I found a revealing illustration on the cover of “Ladies Guide; Or Skillful Housewife,” published in 1853. The print depicts the profile of the young woman, hair in a high bun, leaning over a sturdy table, her hands atop a rolling pin flattening a ball of dough for a pie crust. One child pulls at her skirt looking up into her mother’s face who is seemingly undistracted by her baking task. A second young girl, sits on the floor sewing or perhaps mending a garment; the glow of a fire behind her from the fireplace warms a few articles of clothing hung across a line. Cupboards are open exposing domestic wares, dishes and serving bowls.
The Anonymous figure, a middle-class woman was the manager, nurturer and moral educator of the home. She took responsibility for “private sphere” while the men controlled the public realm of politics and business. Illustrations in and on the covers of advice books like “Ladies” emphasized visually that wives were to make home a haven of restfulness for her husband. She accomplished this through housework or “the gentle arts” of cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing, sewing.
Through the prism of my contemporary world, it is compelling to me how the roles between men and women were not only defined socially and in a cultural context, but also through the visual displayed and circulated in advice books and popular magazines for women. They underscored that although a couple may develop a strong, deep bond of affection for each other, their “partnership,” dwelled separately in their singular worlds. Illustrations like the women making a pie is stagnant in its one vision of her role in the home and in the world.