This article draws on first-person stories submitted by readers whose mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers lived through the Great Depression. Learn what daily life looked like for the women who kept families functioning during that era. It covers six core areas: cooking everything from scratch with nothing wasted; sewing, mending, and making clothing last; earning income without leaving home (when working outside was socially unacceptable); the physical labor of keeping house without running water or electricity; the community networks women built to help each other survive; and the home healthcare women provided when doctors were out of reach. The skills these women had weren’t remarkable for their time. They were pretty standard, and passed down through generations. The article ends with a short list of practical starting points for readers who want to begin recovering some of those skills today.
There’s a quote I’ve read from the Great Depression days, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”
It sums up the mindset of that era, and the women who lived by it, practiced it every single day in order for their families to survive and thrive.
For them, it wasn’t a cute motto, something you might see embroidered on a tea towel on Etsy. They were describing the average Tuesday as they mended clothes, stretched meals, and found work-arounds for every challenge they faced.
They mastered at least a dozen practical skills, but those weren’t hobbies for their spare time. They were what held their families together, and the more I study what those women did, the more I realize how much working knowledge we’ve lost in the last ninety years.
The World They Were Working In
By 1933, unemployment had hit 25 percent. Millions of families had no income at all or, at best, a drastically reduced income. The safety nets we take for granted today didn’t exist. No SNAP benefits, no food banks, and no credit card to float you until the next payday.
You either produced what you needed, figured out how to make do, or you did without.
There was another layer on top of that. Women who worked outside the home were considered morally suspect in some communities. One woman whose grandmother lived through the Depression told me bluntly, women who went to work outside the home were called “loose.” So for many women, whatever income they could earn had to be produced inside those four walls.
That daily, unrelenting pressure ultimately produced a generation of women who could do just about anything. Not because they were especially tough or especially talented, but because there was no other choice.
They Cooked Everything From Scratch, And Nothing Was Wasted.
This is where it starts, in the kitchen, because food was a daily demand.
Every meal was made from scratch, and in fact, convenience foods were just beginning to enter the market. Bread was usually made at home, and every bit of meat that could be scraped off a bone or carcass was put to use — and then the carcass was used to make stock! More often than not, starches were a main feature because they were cheap — bean soups, macaroni shlumgum (my Nana’s recipe!), and repurposed leftovers with some rice added as a meal stretcher kept everyone going. They were hearty, provided plenty of calories, and were usually quick and easy to throw together, and no recipe was needed.
The concept of “food waste” didn’t exist because there was no such thing as food you could afford to throw away. Stale bread became bread pudding or breadcrumbs. Vegetable peelings went into soup stock and if you were lucky enough to have lots of apples, the cores and peels could be used to make pectin — just in time for homemade jam using fruit from the backyard garden. And fat rendered from any meat got saved in a can on the stove for the next round of cooking.
Carme Turner’s grandmother in Detroit made her own bread and pasta from scratch, kept chickens in the backyard for eggs, and maintained a garden for fresh produce. When the family pooled their meat rations, she once served horse tongue disguised as a roast. Nobody was the wiser until Carme’s mother took a bite and asked what it was. “She was totally grossed out and wouldn’t eat anymore of it,” Carme writes, “but because it was tongue, it was cheaper and my Grandmother was able to get more of it and feed the family. It’s what they did.”
I realized that some of these practices were passed down to me, although I doubt my grandmother realized it. I have a handy jar of bacon grease that sits by my stovetop, right next to the two cast iron skillets we use every single day. And somewhere, somehow I learned to not only cook from scratch but never use a recipe, and I think that came from watching my mom and Nana cook by adding a little of this, and a little of that until the best meal you’ve ever eaten is served on your dinner plate!
Pat Miraldi’s family had a recipe no one questioned for decades. They made tuna salad with chopped onion, Miracle Whip, and two or three slices of white bread dampened with water and shredded into the tuna. Pat was a teenager before she thought to ask her mother why they added the bread — no one else she knew did! Her mother didn’t have an answer — it was just what her mother had always done. When they finally asked Nana, she explained that during the Depression, that was how you stretched a can of tuna to feed more people.
“The funny part,” Pat writes, “is that the bread cut the oily taste of the tuna, and until water pack made its debut, we all preferred the ‘depression method’ of making tuna salad.”
