From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice

Western Folklore, Spring 2002 by Newton, Sarah E

From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice. By Sarah A. Leavitt. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xiii 250, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth, $18.95 paper)

A folklore journal is an perhaps an odd venue for a review of a text studying the cultural history of domestic advice in America, but Sarah A. Leavitt's work provides background in women's culture that is useful for scholars in many disciplines-women's studies, American studies, history, sociology, and folklore among them. Leavitt's book-what she calls "a genealogy of domestic advice" (4)-is a critical and historical overview of the genre from before Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe's The American Woman's Home (1869) to Martha Stewart's Martha Stewart Living (1990). Focusing primarily on the years 1850 to 1950, with a conclusion updating domestic advice to the Stewart-dominated 1990s, Leavitt pursues the premise that these texts and their writers reflected and promoted cultural ideals reflected in home furnishing, ornamentation, home architecture and design, and the general art of housekeeping. Leavitt uses the term "domestic fantasy" to delineate the cultural ideals envisioned by domestic advisors in each era. It is a good illustration of Berger and Luckmann's concept of the "social construction of reality."

Beginning with nineteenth-century texts, Leavitt shows how domestic advice manuals reinforced women's role in the home by suggesting their empowerment as wives and mothers in well-run Christian homes. By the late nineteenth century, writers of domestic advice advocated a revised "domestic fantasy" with new ideas about sanitation and the creation of healthy homes through science. (I wish Leavitt had pushed this point a bit more: equating housewives with science and medicine, almost exclusively male domains, persuades women readers to see housework as a nifty "profession.") Here is the beginning of test kitchens, scientific principles applied to counter height, and the Good Housekeeping Institute. The third chapter focuses on household education as a means of teaching new immigrants ways to live, dress, and decorate as "real" Americans. As a school and Agricultural Extension subject, Home Economics reached rural and African-American women, encouraging conformity and reconfirming home decor as a reflection of American values (mass-produced furniture as democratic). The next chapter presents the twentieth-century "fantasy" of the home not as the dusty and bric-a-brac-crammed Victorian ideal, but as clean, uncluttered, streamlined, and sanitary. This is followed by a chapter on the conjoining of ideas of gender and color. By the 1920s women were being told that colors and furnishings could affect character development in their children, and by the 1940s the associations of pink with feminine and blue with masculine had become firmly established in American culture.

Leavitt's next chapter picks up another domestic theme of the earlier twentieth century, "the romance of the past" (149). Here she notes that in the midst of the modernist movement Americans became enamored of Mission-style furniture associated with the primitive West; the Colonial Revival movement that actually began with the Centennial in 1876 (a glance back to our own "creation myth"); and the use of Hispano-American and indigenous Native American (e.g. Pueblo) architecture and artifacts to grasp a "disappearing way of life" (156). The last chapter takes us to the 1950s, the development of the ranch house, and the mantra of "togetherness" as a rhetorical ploy to convince women that the open floor plan meant that their being in the kitchen actually placed them at the center of family life. Leavitt concludes with thoughts on Martha Stewart-thankfully, Leavitt treats her generally with respect-who is the undisputed exemplar and inheritor of this long tradition of domestic advice (Stewart herself collects advice texts). What some have seen approvingly as Stewart's "hyperdomesticity" (203) has gained her many critics, along with charges ranging from class elitism to the undermining of women's liberation. The truth is that Martha Stewart has made domesticity both desirable and respectable again. Stewart knows what many of us have forgotten-that there have always been women who have wanted to stay in the home, who uneasily resisted feminism's call, who have wanted, quite simply, to be wives and mothers and-yes-housekeepers.

This is an intelligent and well written book, and for folklorists interested in the lore within the private domain of women as exemplified in the work of Margaret K. Yocom, Rosan A. Jordan, Susan J. Kalcik and others, it provides valuable perspective on the way women were taught to think about themselves and their homes. There are places where I wish Leavitt had pushed the analysis deeper, but that is difficult, given her historical agenda. And I admit to becoming uncomfortable, finally, with the term "domestic fantasy"-best reserved, it seems to me, for concepts like Pueblo-style Fred Harvey hotels and Turkish cozy corners. In my view these texts more accurately project a model or ideal for educating women, sincerely and sometimes passionately, in their duties and tastes as the culture at the time defines these. Domestic advisors stand, as it were, in loco parentis, teaching their surrogate daughters how to create good and even beautiful homes. And as any folklorist knows, cooking and decorating are performances of identity, a point with which Martha Stewart would agree.