Letters to Young Women
LETTER VII.
HOUSEWIFERY AND INDUSTRY.
She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff.
Soloman.
She is not afraid of the snow for her household ; for all her household are
clothed with scarlet. Strongth and honor are her clothing, and she
shall rejoice in time to come.
AMONG the more homely but most essential accomplishments of a young woman is that of housewifery. There are many things at the present day to interfere with its acquisition, but the fact that it is essential should lead you to subordinate to it those which are not. We hear a great deal about the laziness of the present generation of girls. I think the accusation is unjust. Girls who acquire a really good education now, accomplish much more genuine hard work than those in “the good old times” who only learned to read and write, and occupied the most of their time in the kitchen and dairy. Nothing that can be called education and accomplishment can be achieved without great labor; and, in my opinion, the principal reason why good housewifery is so much neglected, as an accomplishment, is, that the time is so much occupied in study. Laziness is very apt to come with wealth, and there are undoubtedly a great many more lazy girls now than fifty years ago. They are certainly a very undesirable article to have about, and I pity the poor fellow who gets one of them for a companion ; but I say candidly that I do not think there are any more naturally lazy girls in the world than usual.
You expect, one of these days, to be the mistress of a house. Your comfort and happiness, and the comfort and happiness of your husband, will depend very much upon your ability to order that house well. If your companion be in humble circumstances, you will very likely be obliged to do the most of your work yourself. In this case, a thorough knowledge of, and taste for, housewifery will be very necessary to you. If you marry a man of competence or wealth, a knowledge of good housewifery is quite as essential to you as if you were required to do your own work. The expenses of your house will be large or small, as you are a bad or a good housekeeper. If you do not know how to do the work of the house; if you have no practical knowledge of all the offices and economies of an establishment, you will be dependent. So far from being the mistress of your house, you will be only its guest. Your servants will circumvent you, they will cheat you, they will make you miserable. If they do not perform their work properly, through wilfulness or ignorance, you cannot tell them better. You will scold them for things which you cannot tell them how to mend, you will be unjust, and you will not keep them. Many a really good servant is constantly suffering from grievances growing directly from the ignorance of her mistress. Unless you are willing to take up for life with a boarding-house — a place for people to vegetate in — you must be a good housewife. It matters not whether you are rich or poor. You need a practical knowledge of cookery, of the laundry, of the prices and qualities of provisions, of chamber work — of everything that enters into the details of home life.
Of course, if you have no mother who is capable of teaching you these things, you are in a measure excusable for not learning them. I pity a family of girls whose mother is a know-nothing and a do-nothing. I do not blame girls for not wishing to put themselves under the tuition of the cook and the maid-of-all-work. But even when you find yourselves under disadvantages like these, you cannot afford to become a woman without knowing something of the homely utilities of life. Your own aptness of mind — your own good sense and ready ingenuity — will give you a clue to the mysteries which practice will ultimately make plain. Your comfort, your independence, your reputation, your husband’s respect for you, depend so much upon your ability to keep house well, that I cannot leave the subject without insisting upon the importance of your learning to do it while you have the chance. There are few higher compliments that can be paid to a young woman than that which accords to her the character of an excellent housekeeper. There is no reputation which will more thoroughly tend to confirm a young woman in the esteem of young men, or more forcibly commend her to their esteem than that of being acquainted, practically, with the details of the kitchen and the economies of housekeeping.
This naturally introduces me to a discussion of the benefits of physical industry, and the assumption of regular household duties. There is no better relief to study than the regular performance of special duties in the house. To feel that one is really doing something every day, that the house is the tidier for one’s efforts, and the comfort of the family enhanced, is the surest warrant of content and cheerfulness. There is some thing about this habit of daily work — this regular performance of duty — which tends to regulate the passions, to give calmness and vigor to the mind, to impart a healthy tone to the body, and to diminish the desire for life in the street and for resort to gossiping companions.
Were I as rich as Croesus, my girls should have some thing to do regularly, just as soon as they should be come old enough to do anything. They should, in the first place, make their own bed, and take care of their own room. They should dress each other. They should sweep a portion of the house. They should learn, above all things, to help themselves, and thus to be independent in all circumstances. A woman, helpless from any other cause than sickness, is essentially a nuisance. There is nothing womanly and ladylike in helplessness. My policy would be, as girls grow up, to assign to them special duties, first in one part of the house, then in an other, until they should become acquainted, with all housewifely offices; and I should have an object in this beyond the simple acquisition of a knowledge of housewifery. It should be for the acquisition of habits of physical industry — of habits that conduce to the health of body and mind — of habits that give them an insight into the nature of labor, and inspire within them a genuine sympathy with those whose lot it is to labor.
