From the Archives: "The House and All That Goes on in It": The Notebook of Frederica Shanks, 1905-6

Abstract

N 1882 FEMINIST REFORMER Isabella Beecher Hooker urged women to master the plumbing systems in their own houses. Perhaps encouraged by the diverse interests of her half-sister, Catharine, whose combined interests in technology, feminism, and domestic architecture had inspired her own design of the American Woman's Home thirteen years earlier, Hooker saw the relationship between feminism and plumbing quite clearly. It was her own practice, she admitted, to inspect the work of a plumber until she understood every point of it.1 The Beecher sisters were not alone in associating feminist ideals with sanitary fixtures. To illustrate her notion of women's place in sanitary reform, Harriette Plunkett, author of Women, Plumbers, and Doctors; or, Household Sanitation, in-