The Hidden Art of Homemaking

Title: The Hidden Art of Homemaking

Published: 1971

Author: Edith Schaeffer

Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

The Hidden Art of Homemaking combines more traditional housekeeping advice with discussion of fine art as an appropriate hobby for a homemaker. Particularly, much of the book focuses on ways in which a homemaker can find beauty and places for art within daily housekeeping duties, or ways to create said beauty within the home. There’s an undercurrent of Christianity, particularly Christian gendered morality, throughout the book, most explicitly in the introduction, which serves as a kind of philosophical briefing on why the reader should care about art and want to find or create it in the home. The Christian element is somewhat typical of the books in this collection dating to the 1970s; this may signal either a return to uber-traditional morality in the wake of major social movements happening at the same time, or it may simply represent the fact that “traditional” homemaking has proceeded to be increasingly practiced by smaller and more culturally conservative sects of the social world as time goes on.