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, […]

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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, […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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, […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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