DUTIES OF WOMEN AS MISTRESSES OF HOUSEHOLDS.
By FRANCES POWER COBBE.
I have no sympathy at all with those ladies who are seeking to promote coöperative housekeeping—in other words, to abolish the institution of the home. There may be, indeed, specially gifted women—artists, musicians, literary women—whom I could imagine finding it an interruption to their pursuits to take charge of a house. But, strange to say, though I have had a pretty large acquaintance with many of the most eminent of such women, I have almost invariably found them particularly proud of their housekeeping, and clever at the performance of all household duties, not excepting the ordering of “judicious” dinners. Not to make personal remarks on living friends, I will remind you that the greatest woman mathematician of any age, Mary Somerville, was renowned for her good housekeeping, and, I can add from my own knowledge, was an excellent judge of a well-dressed déjeuner; while Madame de Staël, driven by Napoleon from her home, went about Europe, as it was said, “preceded by her reputation and followed by her cook.”
Rather, I suspect, it is not higher genius, but feeble inability to cope with the problems of domestic government, which generally inspires the women who wish to abdicate their little household thrones. Some sympathy may be given to them, but I should be exceedingly sorry to see many women catching up the cry and following their leading to the dismal disfranchisement of the home—the practical homelessness of American boarding-houses or Continental pensions. I think for a woman to fail to make and keep a happy home is to be a “failure” in a truer sense than to have failed to catch a husband.
The making of a true home is really our peculiar and inalienable right—a right which no man can take from us; for a man can no more make a home than a drone can make a hive. He can build a castle or a palace; but—poor creature!—be he wise as Solomon and rich as Crœsus, he can not turn it into a home. No masculine mortal can do that. It is a woman, and only a woman—a woman all by herself, if she likes, and without any man to help her—who can turn a house into a home. Woe to the wretched man who disputes her monopoly, and thinks, because he can arrange a club, he can make a home! Nemesis overtakes him in his old bachelorhood, when a home becomes the supreme ideal of his desires; and we see him—him who scorned the home-making of a lady—obliged to put up with the oppression of his cook or the cruelty of his nurse!
In the first place, if home be our kingdom, it must be our joy and privilege to convert that domain, as quickly and as perfectly as we may, into a little province of the Kingdom of God; for remember that we may look on all our duties in this cheering and beautiful light—first, to set up God’s Kingdom in our own hearts, making them pure and true and loving, and then to make our homes little provinces of the same kingdom, and, lastly, to try to extend that kingdom through the world—the empire of Justice, Truth and Love. We are entirely responsible for our own souls, and very greatly responsible for those of all the dwellers in our homes; and, in a lesser way, we are answerable for each widening circle beyond us. How shall we set about making our homes provinces of the Divine Kingdom?