The Making of a Homemaker

Knowledge of the domestic cares (cooking, cleaning, care of the sick, care of the children, etc), Savvy technique of society (fashion, marketing, etc), Knowledge of vast array of subjects....

Click here to find more about traditional women's roles in the home making.

It may come across jaw-dropping or eye-popping anachronism to post-modern feminists to be presented with this collection. I think this is a valuable collection site because it provides the cultural & historical perspective of women's roles, in particular, middle-class women, in society and the world (meaning chiefly "home") in the late 19th century in the States and the Victorian period in England. This collection will provide understanding of how enduring, persevering, and strong your great-great-great-great grandmothers (??) of such times had been, handling daunting house chores without modern conveniences not to mention how far we have been progressed now in "society." And we still keep our glorious legacy from women of that time as magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Martha Stewart suggest. :)

Collection Principles: The introduction of the site indicates that the collection includes illustrations, book cover images, title pages, recipes, drawings, etc, from various women's guidebooks: for example, a domestic guidebook titled such as "The Skillful Housewife's Book: or Complete Guide to Domestic Cookery, Taste, Comfort and Economy" is the representative of such books. The images from the collection elaborate on how many roles women of the time were expected to play in their domestic worlds--their primary society.
The images are divided by subject areas such as care of the house/care of the sick/decorating/dining/etiquette/fashion/raising children. The image from "Miss Beecher's domestic receipt-book: designed as a supplement to her Treatise on domestic economy" (1865) by Catharine Beecher on the left shows how crucial women's roles were in the domestic front--note that Beecher used the word "Treatise." Not only women were supposed to master her domestic skills including understanding how to keep a hygienic home demanding them to understand science pertaining to such a subject, they were also expected to decorate themselves and their homes.
Whew...look, can you beat her fashion sense? :)

Metadata: Metadata describes the book title, the year it was published, volume number, subjects, description of images, and image caption.

Characteristics of Digital Objects: Images are digitized in gif files and displayed in image dimension 250x300. You can view images that are displayed on the collection page or click "enlarge" which will enable you to magnify the original digital images.

Target Audience: I assume that this site attracts a vast array of folks from scholars of many disciplines (i.e., cultural/social studies, history, women's studies, literary studies, etc) to the general public interested in understanding the historical perspective on women's roles or mere curiosities on the historical background.