Beatrice Tonnesen’s touching images of family life seem to have been published everywhere in the early days of the twentieth century. We’ve found them in print ads, in newspaper art supplements, on calendars and those old cardboard “church” fans, as well as in fancy frames. Now we can add self-help books to the list of Tonnesen venues.

It must have been hard to be a woman in the early 1900’s, as the world emerged from the Victorian era. But, it seems, a wealth of professional advice was available on the nation’s bookshelves. I have a small collection of vintage “women’s books”, which I gathered because I enjoyed reading their now laughable advice to women on beauty, manners, courtship, marriage, hygiene, health, childcare, romance, sex and more. One of these is Ideal Womanhood, Guide to Mental and Physical Perfection, by S. Pancoast, MD, Copyright 1901 and 1905 by Thompson & Thomas.

In a work that veers between the romantic idealization of women’s lives and the scholarly presentation of the medical wisdom of the day, Tonnesen was, of course, a perfect choice to illustrate the former. And so, we have Tonnesen’s “Evening Story”- a tender photo of an ideal mother telling her ideal children a bedtime story- sharing a double-page spread with an illustration of an ovum arriving in the fallopian tube!
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