By Gregory Clark, May 7, 1921.
Man is a lucky creature.
But isn’t he brutally ungrateful?
This spring, the newspapers and magazines are as full as ever of spring-cleaning jokes, poems and cartoons.
The same old line of bunk: father afraid to come home to his muddled household; hubby going golfing or staying down to business at night to escape the madness that has overcome his home.
Is it possible! – is it possible that men are still under the impression that spring cleaning is the old bogey it was in the nineteenth century? Is it possible that men are unaware of the greatest revolution in womenkind since Eve.
The beating of carpets is no longer to be heard in the land. The sight of husbands eating supper on the back steps is no more.
For all unheralded, greeted indeed ungrateful indifference, has come the modernization of spring cleaning, a reform amongst women which for economic importance far exceeds their capture of the vote or their right to sit on juries.
It has been a most sweeping reform. It has affected every male citizen of the community. Yet have the men recognized it, hailed it, acclaimed it? No. They still perpetrate the outmoded jokes and jests of a bygone age.
Twenty years ago, what was spring cleaning? Ah, let us grant that was a terror.
As soon as the last foul snow had fled from the yard corners, the womenfolk began to set the date for the big bee. Father, sons and all were formally warned to be on hand yet out of the way. Soap, new scrubbing brushes and yellow ochre were bought in large quantities. Carpet beaters, step-ladders and curtain-stretchers were brought forth out of the cellar. As the fated day drew nigh, the women could scarcely contain themselves.
Then like doom, the day broke.
Off came curtains, carpets, pictures from the whole house, attic to kitchen. Out came books, out came the contents of the drawers, out came furniture, out came the hidden treasures of clothes closets.
For they did it all at a swipe, a generation ago.
There was a mad orgy of washing curtains, scrubbing floors, woodwork; beating carpets, dusting books, pictures, furniture. The curtains were dipped in yellow ochre to give them that correct creamy color, and then were stretched on frames with millions of pins, out in the backyard sun.
It lasted from three days to a week. Father had to come home early to beat carpets, ate meals in the kitchen, slept in a damp room on a strange bed, in a bare, curtainless, disorganized universe. He knew his books were being mixed up beyond redemption, that his desk was in confusion and all his valuable papers and memoranda lost forever.
He had to carry, heave, lift, tear up, tack down, and risk his neck hanging pictures which never would be straight again.
Those were days-
But what of the present!
To-day, a man never knows spring cleaning is going on if his wife didn’t tell him to notice how nice and clean everything was.
It is the greatest revolution in domestic customs since man moved out of caves into shanties.
For they now do it room by room!
A room a day. After, the men are off in the morning, the women tackle one room, wash and iron the curtains, vacuum the rug, dust and polish the floor and woodwork, clean windows, and so on.
Thus in a week or ten days the house is “done” and nobody would know the ancient fury had struck the place except the neighbors across the road who, peering out in true neighborly fashion, observed the curtains off for a few hours.
Where are the curtain-stretchers of yesterday? The carpet-beaters, the furniture piled in hallways, the tacks in the feet, the damp floors, the fury, the unrest of it all?
Are we not as cleanly as the former generations?
A dear old lady, who has seen many changes since stage coaches used to leave King and Yonge streets, explained the revolution as follows:
“Twenty years ago, had you suggested to a good housewife that she do one room at a time, she would have been scandalized.
“And have the dirt fly from one room to another!” she would have cried.
“To-day, you have machines that inhale the dust, so to speak. Lace curtains of creamy color are no longer the fashion. Little curtains of to-day are easily and quickly washed and ironed.
“But the secret of this great reform is this.
“Twenty years ago, women had very few pleasures. The annual spring-cleaning jamboree was one of their few real athletic pastimes. They had one grand fling, and then contented themselves with the occasional euchre party for the rest of the year.
“To-day what have we? The movie, the motor car. Home is no longer the chief thing in life. It is merely a shelter in bad weather and a place to sleep at nights.
“Movies, motor-cars, tea-rooms, the Daughters of this and the Women’s Association of that are inventions of the last 20 years
“So spring-cleaning, as a pastime, has declined. And as a nuisance, it has been modified into the tame little thing it is to-day.”
The old lady picked up her crochet work again.
“Women do not change,” she said. “Only times do.”
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