Marion Harland did. The writer was born in Amelia County and spent much of her early life in Richmond. Over the course of 65 years, she penned a number of novels that seemed to enact her own divided loyalties over secession, slavery, and Reconstruction. Later in life, however, her interests turned more domestic. Struggling for the first time with household tasks such as cooking and cleaning, she realized there was a need for practical manuals for maintaining a household. The result was Common Sense in the Household: A Manual of Practical Housewifery (1871). Soon, Harland became a household name. Her works on cooking, housekeeping, and etiquette celebrated “the talent of home-making, precious and incommunicable,” as she described it in The Secret of a Happy Home (1896). Though Harland made it clear women were duty-bound to keep a well-ordered home, she also recognized and lamented the limitations placed on women. “It must be a fine thing,” she wrote, “to be a man on some accounts;-to be emancipated forever-and-a-day from the thraldom of skirts for instance, and to push through a crowd to read the interjectional headlines upon a bulletin board, instead of going meekly and unenlightened home.”
Further Reading:
Elizabeth Moss, Domestic Novelists in the Old South: Defenders of Southern Culture (1992)
This Vignette Provided By
Meriah L. Crawford, adjunct instructor of English and mass communications at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond
