Abstract
Much has been written about 19th-century American and British handbooks and manuals dealing with interior and domestic life, however comparatively little has been written about the gardening books by women that dealt with the world just outside the back door. This analysis, based on a sampling of this body of literature from 1870 to 1920, shows that as a literary genre, the books provided a forum and a safe outlet for the cultivation of what feminist historians have called a “woman's culture,” a culture that nurtured independence and power in an otherwise disenfranchised segment of the population.
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