Family Joys and What?!

[telophase]

YES, YES, I KNOW that language changes over time! But my inner twelve-year-old will NEVER NOT SNICKER at passages like this:

A home based on the right principles will be simple. There will be simplicity of living, honesty in the expression of what will be offered in the home. No ostentation or living beyond one's means; simplicity in entertainment in offering freely of what one has to friends, without apology or explanation; simple furnishings, simple, healthful food, simple, artistic clothing, all help to simplify life and give the home makers more time for the family joys and intercourse.

It's a home ec textbook from 1916:

Title: Shelter and clothing: a textbook of the household arts
Authors: Kinne, Helen, 1861-1917., Cooley, Anna M. b. 1874.

Found via the Digital Book Index here, so YOU TOO can share in the joys of domestic science!

Comments

[yhlee]

I was having the same reaction to the use of the same word in Woolf's A Room of One's Own and feeling like a 12-year-old. :-D

[mystcrave.livejournal.com]

"Intercourse" hee hee.

Here's a line from one of my student's annotated bibliography: "This source explains flappers and told me a lot about petting parties, which sound very exciting."

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I bet they do! XD

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

What source? Jeez, do you think we don't want to KNOW?

[mystcrave.livejournal.com]

Braeman, John, Robert H. Bremner, and David Brody, eds. Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America: The 1920's. Vol. 2. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968.

A couple of quotes the student included in her research notes:

"The girls were petting also...The rule earlier had been that a nice girl did not allow a man to kiss her unless they were engaged to be married. By the early 1920s the polling of coeds showed that fairly indiscriminate petting was the rule." 339

"By the end of the decade the issues aroused by petting and short skirts had ceased to burn brightly, which is to say that the women had won that battle" 341