Robert Caro masterfully paints the picture of what life was like in rural Texas for women making homes before their area was electrified. It wasn't just time saved. It was hard, physical labor that caused their bodies to break down that they were saved from.
Really quite hard to fathom for any of us accustomed to growing up without that burden.
For women especially, hard physical labor, assuming it's done safely, will do more good than harm. It's one of the few effective means to combat osteoporosis, and something folks have to go out of their way to try reintroduce in the form of exercise and gym memberships these days.
I have a construction worker father and stay-at home sedentary mother whose only labor in life was childbirth and light house cleaning. There's no way in hell I'd sign up for her outcomes over his, even including his acute injuries from easily prevented poor worker safety like the nail in the eye or skin cancer from decades of shirtless hard labor.
Some excerpts from Caro:
> the farm filth had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the skin off women’s hands
> the heavy flatirons had to be continually carried back and forth to the stove for reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of wood—decades later, even strong, sturdy farm wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday.
I'm blind, and my screen reading software's speech synthesizer amusingly pronounced this as "lighthouse cleaning". Which is a very different thing and made you sound fairly unreasonable...
I had no understanding of what that sort of life must have been like before reading the chapter, but after it stuck with me so strongly. I felt wholly inadequate trying to summarize it above.
It's about 60 miles from Round Rock or downtown. I prefer the northern route.
The ranch is ... out in the middle of nowhere. And if you keep on heading West, even that seems densely populated.
Imagining that without power, gas, or phones, gives pause.