heritage Village is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, closed Monday.
Information: (727) 582-2123.

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Think the toaster that poaches eggs on the side is cutting-edge? Or the all-in-one picnic cooler-grill? Yes, they both really exist.

How about a toaster that does four slices without electricity? Just leave it on top of a hot cast iron stove. It beat holding bread on a fork over an open flame, and was very welcome in the 1870s. (It survives today in campers' mess kits.)

Or how about a vacuum cleaner that inhaled dirt through suction created by friction and stored it in a bag? Cool stuff in the 1930s.

The marvel of electricity powered a washer with a wringer plus a rolling drum for the laundry, which inventors pitched to women of 1910 as the Gainaday, it saved so much labor.

These and many more tools and techniques to make the drudgery of homemaking quick, easy and above all modern star in a new display, "Quick & Easy Gadgets for the Home, " at Heritage Village, the Largo museum park that brings Florida history to life.

One hundred fifty years of irons, butter churns and washing machines fill the space. Floor cleaners and sweepers from pioneer Florida to the 1950s are arranged on a staircase.

The exhibit invigorates the main entryway and office areas, which are dull spots in most museums. Most visitors to Heritage Village skip the visitor center and head directly for the life-size Cracker shacks, cabins and frame houses, schools, churches, general store, caboose and windmill installed in the piney woods. This exhibit gives them something to stop for.

The gadgets and machines that streamlined domestic life in the small towns and growing cities of 20th century Florida are history as much as patchwork quilts and old infantry uniforms.

The displays are sure to spark memories for visitors of a family's first electric washer or Grandma's sewing machine that was nearly as old as the ornate 1940 Singer or the 1935 White Rotary on display. This is history that many of us have lived through.

The payoffs of mass production, metal molding and advertising are clearest when applied to jobs many people know and dread. "When I was pregnant, my doctor said there were two things I couldn't do, " interpreter Wendy Knott-Comer remembered from 35 years before, "floors and ironing."

Those jobs were always women's work and were hard work, so early advertising agencies targeted them directly, as shown in vintage ads on display. "I love this one, " curator Alison V. Giesen said, looking at a woman in a stylish '20s chemise pushing an early vacuum cleaner in a Hoover ad. "She's ready to go out for dinner!"

Why not? "Its handy new air-cleaning tools dust, dustlessly. It keeps your home immaculate; saves time, strength, health; makes rugs wear years longer, " the ad says.

One ad did chide men: "Another year has slipped by since you thought of giving her a Hoover."

Imagine cleaning floors with a chunk of saw palmetto shredded into a scrub brush, or a wire rugbeater for carpets, both on display.

Laundry had its own evolutions. Lye and other soaps helped, but physical effort was key, from beating clothes on rocks to scrubbing them on washboards. Enter the long-handled manual "agitator" with a pierced iron cone at the end to push clothes down in a washtub.

Then came wooden tubs in 1885 with rocking baskets swished back and forth by hand. Maytag gave a new century washtubs with electrical agitators on the bottom. Some were freestanding, others small and portable, like the 1940 Easy Whirldry that washed and dried (sort of).

Soap, too, got better - much better, according to a 1920s ad for Fels-Naptha soap that needed only warm water to work well, saving clothes, hands, fuel, time ("to go about the house") and money (through lower doctor bills "because of fewer colds from overheating and other illnesses from overexertion").

If that was "Quick and Easy, " consider ironing. At first one had to pick up a hot, heavy piece of metal that had sat on the stove. Then a wood handle was added, cooler to the touch and removable to switch between irons to eliminate waiting while an iron reheated.

In 1910 came an iron with its own charcoal fire inside for a heat source. Over the years there were electrics, a gasoline-fired model shaped like Flash Gordon's rocket sold by a lantern manufacturer from Wichita called the Coleman Co., and irons that created steam.

The most unusual device, however, is a tripod loom with a crank. Strands of yarn feed in the top and a knitted tube comes out the bottom looking like a long sock.

It is indeed a sockmaking device, an instant cottage industry for rural women who worked at home. The Gearhart Knitting Machine Co. sold it for $52 in the 1920s and promised to pay $1.65 per dozen pairs of finished socks.

Old-fashioned museum pieces, sure, but in their time, they were the latest thing. And very modern.

Chris Sherman writes about food, wine, architecture and design; he can be reached at (727) 893-8585 or at sherman@sptimes.com.

[Last modified June 21, 2007, 18:59:38]