American Woman's Home

By Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine Esther Beecher

Book Overview

Published in 1869 by the indomitable Beecher sisters, The American Woman's Home is remarkable for both its philosophy and its practicality. A pioneering work of scientific kitchen planning, the book's recommendation for specific work areas, built-in cupboards and shelves, and continuous work surfaces are ideals that, while new at the time, are taken for granted today. The work presupposes a servantless home and teaches the homemaker basic skills on how to cope with such inventions as stoves and refrigerators, as well as providing information on healthful food and drink, care of the sick, and care of the home. While the few recipes included are mainly medicinal, this is an important work of social and food history.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1429011114
• ISBN13: 9781429011112
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: Applewood Books
• Length: 524 Pages
• Weight: 1.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Moral housekeeping and healthly living - 1869

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.

How to life comfortably post "HydroCarbon Man".

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.