XVI.A TROUBLESOME QUESTION.
“ONE of the most urgent of the unsolved, irrepressible questions of the times,” says the “Household,” a most excellent Vermont paper, “relates to the trials which modern housewives experience in their efforts to manage their households satisfactorily, and still have time for needful rest and social culture. As yet the problem remains a puzzle alike to the housewife and to the philanthropist. Labor-saving machines, which promised so much relief, practicallyfail to lighten materially the housekeeper’s tasks. ‘Biddy’ is still the main dependence in the performance of hard work in the kitchen; yet the constant oversight which she usually requires often renders her services a doubtful advantage.
“That the cares of housekeeping increase faster than means are found for their disposal seems generally true. Whether this is owing to increased luxuriousness in our ways of living, or whether the housewives of to-day lack the executive ability of their grandmothers, remains an open question.”
It does not seem to us very difficult to find thereasonsfor the great increase of our domestic cares; the puzzle is to find theremedy.
We escape much of the hard work our mothers and grandmothers performed so energetically, and about which housekeepers of the present day hear so many disparaging comparisons; for machinery does better and far more expeditiously many things that in olden times could only be accomplished by hard labor.
The wool is no longer carded by hand. Our factories have banished the spinning-wheel from the good old kitchen fireside; the little ones nestle no longer by mother’s knee, watching with never-ceasing wonder and enjoyment the “head” of flax disappear from the distaff and become a smooth, bright thread, under the skillful hand and foot that keep the pretty wheel so active. The cool breeze, laden with the perfume of cinnamon-roses and lilacs, while it sweeps through the open window of the old attic, no longer sports with golden curls, as the children run merry races in their efforts to “keep step” when the long white rolls of wool in the hand of the mother are transformed by the rapid revolutions of the big wheel into yarn for knitting. Little hands no longer wind it, from the spindle on the swifts, into skeins, or fill the bobbins for the weaver’s shuttle, and no bright eyes watch it as it flies through the warp.
The mothers escape the labor of the loom, while the little folks lose all this, or the still greater sport of meddling with the web, in their vain efforts to throw the shuttle through, or tobang upif they succeed,—the frolic often cut short bybangingtheir fingers, instead of the woof, with the heavy beam. Machinery relieves us from all such labor, and deprives our children of much real fun, for which there is no compensation.
We almost regret those old-fashioned times, and often wonder if the elegancies and (supposed) increased comforts of our modern dwellings are a sufficient compensation for the multiplied labor and the necessity for so much more help which we are forced to employ. For though our mothers and grandmothers did more rough, homely work, we do not believe that they had half so hard a time in doing it as their daughters have in their efforts to teach modern servants how to perform the necessary labor of our present style of housekeeping. To weave a web of cloth is but child’s play, compared to the worry and disappointment and mortification that cause our modern housekeepers to “die deaths daily,” through the utter incompetency of those they are compelled to have about them. The tyranny of our modern style of living increases the proper amount of work to be done far beyond what one pair of hands can perform.
We think the deterioration is in theservants, and not in the mistresses. With all loving respect for our mothers and grandmothers, we feel confident that their daughters’ executive ability is equal to their own.
To be sure, husbands will tell of their mothers’ gingerbread, pies, and doughnuts, and, with an air of hopeless longing or patient endurance, wonder why nobody “nowadays” can ever cook as their mothers did!
To be sure! Why can’t they? For the very reason that our husbands cannot eat “ever so many” pickles, pies,gingerbread, and big bowls of bread and milk, as they used to do on returning from school; finish off with a pocketful of apples, and then be half ready to cry that their containing powers are not equal to their appetites. A good game of “tag,” however, up the front stairs, down the back, through the long hall once or twice, soon remedied that difficulty in boyhood. If husbands will only let their brains run wild for a short time, quit study, forget business, gold markets, and all such corroding cares, and be wild, harum-scarum boys once more, their wives’ gingerbread will taste just as good as their mothers’ and grandmothers’ did. That is the trouble with the husbands’ appetites. But the housekeepers’ troubles lie deeper than this.
