American Woman's Home, The: Or, Principles of Domestic Science…
With “An Appeal To American Women”
Stowe, Harriet Beecher and Catharine E. Beecher. The American’s Woman’s Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science... New York: J.B. Ford and Company, 1869.
8vo.; frontispiece; preliminaries faintly foxed; hinges tender; dark green pebbled cloth, elaborately stamped in gilt and blind with vine motif; tips lightly bumped; covers lightly used; few closed tears to head of spine; else very nice
First edition of this comprehensive guide to household management for American women, written by two pioneering female educators. The American Woman’s Home is loosely based on Catharine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841). Using that earlier text as a starting point, Catharine and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe (best known for Uncle Tom’s Cabin) composed this new treatise, “entirely remodeled, former topics rewritten, and many new ones introduced, so as to include all that is properly embraced in a complete Encyclopedia of Domestic Economy” (C.E. Beecher, introduction). The resulting volume effectively launched domestic science as we know it, altering the lives of thousands of 19th-century women in the process.
The American Woman’s Home—dedicated “To the Women of America”—is more than an instructional book; it was intended to acknowledge and memorialize the contributions of women working within the home. The Beecher sisters embarked upon this project with the explicit aim of making daily life for American women a less degrading prospect:
The authors of this volume, while they sympathize with every honest effort to relieve the disabilities and sufferings of their sex, are confident that the chief cause of these evils is the fact that the honor and duties of the family state are not duly appreciated, that women are not trained for these duties as men are trained for their trades and professions and that, as a consequence, family labor is disgraceful. (p. 13)
This work is a sustained argument for the professionalization, and standardization, of housekeeping; to this end the authors propose setting up training institutes for the study of domestic science. The book ends with an “Appeal to American Women” which advocates the establishment of permanent, endowed educational facilities for women.
A pretty copy of a quietly revolutionary book; with a nice 1869 gift inscription to a woman “from her husband” on the first blank.
(#4871)
Print Inquire
