Good Housekeeping: Household Management and Domestic Organization

Abstract

This chapter looks closely at a number of domestic manuals, cookery guides and advice books to consider how women’s representation of their domestic role further conflates the public and private spheres. Books by Mrs John Gilpin, Dr Mildred Staley, and Steel and Gardiner’s seminal work encouraged the idea that the home was a microcosm of the British Empire. As such, these writers suggest that women’s domestic duties, particularly in relation to dealing with indigenous servants, echoed the wider principles of Britain’s civilizing mission. Undoubtedly British women in India inscribed English domestic practices as a universal standard against which they measured the work of their own servants. By doing so, they clearly emphasized their own cultural superiority and influenced wider perceptions about the Indian race. At the same time, these authoritative texts reveal a real anxiety about the presence of the indigenous people within sanctified domestic spaces. Thus, although British women insist that the Indian home can be run in the same way as the English home, this is evidently an imperial assertion and not reflective of reality.

Life in India always partakes of the nature of a campaign. (Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p. 32)