Long before a lady calling herself Heloise decided to launch books, newspaper, and magazine columns devoted to household hints, an enterprising newspaper person, calling him or herself "Mrs. Joe", asked readers to submit their household hints to the newspaper. They responded with thousands of such helpful items and these were later published in a book. The book, reproduced here, is an incredible picture of American life a century or so ago, probably the late 1890s to the early 1900s. Reading the hints tells of suggestions for cooking (priceless), cleaning (thought provoking), treatment of ailments (sometimes amusing, sometimes helpful today), and many, many more. Taken as a whole, Mrs. Joe's Housekeeping Guide offers the historian an amazingly detailed picture of everyday American life in the Gay Nineties of the nineteenth century. Even more amazing are some hints that are as practical or useful or delicious in the twenty-first century. Mrs. Joe's Housekeeping Guide will provide the reader with humor, joy at finding an unusual solution for a problem, and fun in comparing how people lived then with the advances made in our country a century later. It can be an invaluable tool for those who study American history.
Joe Mitchell Chapple
(1909), 2007, 5.5" x 8.5", paper, index, 376 pp.
ISBN: 9780788442933
101-C4293
