Old Fashioned Notions about Marriageable Women

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Unidentified couple, probably husband and wife, likely late 19th Century. Cabinet card’s back is stamped “Wm. Shew’s Photographic establishment, No. 523 Kearny Street, San Francisco”. [I own the cabinet card print, purchased on eBay.]

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“I hold an old-fashioned notion that a happy marriage is the crown of a woman’s life.” ~Beatrix Potter (1866-1943)

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“By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.” ~F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), The Great Gatsby

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“Young men often laugh at the sensible girls whom they secretly respect, and affect to admire the silly ones whom they secretly despise, because earnestness, intelligence, and womanly dignity are not the fashion.“ ~ Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), An Old-Fashioned Girl

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“I am trying for nothing so hard in my own personal life as how not to be respectable when married.” ~Mary Heaton Vorce

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“A really good housekeeper is almost always unhappy. While she does so much for the comfort of others, she nearly ruins her own health and life. It is because she cannot be easy and comfortable when there is the least disorder or dirt to be seen.“ ~ The Household, January 1884

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When the first public high school for girls opened in Boston, the American Journal of Education wrote that the school should give “women such an education as shall make them fit wives for well educated men, and enable them to exert a salutary influence upon the rising generation.“ ~ Boston High School for Girls, American Journal of Education 1846 (1): 96-105

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