| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Sarah A. Leavitt. From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2002. Pp. xiii, 250. Cloth $49.95, paper $18.95.

As a "genealogy of domestic advice" based primarily on manuals and magazines from Godey's to Good Housekeeping, this work aims to trace how the history of domestic advisors "connected with the important cultural dialogues of their day" (pp. 4, 205). Beginning with a single chapter on the nineteenth century, Sarah A. Leavitt examines domestic advisors' incorporation of middle-class, Christian ideals—virtue, honesty, and frugality—into the advice they provided Victorian housewives. In the five thematically driven (unevenly paced and poorly organized) chapters that follow, Leavitt covers slightly more than the first half of the twentieth century. According to the experts who then connected science, Taylorism, and the Arts and Crafts movement to their own advice, the ideal home was to be governed by simplicity, utility, authenticity, and modernity. Simultaneously, domestic advisors sought to "Americanize" immigrant housewives and their daughters by introducing them to the practices of scientific housekeeping. In the decades before World War II, domestic advisors then promoted the use of color in home furnishings that they equated with character development ("personality" and "individuality"). By the 1950s, the "togetherness" ethos shaped housing design as well as domestic advisors' home decoration ideals. . . .

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