Ive seen people before reference Hannah as being an example of how bad life was for women in the 1800s, and I always have to kinda be like "....do you think any of that was normal?"
oh god
lasses is the diary of the woman with the Dirty Drudgery Fetish, written expressly as fetish literature for herself and her dom to share, a representative historical source?
like it's not that I doubt SOMEONE in the household had to do those tasks, mind. it's that the way she described those tasks was calculated to focus on filth and physical strain for titillation, rather than to accurately describe what they were like for an average woman working in domestic service
she wrote about how much she loved being dirty. we know most people back then, of any social class, did not love being dirty. just like nowadays. that alone should render it suspect, but people looooove to believe their ancestors were FilthyGross all the time and didn't care, so they don't question it
I swear "took Victorian fetish literature at face value" is a whole Genre of bad historical source evaluation. between this, the tightlacing letters, and the nipple piercing letters
