Independently of the collapse of foreign securities and the general depression of trade, the increased cost of all necessaries makes it impossible to many of us to allow ourselves luxuries, of which the most costly are ornamental servants; and the difficulty of obtaining any others makes it incumbent on us to put our own shoulders to the wheel, and try by diligent self-help to solve some of the problems which so miserably defy us to find a practical answer.
In this consideration of the subject of domestic work in middle-class households, I hope to show in what way the mistress may be rendered more self-reliant, and how the master's purse may be spared the perpetual drain the present system entails upon it at both ends, and from every mesh.
This is but a fraction of a vast subject, yet it is in itself so large, and stretches out into such a variety of kindred topics, that it is difficult to compress it into a form small enough to be easily handled, and still more difficult to make suggestions of reform generally palatable, since many vanities must be hurt by a proposal to reduce establishments, and sensitive feelings wounded by the bluntness of two direct practical questions—
1st. Must the great majority of our young ladies be elegant superfluities?
2nd. Must we keep many servants to wait upon each other?
These questions I hope to answer usefully in the following pages.
We must begin with the understanding that in every house there is work to be done, and that somebody must do it. Our aim will be to reduce its compass, and to do what remains in the cheapest and pleasantest way. But it must be efficiently done, which is seldom the case when young ladies play at housekeeping, which too often means giving out the pepper, and such like. We have long shrunk from allowing our women to work at all. Husbands and fathers have taken a pride in keeping the ladies of their households in that state of ease that no call need be made on them to lift a finger in the way of useful work; so that if reverses befal them, their condition is deplorable indeed.
Now we are turning round and insisting upon every woman being able to support herself by her own exertions. Though a great part of woman's natural work has been taken out of her hands by machinery, this, which is mainly the preparation of clothing, was the occupation of her uncultivated leisure, and did no more than fill up the time which we now devote to culture. By retreating from our active household duties we now divide our time between culture and idleness, or the union of both in novel-reading.
For many years conscientious teachers tried to drive us to household work by calling it our duty: a dull name, sternly forbidding us to find pleasure or interest therein. It was a moral dose of physic, salutary but disagreeable. In the same way we were taught to make shirts and mend stockings, but an evening dress was held to be frivolity. Taste was discouraged, and beauty driven out of our work; no wonder, then, that the young and careless shunned it altogether, and threw as much of it as they could into the hands of hirelings. Is there no way of teaching duty without making it repulsive by its dreariness and ugliness?
Now that we pride ourselves upon being no longer weak-minded and silly, let us exert ourselves to act upon Lord Bacon's maxim, "Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable." We need not fear that the routine of daily handiwork—which will become interesting to us as we try to make it agreeable—will interfere with our further intellectual culture. And even should it do so, are not our leaders of thought beginning to perceive that manual labour is more commercially valuable than mental labour; that the demand for the former is greater as the supply becomes perceptibly less? The deadness of machine work causes us to prize the spirited and varied touch that can only be imparted by the hand. Every woman, among her acquaintance, knows some one who is a skilful, energetic manager of her house, and yet whose reading and accomplishments are above the average. Indeed, as I heard one of my friends of this stamp say, when asked how she found time for so much sketching from nature, "One always finds time for what one likes to do."