Working

by Robert A. Caro

The original objective when Ina and I moved to the edge of the Hill Country of Texas in 1978 was to learn about the boyhood and young manhood of Lyndon Johnson. But while I was interviewing ranchers and farmers, and their wives, about him, I realized I was hearing, just in the general course of long conversations, about something else: what the lives of the women of the Hill Country had been like before, in the 1930s and ’40s, the young congressman Lyndon Johnson brought electricity to that impoverished, remote, isolated part of America—how the lives of these women had, before “the lights” came, been lives of unending toil. Lives of bringing up water, bucket by bucket, from deep wells, since there were no electric pumps; of carrying it on the wooden yokes—yokes like those that cattle wore—that these women wore so they could carry two buckets at a time; of doing the wash by hand, since without electricity there were no washing machines, of lifting heavy bundle after bundle of wet clothes from washing vat to rinsing vat to starching vat and then to rinsing vat again; of spending an entire day doing loads of wash, and the next day, since there were no electric irons, doing the ironing, with heavy wedges of iron that had to be continually reheated on a blazing hot wood stove, so that the ironing was also a day-long job, a day of standing close to the stove even in the blazing heat of a Hill Country summer. I was hearing about all the other chores that had to be done by hand be...