Bit of a fuss pot your old mum.
We used to pee in the sink, only trouble was it was usually full of dirty dishes 
Northern Virginia is where I grew up.
Before my time, my mother’s family of 6 built a large, 5 bedroom summer house on Lake Michigan in the 1930’s. It had one bath.
Which was one more than the cottage they stayed at the previous year that had an outhouse and a cold water pump in the kitchen sink. Not only a flush toilet, but this this new bath had HOT water on demand.
On warm summer days, they all went down to the lake for a family wash, nude. Why not? There was no other inhabitation in sight for miles in any direction.
Are you aware that for a significant chunk of the 20th century, grease was nearly universally applied to men’s hair?
As a short-haired guy, I must say that two days without washing my hair is as far as I can go. And I don’t put any chemicals on my hair except soap (often shampoo) and water. Maybe long hair doesn’t need to be washed as often due to grease buildup having more space to “spread out”?
Not really, but then, I’m not a man and the original statement I was responding to was about women’s hair.
I’m vaguely aware that a LOT was done to the hair of African-Americans to make it “acceptable” as well, but I was also assuming we were talking about the majority US ethnic group as well.
Nonetheless, even the 1950’s era “greasers” (and presumably others who used greasy hair products) did not typically wash their hair daily. Given that hair was often washed with soap rather than shampoo this probably effectively replaced oils stripped entirely away by the cleaning products.
True.
Of course, the “grease” is there to spread out along the hair shaft and provide natural protection to it. It’s also why long hair needs a good daily brushing, to spread those oils all along the length of it.
My Mom came from a family of 13 children. Tarpaper shack, basically. She used to laugh with my aunties, when they were together, about their childhood days. There were a lot of girls in the family, so the rule was, last one to bed had the curliest hair (because they’d steal the rollers from the heads of their sleeping sisters), and the first one up was the best dressed, (first choice of the closet!).
When my Dad was courting (1952) her they had no electricity. As a child I still remember being put to bed there, when visiting, all four kids in one big feather bed. No running water, a well you had to pump out back. And an outhouse, double seater. We used a chamber pot in the night though.
My Gran lived like that well into her eighties, which would have been the early 70’s. Finally one of her sons tore the old place down and built her a nice new place with indoor plumbing - the luxury! She lived to be 104 yrs old and I still miss her to this day!
Absolutely. I went to the Y to learn to swim in about 1960, and we didn’t wear bathing suits. I didn’t like it a bit. The last day was when parents were supposed to come to watch us - I managed to get sick for it. I don’t know if bathing suits were to be worn then, but my impression was not.
I didn’t learn to swim until a year later when I went to day camp and we did it with a suit.
As for bathrooms, we only had four in our family, but there was only one bathroom used for getting ready. We had a schedule for school days. I learned to take showers at night so as not to delay things in the morning. We had a little bathroom on the first floor, but the house my wife grew up in (built around 1880) didn’t have that. Only rich people had bathrooms in bedrooms. None of my friends did.
In the Air Force, we had to “Buddy Up” to use portapotties during the Field Training portion of Basic. If we were really rushed, this would even sometimes happen in the dormitory. So that’s the 21st century in the cushiest branch of the US military.
I graduated from a large suburban public high school in 1963. Swimming class was mandatory, and the boys had to swim nude; the girls wore suits (there were separate boys’ and girls’ pools). If you had a doctor’s excuse from swimming, you had to spend the hour walking around the pool, nude.
I grew up in Michigan, it was in the 1930’s It didn’t seem hard because that was the way of life we and our neighbors lived, We got electricity in 1942. We got an indoor bathroom in 1943, I went to work as a mother’s helper in Sept. of 1943 so I then had my own room and bath. By then the boys were in service and 2 girls had left home.( My husband’s family in N. Dakota didn’t get electric until 1954 and they lived in town.
Our life now is very easy as I have all the modern conviencies but I think Life in many ways was better then. We never had to lock our doors. We were safe as murders etc. were rare. There is a lot of modern life that I feel is better because there is less hypocrisy. Less abuse to children etc. .
Monavis
10 kids in my family, not all living at home at once, but there were those family reunions…
- “Anybody need to use the john before I take a shower?” ("No but leave me some hot water, I’m next.)
- The big gulp hadn’t been invented yet.
A little tangent about the earliest hand-held hair dryers. About 25 years ago, I did home nursing; I had a patient who was 81, and had a very old hand-held hair dryer. She and her husband were wealthy and liked gadgets, so she had a lot of Old Technology.
