Man it’s wonderful. We give the 4 year old the duster and she dusts the whole house for us on the weekend. Sure we’ve got to check the quality of her work but she’ll come back and do it until its correct. She started vacuuming her room and making her bed at 3. It can take all day but it cuts down on our work load when she started doing chores.
The difference now is that communication and especially mass communication are so readily available that everyone hears more opinions about everything.
Child-raising and newborn care have always been taxing. People have always complained about raising their own children; we’re hearing about it more. And people have always complained about how others raise their children, and we’re hearing those complaints even more too.
My kids would have arguments over who got to use the swiffer and other cleaning devices. 
Why do you find that amazing? The nuclear family has been the dominant cultural model in the US for something over a century now, although the “classic” version of it defined as biodad-biomom-and-their-biokids is actually a minority of American families.
The dad-mom-and-kids model is the one where employed mothers (and also stay-at-home dads, as Dark Sponge noted) tend to suffer most from gendered expectations about housework and childcare being “women’s work”. That’s the model that we’re unlikely to reform without changing those gendered expectations.
Of course, all the other types of families (single-parent, same-sex couple, joint family, etc.) also could benefit from some modifications in our culture’s assumptions about childcare duties. But IMHO the traditional expectations about family gender roles are always going to affect the “standard” nuclear family the most.
I think you are putting too much emphasis on ‘labor rights’, because most people during that time worked on farms where those rules didn’t apply.
When you are a poor farmer, hard work is just what life is. And caring for a baby was not hard work compared to everything else.
My Grandmother would be up at 5 AM to make breakfast for the family. Everyone was up by 6 AM, and kids had chores like collecting eggs from the henhouse. The men would be out in the field by 7. Grandma would then had a huge list of jobs to do - collecting wood for the cook stove, beating rugs, washing clothes, taking them out and hanging them on the line, cleaning, canning, gardening, etc.
Cooking was a hell of a lot harder back then, because there were no pre-packaged foods and no takeout. To make a pie you didn’t just buy a shell and filling. you made everything from scratch. Before you can make a sandwich you had to bake the bread. If you wanted chicken for supper you’d have one of the men kill a chicken, then you got to spend part of your day cleaning and boiling it, plucking the feathers, and cutting it up. While still preparing everything else for the meals and looking after the infants.
After supper we might get an hour for board games or watching TV, but Grandma always multitasked. There were always socks that needed darning, ripped work clothes to mend, etc. I don’t think I ever saw her with idle hands.
That was day-today living. Constant hard work from sunup to sundown. A baby was just one more thing to add to the list. And once a child was 3-4 years old they could start doing light chores, and by 5 or 6 they’re part of the work stream when not in school or doing homework. Farmers had lots of children because children were an asset, not a liability. My brother and I were both driving tractors and working fairly hard farm jobs when we were 12.
So yeah, the sense that babies are hard work has a lot to do with the fact that in most ways people’s lives are much easier than they used to be, making baby rearing look comparatively harder.
Farmers had a lots of children because birth control and the legal right to refuse unwanted sex are modern-day concepts.
Yes, having a lot of kids provided a household with ready-made laborers. That’s great when the rains are plentiful, there is arable land, and there is a bull market for your crops. Horrible when there isn’t and you have a bunch of mouths to feed. Babies died when this happened.
Going back to the OP, taking care of babies has always been hard work. That’s the case whether you’re talking about mothers enlisting the help of neighbors and live-in relatives, or whether you’re talking about mothers and fathers doing it mostly without outside help. Even powerhouse kind of women that Sam Stone just described delegated chores to others; she wasn’t single handedly running the house with a newborn strapped on her back.
This matters because when you evaluate “work”, you have look at total amount of manhours that goes into something. If 100 manhours are necessary to care for a baby in a given period but those hours are distributed between 3 or 4 people (MIL, sister, older kid, and you) versus while 1 stay-at-home parent, it’s still the same amount of work in total. But you betcha that stay-at-home parent will vent about how grueling it is more than the mother who has a village to help her.
Slightly off topic, but it seems that Hollywood has, since pregnancy stopped being a taboo subject for movies and TV (late 60’s?) made a joke of childbirth being a horrible painful excruciating experience and why would women put themselves through this? I’ve heard a few younger women comment that one reason they didn’t want kids was because of how painful childbirth would be.
OTOH, speaking as a man, maybe they’re right. I have no way to know, other than some women still go for a repeat performance.
Plenty of women produce enough milk to nurse multiple children. After all, someone women are able to breastfeed twins and they survive. To some extent milk production increases as infants nurse more. Also, milk production is often stronger after subsequent births. A woman who needs a wetnurse to help with child #1 might be helped by a nurse who’s had 3 children and is easily producing enough for two.