The whole routine of modern housekeeping is much more complex than in our parents’ time. To be sure, they rose early; parents and children then knew what “sunrise” meant, for they were dressed and at work before the sun’s red wheel began to rise over the eastern border. The cows were milked, the milk put in the cool milk-cellar, the butter made, the breakfast ready—a good substantial, healthy breakfast—long before the time when our housekeepers of to-day are out of their beds. “Early to bed, early to rise,” simple, nourishing meals, quiet home pleasures,—not many hours spent in senseless calls, but an occasional good old-fashioned visit to keep the heart fresh and living,—these insured health and strength, good digestion, tranquil sleep, and cheerful homes.
Early risingfacilitates the action of the domestic machinery in a wonderful manner. One hour lost or wasted in the morning clogs the wheels, and the work drags heavily all day. One hour gained is the best lubricator in the world. Everything glides along smoothly,—head, heart, and hands work in harmony.
Once, when a little girl, we were in despair because our“stent” was not finished in season for us to go a berrying with the brothers and sisters. Taking her kerchief from the black satin reticule that always hung on her arm when knitting, the dear old grandmother gently wiped the fast-falling tears, saying, “Ah, little one! you didn’t want to get up this morning when the others did. Remember that if you lose an hour in the morning you will waste half a dozen hunting it all day long, and deprive yourself of much pleasure. I’d try and remember, if I were you, never to lose another.”
We regret, for their own comfort, that our present housekeepers do not retain their parents’ habits of early rising. But contrast the life of our parents with the modern life of their descendants. The demands of society, late hours, too much visiting and company, make laggards in the morning; and the appetite, injured by untimely eating at these late hours, is supposed to need coaxing with dainties at breakfast. The elaborate breakfast requires as much time and labor as belongs to a dinner; and the dinner, with all the variety that etiquette claims,—several courses, and a multitude of dishes consequent upon these courses,—increases the labor immensely; and, unless blessed with a good corps of servants, requiring little oversight, we can secure little time for rest, reading, or sewing. Such servants are seldom granted to mortals in our times. Twenty years ago, one girl, without any of the modern improvements,—water to be brought from the street pumps, suds to be taken up and emptied in the gutter,—accomplished more work, and made the family more comfortable, than three or four will do now.
We are inclined to believe that the heaviest trials of housekeeping may be traced, not to the degeneracy of our mothers’ daughters, but to a marked and most unfortunate change in the character and capacity of our “help.”(?) This is no freak of the imagination. Some few families still retainservants that have been with them for years, and such housekeepers have no sympathy with their less favored sisters; but let death or marriage remove these comforts, and compel them to seek others to replace the old and well-tried ones, and they will learn that this complaint has very substantial foundations.
What remedy may be found it is impossible to say. In part our housekeepers are to blame. They have such horror of being left without help, such dread of constant changes, that they live as slaves to the whims and caprices of an ignorant class of persons, who soon recognize their fears and dependence, and use this knowledge to extort high wages for very little service,—compelling then mistresses to pass over their impudence and arrogance by bold threats of leaving.
This lack of independence, this fear to assert their own authority and rights, is, we apprehend, in a great measure the cause of the insubordination and uselessness of the girls of the present time. When they learn that their services will not be accepted unless faithfully rendered, we may look for easier and happier times. But how is this to be accomplished? A few cannot remedy the evil. It can only be effected by general co-operation. We are not willing to acknowledge that the housekeepers of the past were any more capable than those of our time; but we do think that our position, owing to the great annoyance we are subjected to from the kitchen cabinet, is far more trying than our mothers’ could have been.
What sort of housekeepers our daughters will become, enervated by late hours and all the gay and strange excitement of modern life, and crippled by the hideous freaks of fashion, it is painful to imagine and impossible to foretell.