ABSTRACT
There are many people still living for whom the period from 1914 to 1945 is part of their own remembered past, and many many more for whom at least a part of that period is within their own lives. This chapter examines how and when domestic technologies of various kinds made a difference in women’s lives, and what kind of a difference. It focuses on washing – one of the most detested but most implacable of tasks. Washing methods and technologies in the early part of the inter-war period have remained pretty much the same as fifty or even a hundred years before for most women of all classes in Britain. The chapter presents a brief summary of some details of the childhood homes of three of the women in order to illustrate how working-class women in Brighton lived and worked in the 1920s and 1930s.
