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Show 150 MADELYN CANNON STEWART SILVER and do the washing and ironing. (For a number of years a German immigrant helped with the washing and ironing.) Ellen was not then a Latter-day Saint but later converted. After sever al years Ellen left to live with her children on the western slope of the Rockies. Augusta, another Swedish immigrant, lived with the Silvers until she left to marry during World War II. Madelyn then arranged for Esther, a Mormon girl from Utah, to come. This girl married when her "soldier boy" returned at the end of the war. For a period there was simply "help with cleaning," after which Ellen returned to work for a period. Madelyn, who didn't enjoy grocery shopping in the days before supermarkets, took advantage of the offers of local food stores to deliver to her home. Bread was delivered every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday by the Happy Hour Bakery; likewise, milk was left regularly by the Stearns Diary, and Joe Giambrocco, the vegetable man, came twice weekly. These married years were marked by the introduction of a group of machines that profoundly altered the daily lives of housewives. Her mother's old wood- and coal-burning stoves were replaced by gas or electric ranges. Clothes that had once been scrubbed on a metal washboard were now tossed into a Maytag automatic washer with an electrically-driven agitator. The old clothesline was taken down and replaced with the dryer. The vacuum cleaner replaced the broom; the refrigerator the ice box and vegetable cellar. A demanding task of the 1930s was the process of cooking starch for clothes, and dipping them in the starch solution, allowing them to hang dry, then sprinkling and placing them in a laundrybasket to keep them damp until ironing the pieces with either a hand-iron or pressing sheets, shirts, table cloths, and other linens on the mangle. Many households like Madelyn's still used table cloths and Irish linen napkins for daily and Sunday table settings. A dishwasher, mixmaster, automatic toaster, electric can opener, blender, and even electric popcorn popper-all of these eventually became part of Madelyn's domestic routine, as they were not of her mother's. And yet Madelyn surely worked as hard, and put in as long hours, as did her mother. For one thing, she had a large home, |
