You will find below pictures of some objects from the Roedde House Museum which are typical of the time period. After reading each description, try to imagine what objects have replaced them in our lives. You should also consider if the job for which the object was created still exists.

The items listed were household labour saving devices. These objects would have made the large number of household jobs more manageable for the women and servants of the household. Women worked almost exclusively in the home: either their own home or someone else's. In many houses there would be servants to do some of the tasks that were considered "Women's Work". In Vancouver servants were generally Chinese men called "Houseboys".

BELLOWS At the time that Roedde house was built people used coal or wood fires to heat their homes. Coal fires can be difficult to get started so someone in the household would use a bellows to provide extra oxygen to get the fire going.

WASH BOARD A wash board was used to do laundry. Laundry was quite a job in those days. But this improvement made work easier than it was when there was no running water, when laundry was done completely by hand. Each item had to be scrubbed by hand against a wash board. Soap flakes, hard bits of soap much like bar soap, were scrubbed into the fabric. The fabric was then rinsed, and then run through a clothes wringer.

CLOTHES WRINGER In order to remove the excess water, clothes were run through a wringer. This was easier on the fabric than twisting it. The two rollers would squeeze out the moisture, so that the clothes could be hung out to dry on an outside clothesline in the summer, or over the stove in the winter.

IRON Matilda Roedde would have used an iron like this one to do the ironing at Roedde House. You will notice that it isn't electric. It was heated up by placing it on the top of the stove. Stoves of that time had a metal plate on the surface which heated up over a coal or wood fire. Irons came in many different styles, but they were solid iron so that they would retain heat longer, and so that the weight would help to flatten the cloth. Fabrics at that time were generally natural, like cotton and linen, which wrinkle a great deal. That meant that everything needed to be ironed, even underwear and bed sheets.

HOT WATER BOTTLE There wouldn't have been fires in every room in the house, and without central heating, bedrooms would have been very cold in the winter. Ceramic hot water bottles were used to keep people warm at night. Ceramics were used instead of metal because they would hold the heat well and were less likely to scorch either the sheets or the sleepers.

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