Author: Anne Ewbank / Source: Atlas Obscura
In Little Men, the sequel to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the once-tomboyish Jo gives a miniature kitchen to her niece Daisy. The centerpiece was a real iron stove capable of cooking “for a large family of very hungry dolls.
” But the best of it, writes Alcott, “was that a real fire burned in it, real steam came out of the nose of the little tea-kettle, and the lid of the little boiler actually danced a jig, the water inside bubbled so hard.”When I was ten, I read that chapter over and over. Fiercely envious of Daisy, I begged my parents for a kitchen like hers. Of course, they said no, and I had to content myself with an Easy-Bake Oven. But the idea of giving a 10-year-old their own wood-burning stove is not as fantastic as it may seem today. In 1871, when Little Men was published, such toy stoves actually existed. At the time, says Michelle Parnett-Dwyer, a curator at the Strong National Museum of Play, “a lot of little girls were being pushed into domestic play.” For young girls of relative means, a toy stove could accustom them to future responsibilities. Yet too often, such toys proved to be phenomenally dangerous.
In the 19th century, wood and coal cookstoves, as opposed to open-hearth cooking, spread across the United States, writes historian Priscilla J. Brewer. Toy stoves soon followed, many of them exact replicas of full-sized stoves. Some stove companies constructed them by simply minimizing the proportions. This resulted in some of the positively baroque miniature stoves housed in the Strong’s massive collection of children’s toys and games in Rochester, New York. Many were cast with elegant designs, just like their larger counterparts. Later, says Parnett-Dwyer, both large stoves and toy versions came in gleaming, expensive nickel-plating.
Many families who could afford an elegant toy stove likely hired a cook for their real kitchen. But cooking was considered a valuable skill for even adult women of means, who could then teach hired help to prepare household dishes. In Little Men, Jo pretends that Daisy is her new cook and playfully instructs her on how to do the shopping and prepare meals.
There were other reasons for parents to buy functional stoves for their daughters. As Parnett-Dwyer notes, not all families who could afford tiny stoves for their daughters had the money to hire domestic servants. Plus, the publication of Alcott’s book coincided with a movement for more women to cook for their families: the beginning of home economics. Unlike the ease of modern appliances, using coal and wood cookstoves was laborious, especially since they were difficult to clean, maintain, and operate. Thus, Brewer writes, it “was best to learn…
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