Once housekeeping was the backbone of female identity. The work of the housewife was unpaid.

Housekeeping and the household leave very few permanent results and products for later ages. The products are literally eaten up or worn out. Such work as washing and cleaning is more likely to leave traces if it is neglected.

Until the middle of the last century housework was a highly qualified craft with many specialised tools. Housekeeping was a skill, which required training from early childhood or under the supervision of a skilled housewife, from home economics schools supplemented with reference books. The comprehensive skill and knowledge was in this way passed on from generation to generation, from mother to daughter, from mistress to servant, from expert to ordinary woman.

Housework was physically hard work. It was manual work.

Over the years aids and tools evolved to do their part of the hard work. Kitchen utensils mirror the leap from hand power to simple mechanics. Electricity comes later.

By and large women have cooked by the fire or the open chimney since the beginning of time, until the kitchen range with its closed fire chamber and a gate for adjusting the intake of air became common in the kitchens towards the end of the 19th century.

You had to carry in wood or coal for the closed kitchen range and keep it at just the right temperature for cooking. The cooker and the electric stove, which were introduced during the 20th century, made that part of cooking easier. Now you only had to turn a switch to heat up the hotplates and the oven.

Much the same way cleaning had been based on elbow grease combined with brooms and feather dusters, scrubbing brushes and water carried in pails, until soaps, chemicals and vacuum cleaners gained ground in the modern household.  The vacuum cleaner especially eased the physically hard work of carrying the furniture outside to be beaten. But the new tools did not eliminate manual labour.

Washing too was hard work from early in the morning till late in the evening on the two or three monthly washing days. The clothes were dirty, because people did not change them very often, and needed soaking, scrubbing on the washboard, boiling in the copper kettle, rinsing and wringing of the heavy wet fabric and then drying in fresh air. Only when the fully automatic washing machine became a part of the home’s set of machines in the 1960s did the lengthy and demanding washing process change.

The machines helped change housework from a qualified fulltime job to a task without any particular importance, to be done beside the women’s paid jobs.

Housework, which still does not happen on its own, has lost the status it used to have.