Domestic Work for Women
To that class of women who toil not, neither spin, and who, like contented ravens, are fed they know not how nor whence, it is superfluous to speak of domestic service; for their housekeeping consists in “giving orders,” and their marketing is represented by tradesmen’s wagons and buff-colored pass-books. Yet I am far from inferring that, because they can financially afford to be idle, they have a right to be so. They surely owe to the world some free gift of labor, else it would be hard to see why they came into it. Not for ornaments certainly, since Parian marble and painted canvas would be both more economical and satisfactory; not for housewives, for their houses are in the hands of servants; not for mothers, for they universally grumble at the advent and responsibility of children.
But to the large majority of women, domestic service ought to be a high moral question, especially to those who are the wives of men striving to keep up on limited incomes the reality and the appearance of a prosperous home; all the more necessary, perhaps, because the appearance is the condition on which the reality is possible.
Too often a false notion that usefulness and elegance are incompatible, that it is “unladylike” to be in their kitchens, or come in contact with the baker and butcher, makes them abrogate the highest honors of wifehood. Or perhaps they have the misfortune to be the children of those tender parents who are permitted without loss of reputation to educate their daughters for drawing-room ornaments in their youth, and yet do nothing to insure them against a middle age of struggle and privation, and an old age of misery.
To such I would speak candidly—not without thought—not without practical knowledge of what I say—not without strong hopes that I may influence many warm, thoughtless hearts, who only need to 177 be once alive to a responsibility in order to feel straitened and burdened until they assume and fulfil it.
Is it fair, then, is it just, kind, or honorable, that the husband day after day should be bound to the wheel of a monotonous occupation, and the wife fritter away the results in frivolity or suffer them to be wasted in extravagant and yet unsatisfactory housekeeping? Supposing the magnificent affection of the husband makes him willing to coin his life into dollars, in order that the wife may live and dress and visit according to her ideal, ought she to accept an offering that has in it so strong an odor of human sacrifice?
Even if it be necessary to keep up a certain style, it is still in the wife’s power to make the husband’s service for this end a reasonable one. Personal supervision of the marketing will save twenty per cent, and I am afraid to say how much might be saved from actual waste in the kitchen by the same means; and this is but the beginning.
Yet saving is only one item in the wife’s 178 lawful domestic service; if her husband is to be a permanently successful man, she must take care of his digestion. It may seem derogatory to thought, enterprise, and virtue to assert that eating has anything to do with them. I cannot help the condition; I only know that it exists, and that she is but a poor wife who ignores the fact.