Favourite read: How to run your home without help published by Persephone Books Ltd London
When we were in London this January, we came across this bookshop called, The Persephone Bookshop at Lamb's Conduit Street, after drinking delicious coffee from The Espresso Room, buying a couple of oliver spencer shirts and discovering Folk .
It was a rather unusual bookshop that reprints and sells neglected classics by 20th C writers (mostly by women). We bought 3 books for our girlfriends, one of whom, is my neighbour. Unlike me, she has a full-time job, a full-time maid, 2 young children and of course, a working husband.
My mister, out of playfulness, chose this book: How to run your home without help by Kay Smallshaw for her. But she didnt have time to read so i borrowed the book from her after reading an article about persephone from the Vogue magazine recently.
To my amazement, i fell in love with the book instantly and went online to check out other books reprinted by Persephone.
Published in 1949 as an advice manual for women when Britain was still recovering from economic and emotional turmoil after WWII, when there was a great controversy over the propriety of married women working, when housewives had been heroines during war, keeping the home front going as well as holding down jobs essential to the nation's wartime well-being but now reverted to little homebodies dealing with arduous domestic chores. The book was not only thought provoking and enlightening.
Effects of reading the book:
Makes me rethink about the way i run my home and my perspective on modern homemakers: we are spared from mending our clothes thanks to very affordable clothes and affordable and convenient garment alteration services. Cleaning is also less daunting for us as we use cleaner energy and we are blessed with efficient and effective household appliances.
I'm also very relieved that at least for modern women today, we can choose to have a career without much disapproval after being married. In fact, sometimes as a homemaker, you get frowned upon as you are seen as someone who has wasted the nation's resources on your education. But Especially with good childcare centres and schools and affordable domestic helpers in Singapore, women with children can still have a regular job.
Hence no matter how the economy and society evolve and progress, we women will often be confronted with much struggles and be torn over whether we should be full- time homemakers or not when we have children. There will always be tensions between working moms and the non working ones but all who aspire to be good moms.
To end, I find the book rather entertaining and amusing at times too as smallshaw gives super long and detailed list of instructions on how to be a good and efficient homemaker which can be quite exhausting reading them. The instructions include how to plan the day, choose the tools for cleaning, washing up, laundry work and cooking, how to layout the home, plan the kitchen, go sbout one's daily rounds, how to feed the family, entertain with enjoyment, mend the clothing, keep household accounts and budgeting, how to adapt routine when a baby comes and keep yourself pretty while not compromising with the standard of keeping the house in order! Phew!
"all work is coloured by the spectacles worn. Look on it as fearful drudgery and it will never be anything else. See it as a job supremely worth doing, some of it creative, some more humdrum, but all demanding one's best, then running the home without help becomes a challenge and rewarding in itself." - Kay smallshaw, 1949 (how to run your home without help)
