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6. Home Life and History
- University of Massachusetts Press
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: 137 ; Chapter 6 Home Life and History • W riting history, for Alice Morse Earle, involved more than assembling carefully researched facts into an appealing narrative.Her emphasis on domestic life and its material culture , both as historical evidence about the past and as agency for shaping the future, placed Earle at the cutting edge of historical scholarship. Her career coincided with the passing of the age of Francis Parkman and George Bancroft, when the first generation of academically trained historians was transforming historical writing into something more rigorously “scientific.” Within this scholarly context, Earle found the freedom to explore social and cultural subjects—particularly the worlds of women and the home, using artifacts as evidence and drawing on the methods of folklorists and anthropologists, as well as art historians, antiquarians, and domestic advice writers. Earle’sselectionofhomelifeasafavoritetopicrelatedcloselytoherfaith in the formative power of material environments and must have drawn some of its inspiration from domestic advice literature,published from the 1830s on. Lydia Maria Child, beginning with her earliest work on child rearing, published in 1831, as well as many others who followed her, saw the American home as an institution to be scrutinized and utilized for its potential to reform society by shaping individual behavior from one’s earliest moments. Catharine Beecher’s Treatise on Domestic Economy, which appeared in 1841, approached the problem of the domestic environment 138 ; Chapter 6 with the same scientific rationality that her contemporaries employed to define the structure of other institutions: prisons, asylums, schools, cities.1 Sixteen years later Elizabeth Fries Ellet, who shifted gears from history to domesticity, wrote The Practical Housekeeper, which followed a similar pattern. Both authors provided their readers with thoughtfully conceived plans for improving their homes, bringing up their children, cooking, gardening , and myriad other details of housekeeping. Their emphasis on the domestic environment reflected a deep underlying faith in the perfectibility of the individual through the agency of a moral home and women as purveyors of that morality.2 In 1870,four years before Earle married and began housekeeping herself, Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister Catharine Beecher collaborated on a domestic advice book, The American Woman’s Home. Beecher and Stowe dedicated their book “To the Women of America,in whose hands rest the real destinies of the republic, as moulded by the early training and preserved amid the mature influences of home.” This dedication, and much of the rhetoric within,reiterated the importance of the domestic sphere to the future of the United States. In particular, Beecher and Stowe believed that the way a house was furnished and adorned could have tremendous power over its inhabitants. They commented extensively on “the important subject of beauty in reference to the decoration of houses,” arguing that “while the aesthetic element must be subordinate to the requirements of physical exercise, and, as a matter of expense, should be held of inferior consequence to means of higher moral growth; it yet holds a place of great significance among the influences which make home happy and attractive , which gives it a constant and wholesome power over the young, and contributes much to the education of the entire household in refinement, intellectual development, and moral sensibility.”3 Earle, writing twenty years later, elaborated on the environmentalist domestic philosophy of Beecher, Ellet, and Stowe, but with a new emphasis on history, and its impact on the home, as a much-needed instrument of social reform. Although Earle identified herself as a historian and her scholarly products as history, she fit rather uneasily into the emerging historical mainstream . Aside from the fact that she was one of only a handful of women writers of history, what set her work apart from much other historical writing of the period was not so much its prescriptive tone as her choice of topics, her use of evidence, and, most important, her audience. Her main [3.236.147.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:58 GMT) : 139 Home Life and History predecessors as writers of women’s history were Martha J. Lamb, Sarah Bolton,Frances Willard,Louisa Moulton,Phoebe Hannaford,and,above all, Elizabeth Ellet.4 Ellet had published a three-volume work, The Women of the American Revolution (1848–1850), utilizing a biographical approach to her subject. Each chapter was organized around the life of an individual woman, beginning with George Washington’s mother, Mary, and focusing heavily on genealogy, heroic deeds, and the influence of women as wives and mothers. Ellet departed from the realm of...