The Hoosier Cabinet and the American Housewife

The Hoosier Cabinet and the American Housewife NANCY HILLER n the distaste—ranging from mild ennui to marriage-wrecking exaspera- Ition—that late nineteenth-century women shared for household work, a few entrepreneurial men in Albany, Indiana, saw a golden opportunity. The farm equipment factory these businessmen had founded was surviving but far from thriving when they happened on a product that would catapult their firm to national fame. The Hoosier cabinet, a freestanding cupboard equipped with ingenious mechanical devices, consolidated storage and maximized the efficiency of kitchen labor, thereby alleviating some of the most exasperating aspects of the middle-class housewife’s daily responsibil- ities. This article examines how a modest item of Indiana-made furniture came to alter the course of kitchen history. Women’s lives during the late 1800s were quite different from our own. For working-class and rural women, general housekeeping involved real physical labor. Most tasks had to be done by hand—churning butter, stoking stoves with wood or coal carried from the porch or cellar, chopping and mixing and washing. Kitchens were sparsely furnished, usually with a worktable and sink, a storage cupboard, and a few open shelves; dry goods purchased from the grocer were kept in a pantry, along with rows of the canned goods that most women made from homegrown produce. Kitchens were also typically large; a basic work area of 14 by 18 feet was not unusual, __________________________ Nancy Hiller is a cabinetmaker and writer in Bloomington, Indiana. The bulk of the following essay is excerpted from The Hoosier Cabinet in Kitchen History, forthcoming from Indiana University Press, and is reproduced here with their permission. The author’s five-page intro- duction, summarizing earlier portions of the book, was written specifically for the IMH. INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, 105 (March 2009) ᭧ 2009, Trustees of Indiana University. 2 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY with many tasks performed in ancillary rooms such as a cellar or pantry, in addition to an outdoor yard. An average housewife walked thousands of steps each day in the course of food preparation and cleanup alone. Even middle-class women who could afford paid help found everyday life to be far from easy. Servants often brought trouble into their mistresses’ homes—communication problems, personality conflicts, and differences in domestic habits—and domestic help, good or bad, was becoming increasingly hard to find. The factories of the rapidly growing manufacturing sector were hungry for labor, and, despite poor pay and significant hardships, employment in book binderies, paper mills, and button shops often proved more appealing than domestic service, with its preponderance of fickle and unreasonably demanding employers.1 The problem, from the workers’ per- spective, was summed up nicely by a woman who contrasted her servant friends’ existence with her own experience in industry: “[T]hey’re never sure of one minute that’s their own when they’re in the [mistresses’] house. Our day [in the factory],” she continued, “is ten hours long, but when it’s done it’s done, and we can do what we like with the evenings.”2 As domestic servants exchanged their harried positions for the struc- ture and independence of industrial work, their former mistresses were forced back into their own kitchens, where they found themselves at a loss. After years—sometimes generations—of depending on hired labor to deal with the innumerable basic tasks of everyday life, many lacked the expertise required to provide for their families.3 What was a young housewife to make of a recipe that told her to take “a pinch of this, and a little of that, and considerable of the other, and cook them till they are done about right”? The literature of the period suggests that overcooked dinners, sagging cakes, and other minor disasters led frequently to household strife, but there was little formal instruction available in how to remedy such problems. Moreover, despite the considerable skill, creativity, and effort involved in kitchen-related enterprises, many middle-class Americans held such work in low regard, a fact that did nothing to fuel the housewife’s motivation.4 __________________________ 1Sarah A. Leavitt, From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002), 21-22; Ellen M. Plante, The American Kitchen 1700 to the Present: From Hearth to Highrise (New York, 1995), 58-65, 110-26. 2Nancy Cott et al., Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women (Boston, 1996), 359. 3On the rise of domestic advice literature for middle-class women, see Plante, The American Kitchen, 110-39. Popular magazines offered similar advice. See, for example, “Economy in Cooking Well,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, January 1871. 4Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (2nd ed., Berkeley, Calif., 2009), chap. 2; Nancy Folbre, “The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in Nineteenth-Century Economic Thought,” Signs, 16 (Spring 1991), 463-84. THE HOOSIER CABINET 3 Kitchen Scientists, from Hoosier Manufacturing Company’s You and Your Kitchen catalog, 1918. The company drew on the domestic science movement of the early twentieth century to market its cabinets, portraying them as key to the scientific approach to meal preparation. Courtesy of Henry County Historical Society, New Castle, Indiana 4 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY Catharine Beecher, one of the century’s most influential writers and activists, sought to address this disparity at both its individual and its broad- er social levels. With her equally well-known sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, she published and lectured on the need for formal instruction in the housekeeping arts, arguing that proficient, wholesome housekeeping would have wide-reaching effects on American society as a whole. Beyond providing practical guidance that ranged from recipes for calf’s foot blancmange and egg frizzle to her impressively detailed design for a kitchen work cupboard that she called a “cooking form,” Beecher published an astonishing variety of insights into the all-too-often stifling effects of domestic life on the American woman’s spirit.5 As Barbara Welter and others have convincingly argued, women’s attempts to live up to nineteenth-century ideals of womanhood bred resent- ment. Day after day spent alone at home in housework that was not just exhausting, but accorded little—if any—respect, left wives with what we would call low self-esteem, not to mention a lack of energy and enthusiasm for family activities by the end of the day.6 Understanding that women need- ed to feel as though their contributions were valued both by their husbands and family at home and in the wider socio-political sphere, Beecher argued that housekeeping, no less than other forms of business, should be formally taught, and that it warranted the cachet of domestic science. While she sup- ported home beautification and other pursuits on the grounds that these would promote the happy temperament so encouraging to godly living, she cautioned against overspending on such relative frivolities, as doing so could kindle domestic strife. Strife, above all, must be avoided; a husband who was “wearied with endless complaints” might well be drawn to clubs plying family-wrecking temptations.7 Even in her most impassioned calls for improvements to women’s welfare, Beecher steadfastly upheld the impor- tance of maintaining household harmony, and with it, the institution of marriage. While Beecher and other advocates of women’s welfare were working for a better society, economic and technological changes were paving the way for industrial manufacturing on an unprecedented scale. The Hoosier cabinet itself could only be produced because of radical improvements in __________________________ 5Catharine Beecher, Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book: Designed as a Supplement to Her Treatise on Domestic Economy (1st ed., New York, 1846); Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home: or, Principles of Domestic Science (New York, 1869); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York, 1973). 6Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly, 18 (Summer 1966), 151-74. 7Beecher and Stowe, American Woman’s Home, 466. THE HOOSIER CABINET 5 the procurement, processing, and transportation of raw materials. These improvements were augmented by changes in energy production and supply that gave rise to the mechanized factory, and by changes in transportation that allowed for the shipment of finished products to increasingly far-flung places. From the territory’s early history, Indiana’s dense hardwood forests had appealed to craftsmen in wood. As early as 1818, The Emigrant’s Guide, or Pocket Geography of the Western States and Territories advertised the Indiana high country as a rich source of premium timber.8 The prospect drew established artisans from such centers of craftsmanship as Boston and New York, and many brought with them their skills, equipment, and knowl- edge of the furniture business. Joseph Meeks moved to Brookville, Indiana, in 1818, and the following February, he placed an advertisement in the Enquirer and Indiana Telegraph: JOSEPH MEEKS CABINET-MAKER, Late from the City of N. York, where he has conducted a small business for the last eight years, takes this method of informing the inhabitants of Brookville, and the vicinity, that he intends following the above Business at this place. He has brought with him a quantity of Superior Mahogany, which he will manufacture in the newest fashion and workman like manner; likewise other woods nat- ural to the growth of this country. His residence at present is at the House of Mrs. Cooper, in the rear of Mr. Ray’s tavern. N.B. An Apprentice wanted immediately.9 Furniture- and cabinetmaking enterprises flourished in Indiana, though setbacks due to bankruptcy or fire were common.

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