American Woman's Home (Cooking in America)

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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.