All young mind is uneasy if it be good for anything. There is not the genuine human stuff in a girl who is habitually and by nature passive, placid, and inactive. The body and the mind must both be in motion. If this tendency to activity be left to run loose — undirected into channels of usefulness — a spoiled child is the result. A girl growing up to womanhood, is, when unemployed, habitually uneasy. The mind aches and chafes because it wants action, for a motive. Now a mind in this condition is not benefited by the command to stay at home, or the withdrawal from companions. It must be set to work. This vital energy that is struggling to find relief in demonstration should be so directed that habits may be formed, — habits of industry that obviate the wish for change and unnecessary play, and form a regular drain upon it. Otherwise, the mind becomes dissipated, the will irresolute, and confinement irksome. Girls will never be happy, except in the company of their playmates, unless home becomes to them a scene of regular duty and personal usefulness.
There is another obvious advantage to be derived from the habit of engaging daily upon special household duties. The imagination of girls is apt to become active to an unhealthy degree, when no corrective is employed. False views of life are engendered, and labor is regarded as menial. Ease comes to be looked upon as a supremely desirable thing, so that when the real, inevitable cares of life come, there is no preparation for them, and weak complainings or ill-natured discontent are the result.
And here I am naturally introduced to another subject. Young women, the glory of your life is to do something and to be something. You very possibly may have formed the idea that ease and personal enjoyment are the ends of your life. This is a terrible mistake. Development in the broadest sense and in the highest direction is the end of your life. You may possibly find ease with it, and a great deal of precious personal enjoyment, or your life may be one long experience of self-denial. If you wish to be something more than the pet and plaything of a man; if you would rise above the position of a pretty toy, or the ornamental fixture of an establishment, you have got a work to do. You have got a position to maintain in society ; you have got the poor and the sick to visit; you may possibly have a family to rear and train; you have got to take a load of care upon your shoulders and bear it through life. You have got a character to sustain; and I hope that you will have the heart of a husband to cheer and strengthen. Ease is not for you. Selfish enjoyment is not for you. The world is to be made better by you. You have got to suffer and to work; and if there be a spark of the true fire in you, your hearts will respond to these words.
The time will come when you shall see that all your toil, and care, and pain, and sorrow, and practical sympathy for others has built you up into a strength of womanhood which will despise ease as an end of life, and pity those who are content with it. Get this idea that your great business is simply to live at ease out of your head at once. There is nothing noble and ennobling in it. Your mental and physical powers can only give you worthy happiness in the using. They were made for use; and a lazy woman is inevitably miserable. I do not put this matter of enjoyment before you as the motive for action. I simply state the fact that it is a result of action — an incident of a life worthily spent.
When you have properly comprehended and received this idea, the recreations of life and the pleasures of social intercourse will take their appropriate positions with relation to the business of life — its staple duties. Recreation will become re-creation — simply the renewal of your powers, that they may all the better perform the work which you have undertaken, or which circumstances have devolved upon you. Social pleasure will rise into a sympathetic communion with natures and lives earnest like your own, upon the subjects nearest your hearts, and it will give you strength and guidance. The pleasures of life will become the wells, scattered along the way, where you will lay down your burdens for the moment, wipe your brows, and drink, that you may go into the work before you refreshed in body and mind. In these quiet hours you will feel a healthy thrill of happiness which those who seek pleasure for its own sake never know.
There are few objects in this world more repulsive to me than a selfish woman — a woman who selfishly consults her own enjoyments, her own ease, her own pleasure. If you have the slightest desire to be loved; if you would have your presence a welcome one in palace and cottage alike ; if you would be admired, respected, revered ; if you would have all sweet human sympathies clustering around you while you live, and the tears of a multitude of friends shed upon your grave when you die, you must be a working woman — living and working for others, denying yourself for others, and building up for yourself a character, strong, symmetrical, beautiful. If I were you, I would rather be that insensate and quietly gliding shadow which the wounded soldier kissed as the noble Florence Nightingale passed his weary pillow, than the pampered creature of luxury, who has no thought above her personal ease and personal adornment.
Do not seek out for yourselves any prominent field of service where you will attract the attention of the world. Remain where God places you. Some of the noblest heroisms of the world have been achieved in humble life. The poor ye have always with you. The miserable are always around you. You can lighten your father’s burdens. You can restrain your brothers from vicious society. You can relieve your failing and fading mother of much care. You can gather the ragged and ignorant children at your knee, and teach them something of a better life than they have seen. You can become angels of light and goodness to many stricken hearts. You can read to the aged. You can do many things which will be changed to blessings upon your own soul. Florence Nightingale did her work in her place; do your work in yours, and your Father who seeth in secret shall reward you openly.
I would be the last one to cast a shadow on your brows, but I would undeceive you at the first, so that you may begin life with right ideas. Life is real — it is a real and earnest thing. It has homely details, painful passages, and a crown of care for every brow. I seek to inspire you with a wish and a will to meet it with a womanly spirit. I seek to point you to its nobler meanings and its higher results. The tinsel with which your imagination has invested it will all fall off of itself, so soon as you shall fairly enter upon its experiences. Then if these ideas have no place in you, you will be obliged to acquire them slowly and painfully, or you will sink into a poor, selfish, discontented creature — and be, so far as others are concerned, either a nonentity, or a disagreeable hanger-on and looker-on. So I say, begin to take up life’s duties now. Learn something of what life is, before you take upon yourself its graver responsibilities.