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This book contains practical information about housekeeping hints, wire fences and hedges, and harvest work. However, the author states: "What I object to in housekeeping is making the houses the centre around which all things celestial and terrestial must revolve. I do not believe the chief end of man is to build houses, and the chief end of women is to keep them. My idea is that houses were made for inhabitants and not the inhabitants for houses; and that by some means housekeeping should be kept from becoming the primary object of life." There is also extensive commentary about women's rights regarding the right and obligation to know about her husband's business interests. "Nothing is more deplorable than a widow who knows nothing of her dead husband's liabilities and assets, and many a family has been brought to bankruptcy because the women of it were quite too feminine to know whether they were living upon their own or creditors' means". A chapter on "Woman's Work and Man's Supremacy" discusses rich old farmers in the following way: "They see no paper but a religious or political one. [They] never speak about women except to lecture her about her duties - her obligation to obey her husband - her vocation to forget herself and live only for the welfare for her liege lord and some particular church. The latter never speaks about woman or her interests a bit more than if such a creature never existed. The laws and policy they are discussing set her down midway between men and monkeys. She has no vote to solicit, no offices to confer, but is kind of an appendage to her master."

Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm was an American newspaper woman and writer who promoted abolition and women's rights. She wrote many editorials opposed to slavery and also advocated women's property rights.

• Subjects (LCSH): Young women -- Conduct of life
• Categories: Manners and social etiquette; Moral instruction; Home economics and domestic life