The Liberation of Cake

This chapter shows how American housewives experimented with chemical leavening shortcuts that democratized breadstuffs from difficult to prepare luxuries to easy everyday foods. The precursor to baking powder was pearlash, first mentioned in 1796, in American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, the first cookbook written in the United States. Catharine Beecher and Sarah Josepha Hale also experimented with cream of tartar, baking soda, hartshorn, and ammonia, and used them to create a new American cuisine with new foods like cookies and soft gingerbread, and new events at which they were consumed. However, these revolutionary leaveners also had problems such as adverse interactions with other ingredients and loss of potency.

The Labor-saving Kitchen: Sources for Designs of the Architects’ Small Home Service Bureau

The history of the kitchen has received much attention from designers and design historians. Since the writings of Catharine Beecher, designers, household engineers, and others have written about the importance of the kitchen as the center of the home. This research traces the impact of the writings of theorists such as Frederick Taylor, Georgie Boynton Child, Helen Binkerd Young, and Christine Frederick on the designs produced by the architects in the first quarter of the 20th century. Frederick’s work took the concept of an efficient kitchen to a new level applying movement studies and introducing new ideas to the kitchen layout and arrangement. In a properly laid out and equipped kitchen, steps were saved by placing kitchen cabinets, ovens and stoves, refrigerators and sinks where they were needed in the sequence of food preparation and delivery to dining table as well as clean up after the meal. In her books, she also provided advice on a variety of considerations, such as appliances and accessories, lighting and ventilation; materials, finishes and color; and appliances and equipment. In 1919 a group of architects dedicated to improving the housing stock in the United States through good design banded together to form the Architects’ Small House Service Bureau (ASHSB). Their first plan book, How to Plan Finance and Build your Home published in 1921, also encouraged labor-saving kitchen design and provided advice on kitchen design. The research reported here assesses how the influence of Frederick and Boyton’s advice as reflected in the work of and interpreted by Helen Binkerd Young is demonstrated in the kitchen designs of the ASHSB’s first plan book. A plan content analysis instrument, developed using Frederick’s writings and edited to include other variables from Young and Child, is used to analyze the 99 kitchens and two essays in the ASHSB’s plan book. The plans and accompanying comments evidence enthusiasm for the concept of scientific management and other labor- and energy-saving concepts promoted by Frederick. Many of her specific suggestions are incorporated in their kitchen designs, but there is limited evidence that ASHSB designs are only influenced by Frederick but rather include other popular labor-saving concepts of the early 20th century.

The Ideological Origins of the Women's College: Religion, Class, and Curriculum in the Educational Visions of Catharine Beecher and Mary Lyon

In 1828, as the movement to improve educational opportunities for American women was gaining in prominence, Catharine Beecher approached first Mary Lyon, and a year later Lyon's associate Zilpah Grant, to join her as instructor at Hartford Female Seminary. Consonant with the era of optimistic reform in which she lived, Beecher believed Hartford could change the world, so she wanted the most well-known female educators on board. The key to Hartford's influence was to be the type of students it attracted. Beecher wrote to Grant that a “woman of piety and active benevolence, with wealth which enables her to take the lead in society, can do more good than another of equally exalted character without it.” Lyon and Grant both declined.

Catharine Beecher and the American Woman's Puritan Home

Catharine Beecher's publications on household management, published between 1841 and 1869, offered architectural designs with a surprisingly consistent feature: they promoted the long-forgotten center-chimney New England house plan. For Beecher, that remnant of the Puritan era promised a radically new lifestyle, one that profoundly undercut the domestic social rituals of her time.

Clockwork Nation: Modern Time, Moral Perfectionism and American Identity in Catharine Beecher and Henry Thoreau

The economy of time, and our obligation to spend every hour for some useful end, are what few minds properly realize. Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841)There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (1854)In his seminal 1967 essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” E. P. Thompson codified the theory that modern life, characterized by capitalism and industry, would not be possible without the regulating, organizing, and disciplining power of the clock. The theory of clock time's importance to modernity, first proposed by Georg Simmel around the turn of the twentieth century and later adopted by Lewis Mumford, became conventional wisdom among social and economic historians writing after Thompson's brilliant exposition. The introduction of mechanical clocks into factories in England, Thompson argues, resulted in a “restructuring of working habits” and a concomitant change in the “inward notation of time” that led individuals to accept the industrial revolution's basic premises of quantifiable wage labor and systematic production. According to Thompson's successors, historians such as David Landes, the relationship between clocks and other forms of modernization has been recursive; advances in technology have made it possible to measure time more accurately, and this greater accuracy has in turn facilitated greater productivity, more efficient transportation networks (think of railroad timetables), and the punctuality so important to modern business. Moreover, political theorists have argued that the ubiquitous experience of precisely measured time has been fundamental to linking individuals into self-consciously modern national groups, “imagined communities” in Benedict Anderson's terms, moving forward together through a shared historical simultaneity. The result of temporal modernization, this very diverse group of thinkers agrees, has been a world made over both economically and politically to suit the clockwork rationality of the capitalist market.