The American woman's home

Catharine Esther Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, 2002 - History - 388 pages

The American woman's home, originally published in 1869, was one of the late nineteenth century's most important handbooks of domestic advice. The result of a collaboration by two of the era's most important writers, this book represents their attempt to direct women's acquisition and use of a dizzying variety of new household consumer goods available in the post-Civil War economic boom. It updates Catharine Beecher's influential Treatise on domestic economy (1841) and incorporates domestic writings by Harriet Beecher Stowe first published in The Atlantic in the 1860s. Today, the book can be likened to an anthology of household hints, with articles on cooking, decorating, housekeeping, child-rearing, hygiene, gardening, etiquette, and home amusements. The American woman's home illuminates women's roles a century and a half ago and can be used for comparison with modern theories on the role of women in the home and in society. Illustrated with the original engravings, this completely new edition offers an introduction by Nicole Tonkovich and notes linking the text to important historical, social, and cultural events of the late nineteenth century.

What people are saying

Review: The American Woman's Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science by Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

User Review - Goodreads

As a homemaker and stay-at-home-mom in 2011, I found this book incredibly interesting. I was amazed at how much is still the same. Of course, much is different (skimmed the chapter on lamp light vs ...

Review: The American Woman's Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science by Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

User Review  - JL Kruse - Goodreads

First published in 1869, "The American Woman's Home" was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister, Catharine E. Beecher, an early advocate for women's higher education. Meeting the Beechers ...

About the author

Harriet Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, one of nine children of the distinguished Congregational minister and stern Calvinist, Lyman Beecher. Of her six brothers, five became ministers, one of whom, Henry Ward Beecher, was considered the finest pulpit orator of his day. In 1832 Harriet Beecher went with her family to Cincinnati, Ohio. There she taught in her sister's school and began publishing sketches and stories. In 1836 she married the Reverend Calvin E. Stowe, one of her father's assistants at the Lane Theological Seminary and a strong antislavery advocate. They lived in Cincinnati for 18 years, and six of her children were born there. The Stowes moved to Brunswick, Maine, in 1850, when Calvin Stowe became a professor at Bowdoin College. Long active in abolition causes and knowledgeable about the atrocities of slavery both from her reading and her years in Cincinnati, with its close proximity to the South, Stowe was finally impelled to take action with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. By her own account, the idea of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) first came to her in a vision while she was sitting in church. Returning home, she sat down and wrote out the scene describing the death of Uncle Tom and was so inspired that she continued to write on scraps of grocer's brown paper after her own supply of writing paper gave out. She then wrote the book's earlier chapters. Serialized first in the National Era (1851--52), an important abolitionist journal with national circulation, Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in book form in March 1852. It was an immediate international bestseller; 10,000 copies were sold in less than a week, 300,000 within a year, and 3 million before the start of the Civil War. Family legend tells of President Abraham Lincoln (see Vol. 3) saying to Stowe when he met her in 1862: "So this is the little lady who made this big war?" Whether he did say it or not, we will never know, since Stowe left no written record of her interview with the president. But he would have been justified in saying it. Certainly, no other single book, apart from the Bible, has ever had any greater social impact on the United States, and for many years its enormous historical interest prevented many from seeing the book's genuine, if not always consistent, literary merit. The fame of the novel has also unfortunately overshadowed the fiction that Stowe wrote about her native New England: The Minister's Wooing (1859), Oldtown Folks (1869), Poganuc People (1878), and The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862), the novel that, according to Sarah Orne Jewett, began the local-color movement in New England. Here Stowe was writing about the world and its people closest and dearest to her, recording their customs, their legends, and their speech. As she said of one of these novels, "It is more to me than a story. It is my resume of the whole spirit and body of New England.

Tonkovich is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The American woman's home
• Authors: Catharine Esther Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Editor: Nicole Tonkovich
• Contributor: Nicole Tonkovich
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, 2002
• ISBN: 0813530792, 9780813530796
• Length: 388 pages
• Subjects: Family & Relationships / General; History / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877); House & Home / General; Social Science / Women's Studies