Nearly every family who shared their Depression memories with me mentioned the garden and the canning that followed. Leslie’s grandfather grew a half-acre garden that produced enough for his four adult children, their spouses, all twelve grandkids, and still had some to sell and give away. Howard Lisech’s family in southwest Missouri raised their own crops, milked cows by hand, and sold any excess to a dairy co-op. They made butter by shaking cream in a gallon jar until it turned. Howard remembers his grandmother still doing that when he was a small boy in the mid-1940s.
The skills behind all of this weren’t complicated, but they they took some practice. They also required some know-how, like knowing what to do with a half-rotten potato, a wilted cabbage, a can of beans and not much else. A Depression-era homemaker would have asked herself, “What can I make for dinner with just those three ingredients and some salt and pepper?”
That’s knowledge that used to be passed from mother to daughter without a thought. Children were helping out at home from very early ages, and naturally picked up not only the skills, but the mindset.
They Sewed, Mended, and Made Clothing Last Years
A Depression-era woman didn’t throw away a shirt because it had a hole in it. She mended it. She didn’t toss out worn-out clothing but instead, she cut it into squares for a quilt, braided strips into rugs, or cannibalized it for patches to repair something else.
New fabric was a luxury. So women sewed from what they had.
Flour companies and feed mills caught on fast. No one was buying new fabric but still needed a source for patching and hand-sewn clothes for growing kids, so by the mid-1930s, many were packaging their products in printed cotton sacks because they knew women were using them.
Carmelita Lee’s grandmother took it even further and bought flour and feed sacks in matching patterns. She collected enough of the same fabric to sew new dresses for her nine daughters. Sacks that didn’t match became underpants and undershirts. The rubber stripped from old tires served as elastic. “Grandma rarely had the money to buy store-bought patterns or fabrics,” Carmelita writes, “but had an innate talent to make fashionable clothes from the clothes shoe people gave her.”
In Carmelita’s community, “shoe people” was what they called anyone wealthy enough to own a pair.
The quilts these women made are the ones that have survived longest in family memory. Carmelita Lee’s grandmother filled her quilts with layers of old hotel drapes that she bought in bulk for less than ten cents a pound, and then covered them with pieced tops and hand-quilted the whole thing. She gave most of them away to families poorer than her own, and in her later years, her quilts began winning prizes. She never did learn how to charge what they were actually worth.
Most women could also knit and darn. A sock with a worn-through heel didn’t go in the trash, which is what most of us do today. Instead, it got darned, a method of weaving a new thread over the hole by hand using a wooden darning egg, and worn for another year. Gloves, sweaters, hats, socks — anything that could be knitted was knitted by hand, at home and then repaired when they wore out.
They Made Money Without Leaving Home
Because leaving home to work wasn’t a respectable option for many women, they found ways to bring in income from inside the house, and the ingenuity in how they did it is inspiring.
Lisa D.’s great-grandmother grew broom corn in her garden and made brooms to sell to the town store. Another woman in the same community bought a pedal-powered printing press, it took up an entire room, and used it to keep records and print checks for the local bank while her husband worked on the railroad. She eventually put herself through college, which was nearly unheard of for a woman at the time.
Taking in boarders was one of the most common strategies to earn some extra money. Carme Turner’s grandmother ran her home like a small operation, a boarding house that included her five children and six boarders, all under one roof.
Other women took in laundry and ironing, sewed alterations for women who didn’t have the skill or the time, and sold surplus eggs and garden produce. Jay’s description of his family covers nearly every category. He wrote, the girls “gardened and took in washing, ironing, some sewing and did odd jobs.”
Bob Dyer’s grandmother in south Texas took sweet cream butter and fresh eggs into town every few days and traded them at the service stations, grocery stores, and the ice house.
They Made What We Now Buy
Walk through any grocery store and count the cleaning products, personal care items, and household staples we use every day. Depression-era women made most of those at home. From scratch.
Lye soap, made from wood ash and rendered fat, was a household staple. Women made it in batches, cut it into bars, and used it for laundry, dishes, and bathing. It was harsh by modern standards, especially for anyone with sensitive skin, but a well-made bar of lye soap lasted for months and used ingredients most households already had on hand.
Cleaning products were just as simple. Vinegar and water cleaned just about any surface. Lye soap and washing soda handled laundry just fine and for whites, they boiled the load and hung it in the sun.
