Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper / Containing Five Hundred Receipes for Economical and Healthful Cooking; also, Many Directions for Securing Health and Happiness

by Catharine Esther Beecher

Next comes all involved in the cleansing, neatness, and order of houses filled with sofas, ottomans, curtains, pictures, musical instruments, and all the varied collection of beautiful and frail ornaments or curiosities so common. Every girl should be taught to know the right and the wrong way of protecting or cleansing every article, from the rich picture-frames and frescoes to the humblest crockery and stew-pan. And this would include much scientific knowledge as well as practical training.

Next comes the selection of healthful food, the proper care of it, and the most economical and suitable modes of cooking. Here are demanded the first principles of physiology, animal chemistry, and domestic hygiene, with the practical applications. Thus instructed, the housekeeper will know the good or bad condition of meats, milk, bread, butter, and all groceries. And a class could be taken to a market or grocery for illustration, as easily as to a museum or the field for illustrations of mineralogy or botany. All this should be done before a young girl has the heavy responsibilities of housekeeper, wife, mother, and nurse. The art of cookery, in all its departments, has received more attention than any other domestic duty in former days; but at the present time no systematic mode is devised for training a young girl to superintend and instruct servants in this complicated duty, on which the health and comfort of a family so much depend.

Next, in providing family clothing and in the care of household stuffs, she will know how to do and to teach in the best manner plain sewing, hemming, darning, mending, and the use of a sewing-machine, thus cultivating ingenuity, dexterity, and common sense in judging the best way of doing things and deciding what is worth doing and what is not. She will exercise good taste and good judgment in dress for herself and family, in the selection of materials, in the adaptation of colors and fashion to age, shape, and employments, and in the avoidance of unhealthful and absurd fashions; and she will have such knowledge of domestic chemistry as is needed in the cleansing, dyeing, and preservation of household clothing and stuffs.

Next comes all involved in the care of health. This again involves the first principles of animal and domestic chemistry, hydrostatics, pneumatics, caloric, light, electricity, and especially hygiene and therapeutics. A housekeeper instructed in these will have pure water, pure air, much sunlight, beds and clothes well cleansed, every arrangement for cleanliness and comfort, and all that tends to prevent disease or retard its first approaches. And her knowledge and skill she will transmit to the children and servants under her care, while the dumb animals of her establishment will share in the blessings secured by her scientific knowledge and trained skill.

Next comes the care of family expenses in all departments of economy, and in which science and training are also demanded: to this add the enforcement of system and order, hospitalities to relatives, friends, and the homeless, the claims of society as to calls, social gatherings, the sick, the poor, benevolent associations, school and religious duties.

Not the least of the onerous duties of a housekeeper is the training and government of servants of all kinds of dispositions, habits, nationalities, and religions.

All these multiplied and diverse duties are demanded of every woman, whether married or single, who becomes mistress of a house.

The distinctive duties of wife and mother are such that both science and training are of the greatest consequence, and a dreadful amount of suffering has resulted from want of such proper instruction. One of the most important of these duties is the care of new-born infants and their mothers. Thousands of young infants perish and young mothers are made sufferers for life for want of science and training in the mothers and monthly nurses.

Then the helpers in the nursery have a daily control of the safety, health, temper, and morals of young children; and a conscientious, careful, affectionate woman, instructed in the care of health and remedies for sudden accidents, is a rare treasure. These arduous duties are now extensively given to the inexperienced and the ignorant. It is a mournful fact that more science and care are given by professional trainers to the offspring of horses, cows, sheep, and hogs, than to the larger portion of children of the American people. Thus comes the fact that the mortality of the human offspring greatly exceeds that of the lower animals.

The most difficult and important duties of a woman are those of an educator in the family and the school. In the nursery, children are taught the care of their bodies, the use of language, the nature and properties of the world around them, and many social and moral duties, all before books are used. Then it is a mother’s duty to select the school-teacher, and so to supervise, that health and intellectual training shall be duly secured. To this add the duties of training and controlling the helpers in the nursery and kitchen, and to a housekeeper and mother the duties of an educator stand first on the roll of responsibilities.