Your Home and You

Found, in a thrift store: Your Home and You, a home economics book with a copyright date of 1960.

Readers born after 1975 or thereabouts may be unfamiliar with "home ec"; even at that time, it wasn't a required class with an extensive curriculum. Usually it was a course in cooking or sewing and enrollment meant an easy A and a chance to sit around and talk to your friends for an hour in the guise of helping each other with your projects.

Your Home and You is quite a revealing time capsule. The recipes unabashedly include butter, cream, milk and eggs without concern for cholesterol. There are tips on laundering such exotic fabrics as Vycron, Zefran and Arnel. Ettiquette and manners are addressed at length. Imagine what the youth of today would think of such discourse. Many of them would laugh rauccously at the detailed suggestions for eating in company, and even those who didn't might well be unfamiliar with all of "the rules". Though the advice is good, it's phrased very genteelly with a turn of phrase that seems out of date.

With a copyright date of 1960, the actual writing of the book would have been done in the late '50s, and the styles of hair and clothing reflect this. Even more telling is the audience it speaks to: The girls have names like Virginia, Carolyn and Jean, while the boys are Teddy, Chuck and Gary. There is no ethnic diversity whatsoever; all the smiling young people in the pictures are Caucasian. If Your Home and You had been published five or ten years later, it might reflect changes engendered by the civil rights movement, but instead, it stands as a textbook example of the conservative 1950s.

We can't go back to those days, but we can visit. Anyone for Swiss Steak?

Your Home and You

Found, in a thrift store: Your Home and You, a home economics book with a copyright date of 1960.

Readers born after 1975 or thereabouts may be unfamiliar with "home ec"; even at that time, it wasn't a required class with an extensive curriculum. Usually it was a course in cooking or sewing and enrollment meant an easy A and a chance to sit around and talk to your friends for an hour in the guise of helping each other with your projects.

Your Home and You is quite a revealing time capsule. The recipes unabashedly include butter, cream, milk and eggs without concern for cholesterol. There are tips on laundering such exotic fabrics as Vycron, Zefran and Arnel. Ettiquette and manners are addressed at length. Imagine what the youth of today would think of such discourse. Many of them would laugh rauccously at the detailed suggestions for eating in company, and even those who didn't might well be unfamiliar with all of "the rules". Though the advice is good, it's phrased very genteelly with a turn of phrase that seems out of date.

With a copyright date of 1960, the actual writing of the book would have been done in the late '50s, and the styles of hair and clothing reflect this. Even more telling is the audience it speaks to: The girls have names like Virginia, Carolyn and Jean, while the boys are Teddy, Chuck and Gary. There is no ethnic diversity whatsoever; all the smiling young people in the pictures are Caucasian. If Your Home and You had been published five or ten years later, it might reflect changes engendered by the civil rights movement, but instead, it stands as a textbook example of the conservative 1950s.

We can't go back to those days, but we can visit. Anyone for Swiss Steak?