23
At 23 I was hired to be an 18th century farm wife. The job did not require a lot of prior experience because there weren’t many 18th century farm wives in 1975. I was just lucky to get the job.
The job required making cheese, smoking meat in the chimney, cooking in an open fireplace, baking in a bake oven, hauling buckets of water from the well, and making wine. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know how to do any of those things; I had to be able to read an 18th century cookbook and follow instructions, such as they were: “Take a walnut-sized lump of butter….”
The job hazards were burning up, pulling my back, breathing smoke, getting very hot, getting very cold, and listening to complaints that the juniper berries in the meat tasted disgusting. It was a great job. Any complaints I had were part of the job: I could gripe all I wanted to the 20th century visitors filing through the kitchen.
We were, in the shadow of the American Bicentennial, trying to recreate a working farm 30 miles outside of Philadelphia in the year 1776. We celebrated Independence Day on July 8th because we read that it took four days for the news to get to the farm. Some of the employees actually tried living on the farm around the clock. By the time I got the job of farm wife, it was a 10-hour-a-day job and I got to take a hot shower at home in the evening.
The take-away? It was back-breaking work and I still feel its effects today, every day. Hauling a wooden bucket of water up and out of a well and carrying it up a couple of steps to the kitchen was the hardest part. I was given by the costume department (Did I mention I had to wear multiple long skirts for this job? It was the hems that caught on fire.) a leather vest that was pulled tight around my middle. Everyone envied my slim profile, but the vest was for back support. Hauling water, doing it over and over again every day, water for washing, water for making wine, water for drinking, water for dying wool, wore me out in little more than a year, leather vest notwithstanding.
In the 1770’s, nobody had running water; it was all hauled in by hand. And the dirty water was all carried back outside by hand. Twenty-five years after Independence, Philadelphia installed cast iron pipes for the delivery of water, but it took another 50 years to come up with a system for getting rid of the dirty water. In short, it’s pretty safe to say that any farm in the US didn’t have indoor plumbing until well into the 20th century.
It wasn’t the backache that finished the job for me. It was the smoked meat. As soon as I learned that I was pregnant (see 25), I quit. Breathing smoke and eating carcinogens in the meat was not good for a 20th century baby. It wasn’t good for an 18th century baby either, but the farm wife didn’t have the option of finding another job.
