From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart
Subtitle: a cultural history of domestic advice
By: by Sarah A. Leavitt.
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 250
Subjects: Home economics -- History
Description: Today's domestic-advice writers--women such as Martha Stewart, Cheryl Mendelson, and B. Smith--are part of a long tradition, notes Sarah Leavitt. Their success rests on a legacy of literature that has focused on the home as an expression of ideals. Here, Leavitt crafts a fascinating genealogy of domestic advice, based on her readings of hundreds of manuals spanning 150 years of history. Over the years, domestic advisors have educated women about everything from modernism and morality to sanitation and design. Their writings helped create the idealized vision of home held by so many Americans, Leavitt says. Investigating cultural themes in domestic advice written since the mid-nineteenth century, she demonstrates that these works, which found meaning in kitchen counters, parlor rugs, and bric-a-brac, have held the interest of readers despite vast changes in women's roles and opportunities. Domestic-advice manuals have always been the stuff of fantasy, argues Leavitt, demonstrating cultural ideals rather than cultural realities. But these rich sources reveal how women understood the connection between their homes and the larger world. At its most fundamental level, the true domestic fantasy was that women held the power to reform their society through first reforming their homes.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [229]-244) and index.
Table of contents: title: ch. 1.; title: Going to housekeeping : creating a frugal and honest home -- -- ch. 2. The; title: rise of the domiologist : science in the home -- -- ch. 3.; title: Americanization, model homes, and lace curtains -- -- ch. 4.; title: Modernism : no junk! is the cry of the new interior -- -- ch. 5.; title: Color is running riot : character, color, and children -- -- ch. 6.; title: Our own North American Indians : romancing the past -- -- ch. 7.; title: Togetherness and the open-space plan.