I’m on a few archives-related listservs at work and stumbled across a couple of things this week that I thought readers of Miss Abigail might be interested in:
1) An article in the Guardian about the discovery of some historic papers showing how girls in the U.K. were educated, including “housewifery,” where the girls were taught to “test the freshness of eggs, remove stains such as ink, coffee and tar and arrange a home laundry.”
2) An interview with Daniel May, archivist at MetLife. I once corresponded with someone at the MetLife archives — might have been this guy. I own quite a few of the early health and home guides that they published (he talks about them in the interview). I wrote to ask a question and ended up providing him with some information they didn’t have! To see a bit of MetLife advice, visit He’s a Bust with Dust, which contains an excerpt from 1898 (I said when I originally posted this that it was their earliest, that could be what we corresponded about, can’t recall).