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The Hoosier Cabinet and the American Housewife
NANCY HILLER
| In the distaste—ranging from mild ennui to marriage-wrecking exasperation—that late nineteenth-century women shared for household work, a few entrepreneurial men in Albany, Indiana, saw a golden opportunity. The farm equipment factory these businessmen had founded was surviving but far from thriving when they happened on a product that would catapult their firm to national fame. The Hoosier cabinet, a freestanding cupboard equipped with ingenious mechanical devices, consolidated storage and maximized the efficiency of kitchen labor, thereby alleviating some of the most exasperating aspects of the middle-class housewife's daily responsibilities. This article examines how a modest item of Indiana-made furniture came to alter the course of kitchen history. |
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Women's lives during the late 1800s were quite different from our own. For working-class and rural women, general housekeeping involved real physical labor. Most tasks had to be done by hand—churning butter, stoking stoves with wood or coal carried from the porch or cellar, chopping and mixing and washing. Kitchens were sparsely furnished, usually with a worktable and sink, a storage cupboard, and a few open shelves; dry goods purchased from the grocer were kept in a pantry, along with rows of the canned goods that most women made from homegrown produce. Kitchens were also typically large; a basic work area of 14 by 18 feet was not unusual, with many tasks performed in ancillary rooms such as a cellar or pantry, in addition to an outdoor yard. An average housewife walked thousands of steps each day in the course of food preparation and cleanup alone. |
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Even middle-class women who could afford paid help found everyday life to be far from easy. Servants often brought trouble into their mistresses' homes—communication problems, personality conflicts, and differences in domestic habits—and domestic help, good or bad, was becoming increasingly hard to find. The factories of the rapidly growing manufacturing sector were hungry for labor, and, despite poor pay and significant hardships, employment in book binderies, paper mills, and button shops often proved more appealing than domestic service, with its preponderance of fickle and unreasonably demanding employers.1 The problem, from the workers' perspective, was summed up nicely by a woman who contrasted her servant friends' existence with her own experience in industry: "[T]hey're never sure of one minute that's their own when they're in the [mistresses'] house.... Our day [in the factory]," she continued, "is ten hours long, but when it's done it's done, and we can do what we like with the evenings."2 |
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As domestic servants exchanged their harried positions for the structure and independence of industrial work, their former mistresses were forced back into their own kitchens, where they found themselves at a loss. After years—sometimes generations—of depending on hired labor to deal with the innumerable basic tasks of everyday life, many lacked the expertise required to provide for their families.3 What was a young housewife to make of a recipe that told her to take "a pinch of this, and a little of that, and considerable of the other, and cook them till they are done about right"? The literature of the period suggests that overcooked dinners, sagging cakes, and other minor disasters led frequently to household strife, but there was little formal instruction available in how to remedy such problems. Moreover, despite the considerable skill, creativity, and effort involved in kitchen-related enterprises, many middle-class Americans held such work in low regard, a fact that did nothing to fuel the housewife's motivation.4 |
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