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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 640
EAN: 9780813530796
ISBN: 0813530792
Label: Rutgers University Press
Manufacturer: Rutgers University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 440
Publication Date: 2002-06-20
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Studio: Rutgers University Press

The American Woman's Home, originally published in 1869, was one of the late nineteenth century's most important handbooks of domestic advice. The result of a collaboration by two of the era's most important writers, this book represents their attempt to direct women's acquisition and use of a dizzying variety of new household consumer goods available in the post-Civil War economic boom. It updates Catharine Beecher's influential Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) and incorporates domestic writings by Harriet Beecher Stowe first published in The Atlantic in the 1860s. Today, the book can be likened to an anthology of household hints, with articles on cooking, decorating, housekeeping, child-rearing, hygiene, gardening, etiquette, and home amusements. The American Woman's Home, almost a bible on domestic topics for Victorian women, illuminates women's roles a century and a half ago and can be used for comparison with modern theories on the role of women in the home and in society. Illustrated with the original engravings, this completely new edition offers a lively introduction by Nicole Tonkovich and notes linking the text to important historical, social, and cultural events of the late nineteenth century. Nicole Tonkovich is associate professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego and the author of Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Sarah Josepha Hale, Catharine Beecher, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller. "A valuable book made conveniently available." -Choice

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Not as good as previous editions...
Review: I am pretty sure earlier versions of this book featured images. This one does not... Other than having no images, it is the same as earlier versions.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Informative book, but beware of Echo version
Review: On browsing this book, it appears very informative for those interested in Victorian households and how the prominent Beechers advised women to manage their homes. However, I purchased the version of the book published by Echo Library, unaware that this version does NOT include the illustrations that appeared in the original book. The Beecher authors refer to at least 77 figures in their writing, but since none are included in Echo's version, it was difficult for me to follow the text or completely understand what it was saying. I feel quite cheated and am thus returning the book. But I think a version that includes the illustrations would be a great reference book for Victorian historians!

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Moral housekeeping and healthly living - 1869
Review: Catherine Beecher's famous sister, Harriet, may have sparked some of the ideas presented, but did not actually contribute to the work of writing this book. Catherine was a childless, unmarried, middle-class woman, whose great tragedy was that her fiance was lost at sea before they were married.

She was an intellectual who lived in a time when women were severely constrained by domestic drudgery. Catherine Beecher strived to ennoble women's traditional role through education:

"It is the aim of this volume to elevate both the honor and the remuneration of all employments that sustain the many difficult and varied duties of the family state, and thus to render each department of woman's profession as much desired and respected as are the most honored professions of men."

There is a great deal of moralizing in this book, about lifestyle, Christian charity, care of children and servants, and so forth. In this, Catharine Beecher was a product of her century. Yet some of the observations are surprisingly astute, even for today's readers. For instance, there is a humorous passage about cooking with butter that will have you smiling about rancid butter in every dish. In so many ways, the modern homemaker has less to worry about. We can purchase conveniences that were undreamt of 130 years ago.

This is a self-consciously "American" perspective on keeping a middle class house. Yet the French are looked to as having perfected cooking and many other things, and this sort of repetitious praise can grate on the American reader. Beecher was addressing the American woman during the Civil War and post-Abolition time period, during a great influx of European immigrants and when the population was actively expanding westward. She had it in mind to influence the young woman of a certain generation, and in many ways, her ideas were both more advanced and more orderly than what had gone before.

This book is a *must read* for students of Women's History as it pertains to women in the home. If you are interested in the 19th century lifestyle, you will find many domestic details here.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: How to life comfortably post "HydroCarbon Man".
Review: The Beecher sisters and Mark Twain were comfortable neighbors in 1869, living the good life on Hartford's elm lined streets. Mark wrote humorously about world travel or of his adopted home town, what was to become the "Insurance Capital of the World" while Harriet Beecher Stowe could claim authorship of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Catherine Beecher wrote a very practical "how to" book, the American Woman's Home, with a little help from her famous sister. The life they lived had not yet been saturated with the influence of petroleum....that would take some time to get up to speed.

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