Home Economics Collection

HEARTH is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. Titles published between 1850 and 1950 were selected and ranked by teams of scholars for their great historical importance. The full text of these materials, as well as bibliographies and essays on the wide array of subjects relating to Home Economics, are all freely accessible on this site. This is the first time a collection of this scale and scope has been made available.

I return to this collection often. It covers decor, sewing and pattern making, housing, cooking, gardening, morals and much more. The images are available in a variety of sizes. A couple of books I recently browsed:
Student's manual of fashion drawing: thirty lessons with conventional charts
By Edith Young 1919


Woman as decoration
by Emily Burbank 1917
I like the grainy quality of these photos.

Once you are into the the body of the documents there are drop down boxes for choosing the size of the images and the page turning dropdown box will show which pages contain illustrations.

This collection is huge and I encourage you to browse it for yourself.