An article in Prima has given a glimpse into how women's lives today compare with our grandmothers'. Here's what the "research" in the magazine found: 1950s wives scrubbed more and sat down less. Millennium mum snacks more but dusts less. With astounding predictability, this information is being used to make us feel guilty about our lives. Guilty that we eat well, guilty that we go to the gym, guilty that we leave the house at all while a single one of our husband's socks remains undarned or the scullery floor unmopped.
Using the fact that women in the 1950s had slimmer waists but consumed more calories as a leaping-off point, women from different generations have been pitted against each other in some sort of battle of the housewives. So it was that Sybil Appleyard proudly told us how her peers "had no need to keep fit in the gym" because "everything had to be done by hand. It was hard, physical work." Meanwhile her granddaughter oozed shame at a professional lifestyle that allowed her to get out once in a while but has denied her the wherewithal to cook a wild-hare pie for tuppence ha'penny while knitting clothes over a hot stove - or something like that.
It's as if dishwashers and drip-dry shirts have turned modern women into self-obsessed gadabouts. We neglect our children and refuse to please or care for our husbands (which is, after all, what we have been created for). Worst of all, despite increased "leisure time", we've put on weight and let ourselves go. The pictures used in the papers all showed slim, attractive, postwar housewives with slender ankles in corset-tight pinnies or housecoats.
In the 1950s, it seems, all mothers looked like Doris Day or Betty Grable.
If my Nan had been buried instead of cremated, she'd be turning in her grave. For 50 years, she was a housewife who fought a daily battle against dirt without any labour-saving devices - and she hated it. I moved in with her when I was 16 and remember being shocked by how hard she worked. At the time, I thought that being grown-up would mean lots of cups of tea and telly-watching. Instead I glimpsed a womanhood that frightened me half to death. I watched Nan over the top of my well-thumbed copy of Wuthering Heights as I prepped for my exams. Each morning she put on a dab of lipstick, a smear of blush and stockings. "Not bad-looking for a woman my age," she would say proudly, smoothing her skirt over slim legs. Then she would get down on her hands and knees and clean the skirtings with heartbreaking intensity. Her looks were trapped in a dirty, ill-equipped kitchen. Her raunchy sense of humour turned to rancour and paranoia over jars of dripping and a sink always full of plates. "I've worked hard all my life," she'd tell me, "and what have I got to show for it? Nothing, that's what." She was miserable, unfulfilled.
I read after her death that many women of her generation suffered from severe bouts of depression leading to mental illness. Nan was convinced the neighbours were trying to poison or electrocute us. She harassed them so badly the police were called. She was arrested and put in prison briefly. That lovely 1950s lifestyle we've been reading about denied her the freedom to go to work. "Skivvying" indoors - talking to herself for more than 50 hours a week until her death - denied her the freedom of friendship.
I've seen black-and-white footage of housewives from the days before vacuum cleaners and tumble-dryers. Most looked 60 at 30, had straggly hair or curlers and the red, cracked hands of a navvy. If they ate less, it was because there wasn't enough food to go round and their portions had gone to the kids and the breadwinner. Excuse me, I've got to turn the dishwasher on.
