Playing House: Homemaking for Children

Jump to: Technical Note

About the Collection

Kirkland, E. S.

Six little cooks, or, Aunt Jane's cooking class
[Frontispiece]

American domestic advice or homemaking manuals emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and served to advise the housewife in the care and upkeep of the home and its contents and occupants. While most of these manuals were written to assist the “woman of the house”, others aimed at educating young girls, the homemakers of the future. This collection includes digitized versions of books from the UW-Madison collections spanning 1877 to the 1930’s. These books provide instruction on a wide range of topics including cooking, cleaning, laundry, household management and occupational training for young maids. Through them, young girls could learn among other things, the proper way to make a bed, polish the silver, decorate a table, and prepare and serve a nice meal.

Technical Note

Please note that full-text searching for the electronic-facsimile texts in our collections is based on uncorrected OCR (Optical Character Recognition) results. While such text is often highly accurate, it will contain errors that may affect your search results. In particular, texts with the following characteristics are particularly prone to error (in some cases, accuracy for such texts is so low that we have decided not to attempt to provide full-text searching):

• Hand-written texts;
• Texts that contain diacritics;
• Texts that contain non-Latin scripts;
• Texts that contain obsolete characters (including the "long S" [looks like an "f"]);
• Texts that are printed in a font in which the letters are difficult for the software to differentiate.