Meet the Carneys
Mr. Carney was a carpenter by trade but, like most other rural families, he also farmed the land to provide food for his family and extra income through the sale of surplus crops. With the additional purchase of 12 acres of farmland, Mr. Carney raised strawberries, corn, and tomatoes. When he wasn’t working as a carpenter, he managed the work in the fields and the barns.
As a farmwife, Mrs. Carney's life was far from a life of leisure. Like most farm wives of the time, Mrs. Carney's day started before the sun was up.
There was no electricity and no indoor plumbing and as such, her first chore was no doubt to set a fire in the woodstove either in the house kitchen or the summer kitchen. No matter how hot it was outside, the woodstove had to be fired up so that Mrs. Carney she could cook meals for the family and any hired hands, can and preserve fruits and vegetables during harvest, bake bread, heat water to do laundry and heat the sad irons to press the laundry. In addition to these household chores, Mrs. Carney also had children to wash and dress, rugs to beat and floors to scrub, clothes to mend and quilts to be made, farm animals to feed, gardens to weed, sickly neighbors to look in on, and other tasks too numerous to mention.
The following passage from Hill's Manual of Social and Business Forms, 1888
would likely not have resonated with Mrs. Carney:
"Whatever have been the cares of the day, greet your husband with a smile when he returns. Make your personal appearance just as beautiful as possible. Let him enter rooms so attractive and sunny that all the recollections of his home, when away from the same, shall attract him back."