“Quaint Dessert Dishes” in *American Homes and Gardens* (1911) – The Public Domain Review

Although “Quaint Dessert Dishes” is one of many articles explicitly aimed at a female reader, American houses and gardensWriters and readers were mostly men. At the turn of the century, men were not only interested in, but also responsible for, the home. If the term “housewife” is applied mainly to women today, historian Margaret Marsh has shown that around the turn of the century there was a boom in men’s household work in the suburbs. Martha and Robert Bruère, influential progressive economists, proclaimed thus: “When God made housewives, He created them!” And indeed, in the unsigned editorials of editor Charles Allen Munn (whose friends praised not only because of his good taste in art, but also because of his ‘much rarer quality of the housewife’, he advocated male involvement in the household, to writein December 1905, that “the responsibility for the house is not [the woman’s] alone, but equally belongs to the husband.”