Even beauty and personal care products got made at home. Honey could be used as a face cleanser (it works marvelously!), and an oatmeal face mask was as close to a professional facial as most women would experience. Cold cream, hair tonic, tooth powder could be made at home, and if all you had were some vegetables from the backyard garden, you could use beet juice to redden your lips for that popular Cupid-s bow look made famous by stars like Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow.
This kind of production, making things instead of buying them, wasn’t seen as anything unique. It was just one more way of living out the saying, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”
The Physical Labor of Keeping House
Before going further, let’s consider what “keeping house” meant for these women, because it wasn’t what we think of today with our electric appliances, robot vacuum cleaners, and high-tech detergents with special chemical ingredients that promise to make whites whiter, no boiling water involved.
Hilda Foley’s summary of a Depression-era woman’s daily workload is typical. In her words, “Beside cooking meals they baked bread, made butter, did the wash, made lye soap, line dried the wash, fed the animals, helped their husbands with field work, took care of the children, teaching them to do chores, worked in the garden and orchard, preserved food by canning, drying, chopped wood for the cook stove, heater, fireplace. They sewed clothing, quilts. Mended, crocheted, knitted garments. Some did washing and ironing for the public to bring in some cash. There was never a spare minute, always something that needed to be done.”
Many homes still didn’t have running water. Howard Lisech’s grandmother drew water by hand from a 90-foot well with a rope and pulley, and did so until she left the farm in the early 1960s. Bob Dyer’s grandmother in Texas fired up a cast iron pot outside for wash day, using pine tar soap. Lisa D.’s grandmother had a hand-crank washer on the back porch and made her own lye soap from wood ash, scenting it with roses from her garden.
I’ve used a hand-crank washer and wringer exactly once, and let me tell you, it was an all-day affair that involved trying to avoid scalding water, muscle burn, and an upper body workout that would cost you good money at a gym.
Bathing happened once a week, often in a galvanized tub filled with water heated on the stove. Bruce’s mother, a small child in Garrett, Pennsylvania, was bathed that way in a house with a large crack under the front door that let snow blow in during winter storms. The house was heated by a coal stove, and coal was gathered by picking pieces off the ground along the nearby railroad tracks.
The common thread running through all these stories is one of hard physical labor, every day, and sometimes in conditions most of us would find shocking.
They Managed Money Like Their Lives Depended on It
Depression-era women were often the financial managers of the household, and they were meticulous about it, tracking every single penny.
They kept household ledgers, and they knew exactly how much flour, sugar, and lard they had on hand, how long it would last, and what it would cost to replenish. They bought in bulk when prices were good and stocked up when they could for leaner times.
They also bartered, and this alone went a long way towards helping families stay afloat. Skills, goods, and labor continually moved between neighbors. A woman who had chickens traded eggs with a neighbor who had a garden. A woman who could sew traded alterations for preserved fruit, and a mom who knew how to play the piano could teach kids in the neighborhood in exchange for whatever she needed. Cash might be scarce, but skills quickly became a type of currency.
This generation had learned that debt was not an option, if at all possible. They’d seen neighbors lose their homes, farms, and cars, and it wasn’t worth the risk — thus their dogged determination to avoid it at all cost by leveraging their skills, learning new ones, bartering whenever possible, and suffering short-term until they could afford to pay cash.
They Handled Medical Care at Home
Doctors existed, of course, but calling one was expensive when you had no money. A house call might cost less than five dollars, around a hundred dollars today, but that was impossible for many to afford.
So, depression-era women managed most family health care themselves. With whatever basic medicines and supplies they had on hand, they nursed fevers, dressed wounds, and managing infections. Linda Morgan’s mother, who grew up on a farm in Oregon, kept her family healthy through winters with methods that included slicing a raw onion like a tomato and setting it on the table at every dinner. “He said they never had a cold,” Linda writes of her grandfather’s household. “They also never had any friends.”
Some towns were lucky enough to have a few women trained as nurses or volunteering in a military hospital during World War I, and their pay would have been far less than a doctor’s. Many would have been more than willing to exchange medical care for food, help with their garden or with home repairs, or cash, for those who had it on hand.
