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About this project
The book that got me interested in domestic texts in the first place was a 1941 manual called "Etiquette: Good Manners for Everyone." I found the copy archived in this collection in my great-grandmother's house in Touille, Utah, when I was maybe ten. Weird kid that I was, I was immediately drawn into the world of 1940s etiquette, where dinner plates must always be served from the left and removed from the right, and broken engagements are always assumed to be the decision of the bride - even if everyone knows that the truth is something different.
So why do these texts matter/ For one thing, it's a rare resource to have artifacts that don't just describe social norms of a given time period but actively instruct the reader on how to perform them. Some of the texts that I've analyzed for this project are essentially dictionaries of social behavior, right down to the alphabetized lists of different events and how to prepare for each of them.
I also think it's important to preserve and analyze this genre of domestic manuals because they're sometimes overlooked as historical artifacts, maybe because of their association with homemaking and other feminine occupations of the 20th century or maybe simply because they’re commercial instructional books. Existing scholarship on domestic manuals is fairly limited, though not nonexistent, and it was in part this relative lack of information on the subject that led me to want to do this research in the first place.
The collection featured on this site consists of twenty-two texts popular in the 20th century, ranging from Emily Post's most famous etiquette book to homemaking manuals written by a popular Mennonite women's radio host to instructional books for new wives just starting their own households. This web archive is meant to serve as an entry point to people interested in learning about domestic texts, as well as a mini-library of relevant texts for anyone currently studying the subject.
The Stepford Lives is the culmination of twenty-four weeks of work and research for a Mentored Advanced Project at Grinnell College in the summer of 2021 and spring of 2022. The student researcher on this project was Eva Hill '22, advised by professors Liz Rodrigues and Christopher Jones in digital scholarship and archival research, respectively.
This site is hosted and maintained by Grinnell College. Contact hilleva@grinnell.edu with any questions.