ABSTRACT
As her fi rst contribution to the Semi-Colon Club, a Cincinnati literary society to which Harriet Beecher belonged, she made a satirical list of offerings to be found at the Beecher home:
The list indicates the role of the parlor as a hybrid space for learned activities and domestic capabilities. Aprons and geographies are produced rapidly and simultaneously; hairdressing services and verse-writing are complementary; bonnet construction and English instruction are whimsically juxtaposed skill sets. The advertisement of available services comprises the entire irony of Stowe’s domestic legacy. Although she was an author of domestic advice manuals and numerous works of fi ction whose importance turned on traditional, cultural constructions of the domestic, Stowe labored as much as possible throughout her life to avoid not only the co-production of housework and writing, but rather housework altogether. Even as she expounded the importance of domesticity and reconceived its defi nition in her texts, this writing was motivated by the increasing expense of household help that in turn enabled her literary production. Departing from the model of female authors writing from the home about the home, one of the most notorious homemakers of the nineteenth century was in actuality a chronicler of but not participant in the vocation. Consequently, a profound disjunction exists between Stowe’s domestic life and the multifaceted constructions of the domestic life she advocated.
