More than religion – or self-improvement – was at issue in the first half of the 19th century, when the week stamped its form on social life and culture. As Americans began the vast movement from scattered farms into cities, where immigrants joined them in workshops and factories, new patterns of conduct were rapidly established. By 1860, half of the workforce received their pay in cash. Though wages were paid on varied schedules, they were usually handed out on Saturdays. Saturday night became a special time. The Alfred Doolittles of the world could go on a spree and sleep it off in jail. Others could redeem their Sunday clothes from the pawnshop and make a respectable appearance in church. The commercial revolution enforced attention to the week.
As children entered the rapidly growing public schools, their lives were dominated not only by the distinction between week and weekend, but also by the detailed class schedules that governed their days. A rich prescriptive literature ordained that domestic labour, paid or unpaid, must also follow a weekly rhythm:
Monday comes, and with it brings,What the damsels all will say,As they tie their apron strings –This is dreaded Washing Day.
Housekeeping, as Henkin notes, was not clocked, but it was calendared, and it’s clear that these rules were widely internalised. Women at many different social levels worked hard to make their lived weeks match the order and discipline of the prescriptive literature: ‘In the new regime of middle-class domesticity, the ancient technology of the week became a management tool of undisputed utility.’
Time was never uniform, of course, and rules never omnipresent. Meal schedules became as regular ‘as the laws of the Medes and the Persians’ only in total institutions, such as the fictional ‘boarding house, far, far away, where they give ham & eggs three times a day’, and the real schools and colleges that went in for plain living and high thinking. It took a long time for Friday to be marked as the day for the fish special, as Henkin’s magnificently detailed table of menu changes in Chicago illustrates. Though they long remained both working days and school days, Saturdays often offered a looser and more varied schedule than weekdays – and private schools had Wednesday half-days. The schedules by which late-19th-century city dwellers navigated their days were tightly and elaborately organised in ways that would have been unfamiliar to their predecessors living with the plain colonial week.