The Real Housewives of New England: Poverty and Epistemology in Lydia Maria Child's The American Frugal Housewife

Abstract

When The Frugal Housewife first appeared in 1829, its author Lydia Maria Child had already published her sentimental novel Hobomok (1824) to some encouraging reviews, and she would eventually achieve broader success and some notoriety for her activism on behalf of African American slaves.1 Of all her life’s work, however, nothing would introduce her into American public life like this slim volume of domestic advice, published in thirty-three editions prior to the Civil War. Late in the century, Thomas Wentworth Higginson would fondly recall its “appetizing pages” and observe that American women gained “passage into literature by first compiling some kind of cookery book.... as Charlotte Hawes has since written, ‘First this steak and then that stake’”—first a domestic entrée and then a seat at the table.2 But the passage into literature to which Higginson refers was not a smooth one. Child’s book, with her stated intent to write “for the poor,” was greeted with some dismay by one of the age’s great tastemakers, Sarah Josepha Hale (AFH, 6). Herself a widowed mother of five, Hale also recognized the need for her readers to plan for financial exigencies.3 However, she offered only faint praise in an 1830 Ladies’ Magazine review of the first edition of Child’s book, which A mind full of piety and knowledge is always rich; it is a bank that never fails; it yields a perpetual dividend of happiness.