XVON HOME-LOVING AND HOUSEKEEPING
There are people in the world in this enlightened age who are worrying about the relation of the woman of to-morrow to the home. They argue that the new woman, with her opportunities, her relation to the business world, her college education, her mental development (which they delight in referring to as “so far ahead of their physical development”)—that this woman of the future is sure to cut asunder from all home ties; that we are to become a race of nomads, who roam desolately from one hotel or boarding-house or lodging-house to another, with no taste or desire for the old-fashioned home. But this is now, as it always was, sheer nonsense. Ever since Eve hugged her first baby to her heart women have been proud and happy mothers. Ever since she urged Adam to partake of the fateful applewoman has been enticing man with dinners, good or bad. Think you that after thousands of years we are going to change our natures entirely because of a little college training, a little “advanced thought”? Not while women are women.
Woman’s life for centuries has been narrowed to a compass bounded by four walls; it is true that she has now stepped out and demonstrated her fitness to do her part of the work beyond those confines. She has learned the beauty and usefulness of association, the part that sustains the great whole. She has found out the meaning of the word “coördination” and the beauty of community work. She knows how to make the right connection between home life and world interests, and her family are the better therefor. She realizes what relation a good home bears to the good school, the influential church and pure society. She even begins to comprehend the immense bearing a good home and an upright community have upon a healthy industrial system.
I suppose I am optimistic, but it seems to me that things are going very well for our sex and that we have very little to complain of; also,that the opposite sex has very little to complain of as well, for he is still far from a buttonless state, and he acts as if he enjoyed having intelligent companionship from or with his womenkind. Few women are yet so “advanced” as to wish to bring up their babies on the coöperative plan. Many young women persist in getting married every year, and also in having babies. And what do they do about it? In the beginning they pin a little band around them and see that their milk is maternally sweet, and look confidently to God for the rest. And so far as we can judge, they seem to enjoy motherhood. Oh, I know it is the fashion to cry out “race suicide,” and all that, but let us not take to heart too seriously the dismal state of affairs bewailed by certain sensational reformers. For the world is rolling on towards the good—still swinging out to the light.
The most enduring element of our national strength lies in the fact that our American life centres around the home fireside. We are proud to boast of the goodness and bravery of our men, the beauty and purity of our women, and they have these qualities because the home is their school and the mother their teacher. The wiseCreator, when He made woman, gave her the two highest offices in His gift—those of wife and mother. Kings boast of reigning by right divine, and inscribe “Rex Dei Gratia” upon the laws of their land, but woman is the only creature who may truthfully use those words, and she may say, “I am a woman by the grace of God, and rule in a kingdom of kingdoms.” She makes no laws, leads no armies, governs no enterprises, but she forms those by whom laws are made, armies led, great enterprises managed. I often think the wife and mother who lives quietly at home and looks well to the ways of her household; who still pursues the simple art of making her husband happy (I trust I do not misuse the word “simple”) and of bringing up her children to be good citizens—I often think that this woman feels that her life is wasted. She reads and hears of the public work of women, and sighs that her life is being thrown away. Not so. This woman is fulfilling the mission of her being, and the old-fashioned wife and mother will not go out of fashion as long as the world stands. Neither do those of us who do not happen to be wives and mothers do right in belittling their work and arrogating unto ourselves all the glory. Ihave never known a more splendidly developed woman, spiritually and intellectually, than my mother; and I have chanced to know most of the prominent women of the last quarter of a century. And I cannot go back on her work, although had the Lord seen fit to place her in the ranks of the care-free, or in the present day and generation, she would have gained far wider recognition.
Collectively, women may have been weak, mistakenly zealous, or wofully deficient in method, but in this modern association of all grades in society they are coming to know themselves and their possibilities as well as their limitations. And they are beginning to realize that collectively they are only beginning their education.
