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One of the most fascinating qualities of housekeeping manuals is their simultaneous provision of genuinely helpful advice for keeping up a homestead and deeply ingrained social expectations. It is not useful, nor is it particularly interesting, to examine these texts purely as regressive artifacts of a past time; a much more productive analysis is to examine the ways in which the books exist on two informational axes, one that provides direct information on the best and easiest ways to maintain a house and family, and another that indirectly reinforces existing gendered dynamics within families and in the social sphere. The annotation available via links in the sidebar offer some notes on each above quality as it appears in the collected works. Click on the item thumbnails below to be taken directly to the item metadata page without annotations.

Collection is sorted alphabetically by title; works by a single author are not grouped together. Full-text PDFs are linked under item annotations where copyright permits.