Domestic Problems.
Diaz, Mrs. A[bby]. M[orton]. Domestic Problems: Work and Culture in the Household, and the Schoolmaster’s Trunk. Boston: Osgood, 1881.
Slim 8vo.; endpapers and text unobtrusively foxed; rust brown cloth, delicately stamped in blind and gilt; tips gently bumped; head and foot of spine noticeably rubbed and bumped; else a beautiful copy.
First edition of Diaz’s fifth book, criticizing the encumbering domestic role of women. Abby Morton Diaz, socialist, educator, women’s rights activist, and author, was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1821. Under the influence of her father, an antislavery and temperance advocate, Diaz was a rebel from the start: before age ten she was appointed secretary of the Juvenile Anti-Slavery Society. During her late teens, Diaz’s family moved to the utopian community of Brook Farm where she spent the remainder of her childhood, in time serving as an instructor at the Brook Farm school. In 1845 she married Manuel A. Diaz, a Cuban immigrant who had come to the Farm for tutoring. After the disintegration of the marriage, Diaz supported her two sons by teaching and writing juveniles—her first story for children was published in 1861). She soon attracted a broad readership with tales of youthful adventure, character development, and female self-improvement. Her best-known works include The William Henry Letters (1970), Lucy Maria (1874), Domestic Problems (1884), and The Religious Training of Children (1895).
Domestic Problems denounces the traditional domestic sphere, asserting that women are enslaved by mundane household tasks that produce little genuine conviction:
Our problem is this: How many women enjoy the delights of culture, and at the same time fulfil her duties to family and household?… I wonder how long it would take to name, just merely to name, all the duties which fall upon the woman who, to use a common phrase, and a true one, carries on the family.
A candid treatise on the discontentment of women in the 19th-century.
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