Anyway, this hair dryer was ancient; it was so old the cord on it was wrapped in fabric! (Remember that? I remembered it from my mother’s old iron). And why weren’t they more popular? Because that mother weighed a ton! Seriously. I don’t know what kind of metal it was made of, but it certainly wasn’t anything light-weight like aluminum. I would imagine spending more than, oh, five minutes holding it at the correct height and level to blow-dry your hair could cripple you for the remainder of the day.
Broomstick, that’s a mighty wide brush (heh) you’re using there. I never put styling products in my hair. My hair is longer than shoulder-length. But at least the front of it needs to be washed every two or two and a half days. (In case you’re wondering what I mean by “every two and a half days”, it means that if I wash my hair on a Friday morning, the latest I can get away with letting it go is Sunday night.
However, the part of my hair below the ear lobes (IOW, further away from the oils in my scalp) can easily go a week without washing. I seldom really shampoo it at all. I wash the top part, and the ends get clean enough just from the soapy water running over them when I rinse. I only put conditioner on the part of the hair from my ears down.
As to the OP, I grew up in a family of seven (my two parents, and us five girls). We were lucky enough to have one and a half baths. I was the youngest, and the younger kids often bathed together, and were “bathroom buddies”. While my sister B, two years older than me, was using the toilet at night, I’d be brushing my teeth and washing my hands and face, then we’d switch and I’d get the toilet and she’d get the sink. And of course, as many others have mentioned, there was much pounding on the door and many shouts of “I gotta go!”
My hubby grew up in a family of eight, with only one bathroom. They just took turns, and beat each other up while waiting in line (hey, they were all boys; what can I say?)
That you for the detailed answers.
The 1930s & 40s were my parents generation. They were living in a really poor immigrant section of Manhattan but they had electric at least. I know they used an icebox but then by Mom’s father was an iceman. I have to ask them about the bathroom situation, but I think one of them mentioned a common bathroom on each floor of the building and not in each apartment. I know they had good water pressure though. They commented on the lower water pressure when we moved to Jersey and said it was worse than they ever had in NYC.
My Grandfather always called NJ the sticks; he pretty much thought he was in Dixie when he came down.
My Mom’s Mother use to hand sew much of her three daughters clothes. The first major purchase my Mom made when she started working was to buy a used electric sewing machine for them.
Jim (What a fascinating thread this has been)
We routinely spend part of our summer vacation in situations with 10+ people and one bathroom, sometimes one rather primitive bathroom. Not a big deal, everyone adjusts. Admittedly, in a beachside cabin situation the boys can always be sent out to water the bushes if it’s an emergency
If you would like more information of life during those times, we had no ice box. Most of our meat (which we rarely had), was eaten the day it was purchased or In winter when my father butchered a pig and let it freeze. Some things we kept in a bucket down a well. When we had chicken it was cooked the same day it was killed.
We heated our irons for clothes on a wood stove, we cooked and baked on it as well. The girls curling iron was heated in the stove as well. Our washing machine was gas powered and was hard to start.
All of the children in my family had to work. At age 4 I picked pickles for the pickle factory because my hand was the size the factory paid the most money for.
We had to weed the gardens and watch the cows so they wouldn’t get into the corn. We had no fences. Some times they would get into the woods and get lost because we were busy playing and of course we were punished for neglect of duty. But we all learned responsibility early.
Monavis
I graduated in 1984, which wasn’t actually all that long ago. Little town in southern Indiana, very rural, lots of farmers and trappers and probably a pretty poor community (although I never thought of it that way.) My family had a larger house with 2.5 baths, but I had several friends who had outhouses, cold running water inside the house, woodstoves for heat, no AC. It was common enough that now that I’m househunting, the number of bathrooms isn’t an issue for me. I had to remind my realtor that when I looked at houses in my hometown, some of them STILL don’t have an indoor bathroom.
I was from a family of eight and I don’t rever remember sharing the one bathroom. But we did have rules. First was do your business then get out. No one bathed before school or work, we bathed the night before. We’d take our shower or bath starting at 7pm the day before.
Before you walked around saying “Anyone have to use the bathroom? I’m gonna shower now.”
In fact the bathroom was the only peace I got, everywhere you went in the house, the garage, the backyard was a brother, a sister, a parent or the cat or dog.
LOL
Brylcreem a little dab will do ya
bylcreem youll look so debonair
brylcreem the gals will all pursue ya
simply rub a little in your hair
That stuff changed the rules.