Edwin's criteria for a good woman

Writing (and courting) more than one young woman during the Civil War years, Edwin Lybarger asked Miss Lou Riggen these questions in a letter in 1864:

• Do you like music?
• Play on the piano?
• Can you bake bread?
• Can you bake mince pies?
• Make good coffee?
• Keep house?
• Can you eat your share of a dinner?
• Do you like History, Poetry, or Novels best?
• What church do you belong to?

Miss Riggen began corresponding with Edwin in August of 1863, replying [using the pseudonym "Fannie Jerome" at first] to his advertisement for correspondents of the Fair Sex for "agreeable, interesting and useful correspondence."

Miss Riggen's reply to the above questions is in a letter dated Sept. 29, 1864:

Keep house? I once kept house for six months to the edification of the whole family except Lou Riggen. My! what an endless task of intricate labor. Brooms, carpets, beds, cobwebs, dinners, suppers, breakfasts, with all their attendant auxiliaries of good butter, sweet milk, done bread & not burnt either. 'To be or not to be' good was always the dread question until dinner stood in all its dread array on the table. Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn't.

To the dismay of his Northern friends, Edwin was very impressed by a woman he met in Memphis, Tennessee who chewed tobacco. He seems to have been most impressed by women of wit and intelligence who could entertain by performing music, who didn't talk all the time, and who shared his Union loyalties.

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