How to Run Your Home without Help - Softcover

'Some of the smartest lessons in how we live now are to be found not in government speeches or fashionable film releases, but in the small grey-covered books published by Persephone Books,' wrote Andrew O'Hagan in the Daily Telegraph. 'The volumes are usually lost classics of female writing; they promote the notion that understanding the past is a reasonable way to go about identifying the present, and I have been looking at their newest release as a way of getting a handle on the idea of British domestic bliss.' The book he was looking at was How to Run Your Home without Help (1949). This, as its title implies, is a book about housework: we have republished it because, even today, it is extremely useful (Kim and Aggie of Channel 4's 'How Clean is Your House' would approve). After the war "a woman's place" was understood for the next couple of decades to be in the home.' As a result, 'lives that had been relatively leisured between the wars were now hectic with housekeeping' says Christina Hardyment in her Persephone Preface: 'How to Run Your Home without Help offers an enthrallingly detailed picture of their duties: laundering techniques "from whites to smalls", methods of darning, bottling fruit, scouring pans and managing children's tea parties. Although the author of the book, Kay Smallshaw, was herself a career woman (she was editor first of Good Housekeeping and later of Modern Woman) she knew that she was in the minority and that most women were at home wishing that the new labour-saving machines were indeed more labour-saving and that pre-war standards could adapt to a post-war world. But this was not to happen for another twenty years; meanwhile Kay Smallshaw's readers continued to keep up appearances and to go on running their homes to the standards of the time when they had both cook, maid and daily help