Housekeeping and Hygiene
Photographs
These photographs show, among other things, the teaching of housekeeping skills and hygiene standards, a focus of widespread concern during the Progressive Era and in the settlement house movement. Click on the photograph to view larger images or to magnify image details, or click the links in the right-hand column for more related photographs from the Social Museum Collection.
 "Washing Lesson," c. 1900, Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Association |
This Photograph Catalog record More Photographs Washing Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Association Social settlements From the Social Museum Collection. |
 "Housekeeping Class," c. 1900, Kingsley House, Pittsburgh. |
This Photograph Catalog record More Photographs Housekeeping Kingsley House Social settlements From the Social Museum Collection. |
 "Cooking Class," c. 1900, Calhoun Colored School, and Social Settlement, Calhoun Alabama. |
This Photograph Catalog record More Photographs Calhoun Colored School Social settlements From the Social Museum Collection. |
Text and Images
The passage below is part of a longer description of the settlement worker's experience and environment. "If the people whom she has elected to help were cultivated, refined, and highly moral, there would be no need for her presence among them. She will find immorality, dirt, disease, unthrift, and all the faults that produce poverty and misery." Instruction in domestic science was expected to address the physical conditions settlement workers encountered; because physical and moral hygiene were inseparable in people's minds, it was also favored as a remedy for less tangible problems. Click on the excerpt to page through the book, or click the links in the right-hand column for more related texts and photographs.
 From Helen Churchill Candee, How Women May Earn a Living, New York: Macmillan & Co., 1900. |
This Text Catalog record Related Photographs A Resident's Room Polish Family Typical Italian Courtyard Texts: Settlements The Burden of the City, 1904 The House on Henry Street, 1904 Settlement Work as a Vocation for Women, 1912 20 Years at Hull-House, 1912 Texts: More Domestic Lessons Housekeeping Notes, 1911 Welfare Work, 1923 Home Industry is Culture, 1914 All home economics People Jane Addams Florence Kelley |
Advertising
Some middle-school students who examined these materials thought the illustration below expressed for both the advertiser and the broader society, including settlement leaders, the expectation that soap would make young people polite, dainty, whiter, and more American, as well as clean. The links in the right-hand column lead to more advertisements for soap and more evidence of its cultural significance.
 Acme Soap, Lautz Bros. & Co. (n.d.), Buffalo, New York. |
More Advertising John Anderson, My Jo What a Cake of Soap Will Do All trade catalogs "Fairy Soap Purity" Souvenir Program of the Ninth Biennial Convention of the General Federation of Women's Clubs (1907) "Think of Soap" (1907), Ladies' Home Journal "Packer's Tar Soap" (1903), Ladies' Home Journal All magazines Price Lists "Laundry Soaps, Etc." "Toilet Department: Soaps" S. S. Pierce, Importers and Grocers [1886] Cobb, Bates & Yerxa Retail Price List [1889] |
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Texts "The Soap Industry" Elementary Industrial Arts (1922) "Report on Hygiene and Physical Culture" Report of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union (1881) |
Selected Bibliography for Housekeeping and Hygiene
Bushman, Richard L. and Claudia L. Bushman. "The Early History of Cleanliness in America." The Journal of American History 74.4 (March 1988): 1213-1238.
Lasch-Quinn, Elisabeth. Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Mohun, Arwen P. Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1940. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Rury, John L. "Vocationalism for Home and Work: Women's Education in the United States, 1880-1930." History of Education Quarterly 24.1 (Spring 1984): 21-44.
Valverde, Mariana. The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, Inc., 1991.
Woloch, Nancy. Women and the American Experience. 2nd ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1994.