The men and women who by their lives have influenced the world, have been those who lived simple, earnest, honest lives. What was it that endeared the late Queen of England to her humble subjects? It was her interest and participation in the common things of every-day life. Her love of children, tenderness toward animals, even her relish for oatmeal porridge was a virtue in their eyes. The homes of the nation mean thelife of the nation. No stream can rise higher than its fountain, and as we build our homes so our land will prosper. God has given us a picture of what Heaven may be, and He has given it in the shape of a perfect home. When we learn to give our girls the training for home life which will give them such power over their work that each day’s tasks will come to willing and able hands, then we shall have solved many of the problems that confront us at the beginning of this twentieth century. And right here, although it may not seem apropos, how many mothers are educating their sons in the matter of newspaper reading? How many wives say to the husband who brings home a pink or a yellow or a green, or even some of the white newspapers, “Please do not bring such papers home for the children to read”? Some women do this, it is true, but more are utterly thoughtless about it. Hosts of good women read the sensational papers themselves—because, perchance they cost only a cent, while perhaps the better ones cost two; and hosts of others allow their children to read the sensational, unreliable paper without ever giving a thought to the fact that those young, eager minds are being subjectedto a lowering of taste and a lowering of moral and mental tone. They are particular about the associates their children select; they are even particular about the books they read; but a newspaper is an ephemeral thing, read to-day and forgotten to-morrow, and it does not occur to them that the effect upon the child’s taste is morally and intellectually the same as if they were allowed to come under the influence of a teacher with low morals.
I say this because the modern newspaper has a direct influence on the home and the people that dwell therein. The woman who used to spend her evenings picking out the rules for crocheting a cushion cover from the woman’s page has learned how to read good books, to write papers without a too free use of the encyclopedia, how to use her brains, how to think. Just as the woman who used to edit the page has come into her own and convinced the editor that women’s whole existence is not bounded on the north by angel cake, on the east by baby’s afghans, on the south by her pet dog, and on the west by her husband’s dinner; and that the magnetic needle which points her compass is not a crochet hook. Women everywhere are learning thatscientific or simplified housekeeping is not beneath the attention of the refined nor beyond the comprehension of the uncultured. It is the duty of the rich and the salvation of the poor. We are all agreed that as our lives are now ordered we have too many things to care for, too much show and too little comfort.
“We have exchanged our stage coach for the electric motor, our tallow candles for the incandescent light, and our simple living for nervous prostration, so that inductive science, the new gospel, must come to our aid,” says a bright woman. “If we would save our bodies as well as our souls, and if the knowledge of household economics means anything to us, it means we must get back to nature’s heart and be content to live simpler lives.”
And we must remember that for every bad woman, every erratic woman, every cold and selfish woman in the world, there are a thousand good and true and faithful unto death. Only the cynic and the critic do not consider the latter worth talking about. They only emphasize the abnormal woman, thinking all the time they are holding the mirror up to nature and proving something; which they are not.
Domestic science is domestic sense, and domestic sense is common sense. Women should have the best and highest education they can obtain, and more especially if their lives are to be rounded out in the limited bounds of a four-room cottage; and while she may have caught the spirit of the times and become an expansionist by invading new territories, and may have been masquerading as the “eternal feminine” or the “new woman,” these little excursions and diversions only make her prize the more her old dominion, and the complexities of her nature find full play in the evolutions in the American home.
Statistics have already proved that the college-bred woman marries in the same proportion and infinitely better than the simpering sister who cares nothing for education. And she not only has as many children, but is manifestly better fitted to train them up to good citizenship. It is also evident that woman’s experience in the business world—while it makes her more cautious about marriage—renders her a more sympathetic, appreciative and sensible wife than the girl who waits at home for a husband, who, she has been taught to believe, must ever after beher body-slave. And although modern conditions make it possible for a woman to be self-supporting, and therefore not to marry unless she does it for that greatest reason in the world—love—the business of marrying and having children is going right on, age after age, generation after generation, long after you and I are forgotten. So there is no real cause for worry. Even the rankest pessimist may take heart if he will. And to all I commend the lamented Frank Norris’ definition of a “womanly woman,” a term we all love to use:
“To be womanly? It’s to be kind and well-bred and gentle mostly, and never to be bold or conspicuous; and to love one’s home and take care of it, and to love and believe in one’s husband, or parents, or children, or even one’s sister, above any one else in the world.”