Q Dear Miss Abigail: I have a bunch of zits on my forehead that never seem to go away. I use pimple-fighting creams and scrubs but they never go away! What can I do to make them go away? Why won’t they go away in the first place? Is there a cream out there that […]
Tag: 1910s
Mother Knows Best
Q Dear Miss Abigail: I’m going through puberty and I don’t know how to talk about it with my mom, yet me and my friends talk about it all the time. Is it wrong? What should I do? Signed, Deeply Confused A Dear Confused: I’m sure your friends have interesting things to say about puberty, […]
Our Hats
I think I’m ready for a new hat. I love my winter hat ~ it’s floppy, velvety, and comfy, but it’s a few years old and a little worn. So before I go shopping, I decided to look up a little advice on selecting a hat from Mary Brooks Picken’s Secrets of Distinctive Dress. And hey, […]
Stair Climbing
There’s nothing like spending a long weekend hunched over the computer, as I often do. So with posture on the mind, I bring you a selection from a 1919 book called The Posture of School Children. Once property of the State Normal School, in Buffalo, NY, this book was found while visiting Grandma Rose and Daddy […]
How Unnatural Cravings Are Caused
Here’s a little excerpt from a book written by Robert Armitage titled How to Stay Young. If this is true, I’m in big trouble, because my Girl Scout cookies ~ those delicious chocolate mints, of course ~ arrived this week. 1918: How Unnatural Cravings Are Caused An abnormal desire for something is due to a disordered condition […]
Care of the Ear
This week’s tip is from Professor T. W. Shannon’s Nature’s Secrets Revealed: Scientific Knowledge of The Laws of Sex Life and Heredity, or Eugenics. You might be interested in this heavy statement from the book’s introduction: “The truth and facts about sex laws and hygiene are the foundation upon which this nation must build for the […]
Importance of Breathing
You may be asking, why does Miss Abigail keep writing about health issues? Is she obsessed? Well, yes, but that’s another story. Heck, maybe I feel like protecting you lovely readers from the evils of the world, in my own little way. So here you have it: another tip to help you make it through […]
The Wedding-Day
This selection goes out to my dear friends Sarah Carter and Iain McPhie, who have a little event planned this weekend. The invite said something about “marriage,” so I decided to do a bit of research on the topic. I stumbled across this advice from J. R. Miller’s The Wedded Life regarding the much-anticipated wedding day, […]
Love
I turn to our dear friends Professor B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols and their Search Lights on Health for this love-filled excerpt about love. You know you want it. 1911: Love Love Blends Young Hearts. ~ Love blends young hearts in blissful unity, and, for the time, so ignores past ties and affections, as […]
Man ~ The Ungrown
In 1911, author Edward Carpenter wrote in a prefatory note to his book Love’s Coming of Age: When I first wrote this book some fifteen years ago, if was refused in succession by five or six well-known London publishers; and ultimately I had to print it at my own expense. Such was the taboo then prevailing […]