This is an actual list from the early 1900s of some of the inventions that readers of Today’s Magazine, a magazine dedicated to housewives, made them the most thankful. Baby’s own bathtub— a miniature bathtub was much more manageable for frequent bathing and saved mothers from having to haul water to the full-sized household bathtub.…
Category: housewifery
We All Have Reasons to Be Thankful
A housewife in 1930 writes: “Thanksgiving Day approaches again, but how can we be thankful in our community where hail and drouth and other ills of agriculture have given us a lean year and empty purses. I am not irreverent when I say that it is not easy for me to lift my voice in…
I Cannot Be a Successful Homemaker and a Minimalist, too
It is not easy to determine, in detail, just which things are really necessary to refined and beautiful living, and which are the evidence of…ostentatious waste. -1907 The lifestyle of all the cool people for the last several years–minimalism. Like most extremes, it was the reaction to the unprecedented materialism of the last few decades. …
Praying and Playing in the Great Depression
This little story was first published in 1931, at the start of America’s Great Depression. As difficult as that time was, Grandmother felt that the 1870s was the “harder” time. Hard times aren’t unprecedented and for us in 2020 with our many concerns about the future, advice from past generations is always encouraging. From Grandmother:…
