You’ve undoubtedly heard it before: women from the 1950s didn’t have promising career positions but were great housewives. It was the era of respectability, conformity and responsibility. Women stayed at home, raised children, looked after their husbands and took great care of their house.
So, here are some cleaning tips from 1950s housewives.
Don’t Make the Bed in the Morning
“If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter. If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right. And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made — that you made — and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.”
By Admiral William H. McRaven
This speech, told with optimism and great humility, inspired many to start off the day by making the bed. On the net, you will easily find several articles telling you that you should make your bed every morning. Making the bed neat first thing in the morning is said to promote productivity and help you feel calm, relaxed and competent. But guess what: experts now say that there are many good reasons not to make your bed in the morning.
When you tuck yourself in at night, you are unaware of the dead skin cells you will be shedding while sleeping. A study by Atlantic revealed that at night, up to a third of the weight of your pillow could be filled with bugs, dead skin cells, house dust mites and their feces. In fact, some researchers have shown that every night your bed could be collecting about 300 000 dead skin cells.
So, when you wake up in the morning and make the bed, you are trapping in the moisture, all the skin cells, the mites and their droppings. In addition, the dust mites will thrive and continue to accumulate in the damp and humid atmosphere created by the skin cells. This can then lead to asthma and allergies.
According to researcher Dr. Stephen Pretlove, “Something as simple as leaving a bed unmade during the day can remove moisture from the sheets and mattress so the mites will dehydrate and eventually die.”
Clean the Kitchen After Breakfast
A good cook will clean as they go. However, nowadays, people find it difficult to keep the kitchen clean after every food preparation process or after every meal. So, why don’t you try out a 1950s housewife cleaning hack?
Breakfast is called “the most important meal of the day” –and for a good reason. So, as soon as you’ve had breakfast, you can rinse off the dishes and load them into the dishwasher. Right after, you can clean the sink and wipe off the kitchen counters and table. If you have time to sweep the floors, then do that also, though you can save the sweeping for the end of the day.
Take a Basket With You
Between working full-time, starting a new business, tending to the needs of the family and being a caring parent, the last thing you’d want to do is clean. So, it’s no surprise to come home to a messy and cluttered house. Furthermore, creating a mess-free home is a challenge when you are raising “little monsters.”
So, if you are struggling to declutter your house, start by taking a basket with you. As you go on tidying different rooms, pick up items that don’t belong to that area and put them in your basket. As you enter a new room, you can put the items back in their respective place.
