Although “Quaint Dessert Dishes” is among several articles that are explicitly directed at a female reader, American Homes and Gardens’ writers and readers were mostly male. At the turn of the century, men were not only interested in but responsible for the home. If the term “home-maker” is mostly applied to women today, the historian Margaret Marsh has shown that the turn of the century saw a boom in male suburban home-making. Martha and Robert Bruère, influential Progressive economists, thus proclaimed that “When God made homemakers, male and female created He them!” And indeed, in the unsigned editorials by editor Charles Allen Munn (whose friends praised not only his good taste in art but also his “far rarer quality of the home-maker”), he made the case for male domestic involvement, writing, in December 1905, that “the responsibility for the home is not [the woman’s] alone, but is equally the husband’s.”
