Not as good as previous editions...

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I am pretty sure earlier versions of this book featured images. This one does not... Other than having no images, it is the same as earlier versions.

Informative book, but beware of Echo version

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On browsing this book, it appears very informative for those interested in Victorian households and how the prominent Beechers advised women to manage their homes. However, I purchased the version of the book published by Echo Library, unaware that this version does NOT include the illustrations that appeared in the original book. The Beecher authors refer to at least 77 figures in their writing, but since none are included in Echo's version, it was difficult for me to follow the text or completely understand what it was saying. I feel quite cheated and am thus returning the book. But I think a version that includes the illustrations would be a great reference book for Victorian historians!

Moral housekeeping and healthly living - 1869

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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".

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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.