Marion Harland
Written by Stefanie Goldberg
Source: Encyclopedia Virginia
b. December 21, 1830 | d. June 3, 1922
An exceptional writer and nationally recognized domestic authority, a “genius in the art of homemaking,” Marion Harland elaborated the glorified woman’s role through her myriad books and articles and was devoted to elevating the morality and divinity of housework.
Mary Virghina Hawes was born on December 21, 1830 in Virginia, showing a gift from a young age for storytelling and writing. Raised in a house of faith, she followed a strict schedule of daily observance; this pious nature remained with her all her years. Whenever she wasn’t involved in church or school, she was composing stories. It was at the age of 15 that the urge to publish became overwhelming, and under the pen name Robert Remer, a series of articles Harland wrote were published in the Watchman and Observer and the Central Presbyterian, two religious papers in Richmond (Smith 113). Convinced that she was not intelligent enough to write religious philosophy, Harland turned to writing fiction and moral essays. After being rejected by a local publisher, her first novel, Alone, was published privately by her father in 1854. It achieved such acclaim that it was soon picked up by a publishing house in New York and became a national bestseller (Smith 114).
Harland’s deep dedication to her work was profound. She turned down many proposals from interested suitors of religious persuasion because she was “determined that not even the threat of permanent spinsterhood would induce her to take upon herself the ‘duties and liabilities of a minister’s wife’” (Smith 115). She was not willing to give up her career, her livelihood and source of independence, and be married to a man’s work. But everything changed when Harland met Edward Tehrune, a minister, in 1854. Edward never expected Harland to be a “minister’s wife”, devoted exclusively to his work. He supported her work, her status as a “career woman”, and there was an agreement between the two that the writing would always continue, no matter what entered her life. On September 2, 1856, they were wed.
It was during her marriage that Harland first began to acquire the domestic skills she never had to learn in her father’s house, as there was an abundance of servants. Her responsibilities at the parish were minimal and the women within the community were very supportive during this transition from “pampered spinster to practical wife of a man of modest means” (Smith 115). Using the cookbooks she had in her possession, Harland taught herself the skills of cooking and keeping a home. As Harland began to have children, the home was organized into a space of maximum efficiency: she now had the capacity to train servants at the highest capacity, follow “strict methods of system and order”, and had the luxury of learning to write amidst interruptions without losing her concentration (Smith 116).
When Tehrune was given the opportunity to take on work in a ministry in an industrial city, he and Harland moved to New Jersey (his home state). On the brink of the Civil War, this move was particularly important to Tehrune, who feared his loyalty to the Union would be unwelcome in their Virginia home, despite his marriage to a Southern woman. Though Harland and her family were Whig Unionists, not Confederate sympathizers, and she anticipated facing challenges as a Southern woman in the North, she was met with understanding from her new community in New Jersey. Harland became heavily involved in war relief efforts and became president of the Newark Young Women’s Christian Association until 1876, overseeing its boarding house and employment referral bureau for women; she simultaneously ran the entire children’s Sunday school department at the First Reformed Church and was president of the church’s women's group.
None of this work detracted from Harland’s writing. In fact, there was great tolerance and acceptance within the community of her as a writer, an unconventional occupational choice for a woman at that time. By 1870, Harland had written and published “a dozen novels, a collection of short pieces, and scores of stories and articles for a variety of women’s magazines” (Smith 118). It was in 1871 that she published Common Sense in the Household, an idea for a cookbook that had come to her fifteen years earlier. The book became an immediate bestseller, containing recipes, domestic advice, ways to avoid difficulties and discouragement. In the latter quarter of the 19th century, it became the standard American cookbook found in middle-class kitchens throughout the country, and the first of a long series of cookbooks and domestic manuals. For Harland, this work felt more exciting than writing fiction because she had finally found her mission, her own ministry. A large and mighty congregation of women far and wide would benefit from her work and “domestic expertise” day in and day out.
Though Harland was a woman who had never learned domestic skills, she wrote a nationally best-selling cookbook. Her 1910 autobiography details that, though not formally trained, she was considered to “have a turn, if not a talent, for housewifery” (Marion Harland’s Autobiography 334). Harland states that her skillset began to develop following an unsavory experience with her own cook in New Jersey, Ermily, who cooked Harland’s breakfast beefsteak “brown–almost to a crisp!” (Marion Harland’s Autobiography 337). Harland cites Emily’s “ineptitude” as a wake up call for her own ignorance in the work of the home and the kitchen, one that incited her journey of learning domestic skills to create a manual that would teach “take the tyro by the hand and show her a plain path between pitfalls and morasses” (Marion Harland’s Autobiography 344). Let us remember, however, that so many of these recipes in these manuals and cookbooks that white women like Harland laid claim to were actually the creative and intellectual property of the Black women who inhabited their kitchens. Furthermore, I would argue that Emily was not inept at all but was fully a knowledgeable human being, and her domestic knowledge and the resulting fruits of her labor were not “white” enough.
It is also worth noting that Harland didn’t quite live the life she wrote about in her myriad books. Scholars like Karen Manners Smith have written that “even as her career expanded, and even though she always had servants, she did run her own house” (119). Harland was incredibly efficient through it all, though I would argue that she was overseeing her household as opposed to running it. Harland had domestic servants who were “running the show”, responsible for the work of the home outlined in her books and manuals. Similarly, in Harland’s domestic manuals and cookbooks, she didn’t question the placement of women within the home and kitchen, believing women to be in charge of families as a result of their gender. Similar to Catharine Beecher, Harland was confident that her responsibility was to “redeem woman’s profession from drudgery, and to elevate housework to a divinely ordained vocation” (Smith 118). She accepted and had great trust in the separation of spheres, and continuously affirmed that a woman’s place was indeed in the home.
Harland died on June 3rd, 1922, just shy of her 92nd birthday. She had published roughly 70 books and hundreds of articles in her lifetime (“Marion Harland”). In her national bestselling cookbook Common Sense in the Household, Harland painted herself as a heroine who saved herself and women across the nation from the “ineptitude” or “affected stupidity” of domestic servants through her books (Common Sense in the Household 5). If we take a deeper look at Common Sense, it was written for middle and upper-middle class white women to master “the rudiments of the art” for themselves, to understand it in all its branches (Common Sense in the Household 7). More broadly, however, obtaining this knowledge and establishing these skills had the greater goal of enabling these white women to oversee and instruct their domestic servants. In closing, let us continue to understand Harland as an intelligent woman and a gifted writer, and let us simultaneously continue to question and take apart her role in propelling racism, classism, and the co-opting of Black women.
Sources
Harland, Marion. Common Sense in the Household: A Manual of Practical Housewifery. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884.
Harland, Marion. Marion Harland’s Autobiography: The Story of a Long Life. Harper & Brothers, 1910.
“Marion Harland, Author, Dies at 91.” The New York Times, 4 Jun. 1922. https://www.nytimes.com/1922/06/04/archives/marion-harland-author-dies-at-91-mrs-mary-virginia-terhune-writer.html
Smith, Karen Manners. “Mary Virginia Terhune (Marion Harland): Writer, Minister's Wife, and Domestic Expert.” American Presbyterians, vol. 17, no. 2, 1994, pp. 111-122.