This was an era when herbal and home remedies weren’t viewed as “alternative medicine”. They were medicine, and this was yet another skill passed on from one generation to the next. These women knew what grew nearby that could bring down a fever or heal an infection, and they knew how to use it.
One of my favorite stories comes from Susan Heggestad. Her immigrant grandmother, needing a necessary surgery with no money for a hospital, talked a doctor into performing the operation on her kitchen table.
You might say that was reckless, but it would be more accurate to say this grandmother made a sound decision based on risk versus reward, using whatever resources were available.
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They Raised Children to Do Real Work
Depression-era children worked, and usually, they worked very hard. Not in some punitive sense, but in the practical sense where a household needed every able-bodied person to help out.
Mothers, and fathers, of course, taught these skills deliberately and early on. A six-year-old could gather eggs, pull weeds, carry a bucket of water, and feed the chickens. By middle school ages, most children could cook a basic meal, do laundry, and handle most household tasks without any supervision, which was important because Mom had her hands full with everything else.
Moms didn’t have the option of helicoptering and micromanaging. A garden that didn’t get weeded didn’t produce food — and kids grew up understanding that. If a fire didn’t get started in the morning, everyone would wake up to a freeezing house. So work had real consequences, and kids learned to take it seriously.
Linda Morgan’s mother and her sister were baking a batch of bread every day by age seven, along with handling most of the cooking for the family, helping with sewing and laundry, and managing all the food preservation for winter. Their grandmother was often ill, and the family farm needed them.
Jay’s description of his father’s childhood tells a similar story. He was fishing from age five, not for fun, but to help put food on the table for eleven people. “School didn’t matter at all anymore,” Jay writes. A family that needed to eat couldn’t afford to have its children sitting in a classroom.
Ultimately, this produced a second generation that knew how to do things and didn’t wait around to be rescued.
The Mindset Underneath All of It
None of what I’ve described — the cooking, the sewing, the soap-making, the gardening, the boarders — happened because these women woke up feeling motivated. It happened because they had already decided, at a foundational level, that whatever needed doing was going to get done, sore back or not.
That’s the mindset, and it comes before the skills, not after. You don’t learn to bake bread and then develop grit. You decide that your family is going to eat, no matter what, and then you figure out the bread.
Linda Morgan captured it best when she described her parents attitude. Rather than leaving them bitter, the Great Depression gave them “a spirit of challenge for making stuff themselves. It was a lifelong HOBBY to see how much they could enrich all of our lives for the least amount of money. And, I swear, there was NOTHING they couldn’t do.”
That orientation, viewing problems as things to be solved rather than hardships to be endured, is what produced a generation with an enormous bank of practical knowledge and skills along with the mindset. A woman who had decided she would find a way didn’t stop at “we can’t afford it” or “I don’t know how.” She considered what she had, what she could make, what she could trade, and who might help and then solved the problem.
Most of us already have some of the skills I’ve discussed, or could learn them. What’s harder to come by is the determination that when something needs doing, you’re the one who will do it, come hell or high water, as my Dad used to say.
Where to Start
You don’t need to render lard this week (though it’s easier than you might think), but you can pick a skill and then spend some time learning and getting comfortable with it. Here are a few to choose from:
- Bake your own bread. Start with a simple sandwich loaf. Learn to make it so reliably you’re tempted to stop buying bread.
- Cook from scratch for one week. No packaged mixes, no convenience shortcuts — try it without a recipe.
- Mend or sew something by hand. Could be sewing a button on a shirt or heming a pair of pants. Try to become comfortable wielding a needle and thread!
- Make one cleaning product. The simplest is an all-purpose spray from vinegar and water with a few drops of essential oil.
- Make an herbal remedy and use it in place of an over-the-counter med. You can start here and browse through articles by an herbalist.
One skill at a time, one bit of practical and timeless knowledge at a time — they all add up to something those women had that most of us don’t, but I suspect you’d like to learn. The ability to take care of your own in spite of challenges and hard times is a super-power. You can stop waiting for someone to come along and solve your problems and realize, you can do just fine on your own because you know stuff.
Get the Free Printable: 25 Skills Great Depression Women Had That We’ve Forgotten
I put together a checklist of 25 specific skills, most of them practical, a few of them surprising, that were standard knowledge for Depression-era women. It’s a good starting point for figuring out which ones you already have and which ones you want to learn.