Reliable books on cooking, on the relative values of foods, on sanitary housekeeping, are not hard to find, while the magazines and papers are full of happy suggestions on these and kindred themes. A woman who intends to be her own maid should possess some reliable volumes on her subject, should make her work more interesting to herself and more valuable to her family by a reference to authorities on her subject. The more one knows about the work one has in hand, the more one is apt to care for it. And enthusiasm for one’s task, in its turn, begets good work.
No woman on whom falls the burden of keeping her own house should feel permanently discouraged. She may learn to do her task not only with comfort but with grace. The difficulties in her way can be surmounted through experience and study. If she has a natural liking for the ordering and managing of a house, her work may become a delight. “Why do you look so sad?” said one woman to another. “Because I have a perfect maid,” said the second. “All my life until recently I kept house for my husband and myself. Housekeeping was my passion as music is yours. Now my husband insists that I shall keep a maid. She knows her business. It would spoil her if I helped. I am a stranger in my own kitchen. Wouldn’t you be unhappy if you had no opportunity to play Chopin and Beethoven? Well, I am miserable because I can’t concoct salads and soups.” This testimony to the joys of housekeeping is extreme, but it may serve to cheer some beginner in domestic labor who sees only duty but no pleasure in the work.
A SOUTHERN GIRL’S PARTY
To feel that because one is limited in means one can not entertain is wholly mistaken. The young lady in a southern family in aristocraite Charleston, herself the granddaughter of a governor of the state and a member of the famous St. Cecilia Society, told the writer, who was a “paying guest” in the simple home, how she entertained her friends. “In the morning we whip up a cake, order cream, telephone the girls, and when they come, that’s the party!” But her own delightful spirit of hospitality, the perfection of her breeding, were the largest element in that party’s undoubted success.
CHAPTER XXXIX
WOMAN IN BUSINESS RELATIONS
THE number of women who enter into business life and the number of avenues open to them for earning a living are constantly increasing. And however much we may be disposed to ridicule the agitation concerning woman’s progress and the rights of woman, no fair-minded person can fail to recognize the happy changes such agitation in the last decade has wrought in the attitude of the world toward women who make their own way in it. The old-fashioned prejudice of gentility against a woman employing her powers to make money has very largely disappeared. Many a delicate-minded woman of the old school has lived in poverty or has incurred unwillingly financial obligations to family connections because of the prejudice against her doing something for herself, because of the feeling that her social position, a matter naturally of high importance to a woman, would be injured by her stepping out of the family niche and picking up something for herself on the highway open to all. She feared more even than this, perhaps, the loss of those particularly feminine attributes and charms so dear to every real woman’s heart. In the old-fashioned conception of a woman who worked outside of her own home, it used to be taken for granted that she must be denied social consideration and must give up her share of fun in the world.