cover image Voices of American Homemakers

Voices of American Homemakers

. Indiana University Press, $50 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-253-12986-4

These interviews focus on members of the National Extension Homemakers Council, an organization that tries to educate and uplift housewives, particularly those in isolated rural areas. While it presents surprising and often touching information about women's lives, this book makes poor use of its subjects by splitting their experiences up by topic rather than leaving them whole, so that a chapter on the women's younger years, for example, presents many extracts from different women's narratives but never gives the unified story of any one woman. This approach is repeated throughout, as are the interviewers' rather intrusive comments. Statements like ``You have some fond memories'' seem designed to lead the subject rather than to draw her out, and a happy veneer is often encouraged. Still, there's no denying the little joys found in anecdotes like the one about the woman who enlisted her mail carrier to bring starter for bread dough to her closest neighbor, only to have it rise on the way, or the useful fact that pages from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue made better toilet paper than those from the Montgomery Ward one. The period photographs are a delight. (Feb.)