A Housewife Is a Handy Person and a Handy Kit
Peterson’s magazine in 1880 was full of projects, most of them with directions that we would consider inadequate today, but sufficient for the readers of the time apparently. This housewife is a thing, not a person. It’s a little sewing kit, a generous version of those tiny sewing kits that we still take when we travel. The college student was probably a young man, it being 1880. But there were some women going to colleges, especially teaching colleges back then, and in the decades to come the idea of the New Woman meant more of them would be going to colleges of all sorts.
The kit was meant to keep needles and threads and spare buttons, notice most of them are small buttons for shirts, and a little pair of scissors, etc. All in a pretty kit as it was suggested that velvet or silk fabric be used and then a silk monogram put on the outside.
So someone, probably a housewife, a mother or sister or aunt, put together a housewife for a young man to do the kind of mending that women usually did but which men were obviously capable of doing. The word makes my head spin a little, but I like the idea of everyone assuming that young men were just as capable of doing the work. Which makes sense in an era when men were professional tailors.