My mom said that she “leaked” a little for all of her childbearing years. If she heard a baby cry in the supermarket, even if she wasn’t currently nursing her own baby, she leaked a little milk.
I’m certain she could have wet-nursed babies continually, for years, whether or not she had a baby of her own at the time. And I imagine her lactation talent wasn’t unique. (Although I lacked it, and could barely nurse my own.)
*A lady of Dublin begat
Three children named Nat, Pat, and Tat.
'Twas fun in the breeding,
but hell in the feeding
When she found there was no tit for Tat. *
Regarding the latter, that had a lot to do with the local culture and the relationship itself.
Has anyone read the classic biography “Old Jules” by Mari Sandoz? Jules was an immigrant who, among other things, abused all 4 of his wives, and the first 3 left him before they got pregnant. The last one, Mari’s mother, moved his bed to an outbuilding on their farm after having their 6th child, and those were the sleeping arrangements until the first one died.
Depends on what specific time you mean in the phrase “during that time”, and what proportion of the population you mean by “most people”.
In the US, which was the locus of the labor-rights movements of the past century and a half that I was talking about, 35% of the population lived in urban areas in 1890, 46% in 1910, and 51% in 1920. So you can modify my statement “Labor-rights movements for the forty-hour week and so forth changed social perceptions to the point where it was considered acceptable for even the poorest working people to resent and complain about excessively grueling work” to “Labor-rights movements, the shift to urban occupations, and modernization of home technology changed social perceptions…” etc.
:eek: Wow, you are old. I was a kid in a rural region of the US beginning in the mid-1960s and likewise had chores in the garden, chopping wood for the woodstove/fireplace, etc., as did most of the kids in my area. But I never heard of anybody even in the poorest or most remote families who still used a wood-burning stove to cook with.
I’m actually going to disagree with the entire premise of the OP. I did not find raising either of our children as newborns as “grueling”. A bit tedious and time consuming perhaps. Certainly not my first choice of activities day to day. But the basic activities - feeding, burping, changing diapers, playing with, reading, putting to bed - not really all that tough.
Really for the first 6 months or so, it’s basically just carrying a basket around wherever you guy and either shoving a bottle in its mouth or changing its diaper when it cries.
My in-laws were still using their wood-burning stove for cooking right up till they moved out of the house they brought up their kids in - in 2005.
My husband (eldest, 70’s kid, only boy) chopped a hella lot of wood in his childhood…
I cooked on a wood stove in the 1970’s; and I know plenty of people using a wood burning cookstove right now.
(Actually, I cooked tonight’s dinner on the wood stove; though it’s really a heating stove, and has no oven, it does have two levels that one can put pots on.)
Proper wood cookstoves are great to cook on in the wintertime; you can get gradations of temperature, and extremes of temperature in both directions, that neither a standard electric stove nor a standard gas stove can provide. The advantage of course goes in the other direction in hot weather, especially if you haven’t got a summer kitchen. Most people I know who currently cook with wood also have an electric or gas stove for summer use.
/hijack, sorry
Or more. A Chinese police officer by the name of Jiang Xiaojuan was nursing nine babies at once in the aftermath of a major earthquake until their parents could be found or other care could be arranged for them. Some women apparently can just produce much more milk than others.
I am impressed! Yeah, I’ve cooked food on/in a wood-burning stove or fireplace too, and I know people who’ve done so habitually in a kind of survivalist/back-to-the-land lifestyle.
But until this thread I’d never encountered (at least in developed countries) people of a relatively recent generation who had to continue using only a wood-burning cookstove because they simply had no way of accessing more modern technology.
Ah, that’s not what I thought you meant.
Most of the people I’ve known using woodburners had at least some choice in the matter, yes; though in some cases the wood stove really was the most practical thing to be using.
I did my (English) family tree and found an interesting pattern. Up until about 1700, most of my rural ancestors had 2 or 3 children. It’s only about the time industrialization and urbanization started taking hold that they started having 5,6, 8 children. (Sad case of three Peters in a row born a year apart to one family - the third finally lived - for 5 years) I don’t think unlimited children was a boon for a rural farmer. They needed enough to help with the chores, but not so many that they’d have trouble feeding them all. I suspect as posted above, aunts and cousins probably played a bigger role in helping with child-rearing.
(Other fun fact, I find a lot of May-October marriages, the farmer’s son not getting married until his 30’s while the wife was about 20 or younger. Presumably he wasn’t a catch until he effectively owned the farm, da’ had slowed down or kicked off.)
They frequently didn’t. In some societies, if the wet nurse was a slave her babies could be sold, given away, or simply killed to eliminate competition for the master’s children. In more civilized situations wet nurses were recruited among women whose babies had died or who weaned their children early.
Hell, I’ve had dogs who would outsource their puppies if that was an option, so I agree with Beck: Day 1.