Making Housekeeping Easy

Title: Making Housekeeping Easy

Published: 1948

Author: Dorothy Lois Abel

Publisher: Funk & Wagnalls

In an approach apparently popular with the 1950s era of homemaking manuals, Making Housekeeping Easy emphasizes ways in which a housewife can work on aesthetic attractiveness - both personal beauty and stylishness of the home - while carrying out basic chores. The instructions for doing so seem, if anything, to be making housekeeping much less easy, adding complexity to already demanding daily tasks, but a reader approaching this book with the built-in belief that both beauty and domestic tasks are a necessary part of life might have considered the instructions helpful. “No mistake about it, dusting the high spots is wonderful for your figure,” Abel writes. “The stretching and reaching lifts the chest and slims the waist. Think of this whenever you are inclined to moan about having to dust the tops of pictures, moldings, high shelves, ceilings” (59). The ultimate result of presenting personal attractiveness as a core component of homemaking like this is that the book confirms deeply patriarchal conditioning in between snippets of much more practical cleaning and organizational advice.