And so on, again. Certainly monotony could no farther go. If such workers had not fastened a book to the distaff, insanity would surely have set in. The weaving never could be quite so monotonous as the spinning, for there was necessary a constant watching of the web that effectually prevented any wandering from the business in hand, or any flashing of looks toward the window-sill where lay the volume of romance.
If however, a leaf from the daily life of one of our grandmothers were accessible, it would contain the story not only of the bread-making, but of the soap-making too. That good grandmother in her brisk and energetic days would kindle the big fire in the back yard, bring the large kettles up from the cellar, pack the barrel full of good hard-wood ashes and set it on its supports, and then pour the water through it to make the lye. She would then melt up the bones and grease saved from the winter's supply of pork, and when the grease was tried out she would mix the lye and the melted grease with as nice an art and with an expertness as much the product of long experience as is the skill of the artist when he combines his paints for a masterpiece. "With what do you mix your paints?" inquired a young sprig of a great artist. "With brains, sir," was the answer. So might the housewife of a hundred years ago have said if she had been asked how she attained her ends in the soap, the candles, the dyes, the cakes, the baking of the beans—as critical a piece of business as ever a Parisian chef could attempt—the turning of the heel in stocking-making, the weaving of the colors in the carpet, the bleaching to snowy whiteness of the linen and the woolen blankets. "I mix all these processes with brains—with the results of experience bought through many decades of experiment by many costly mistakes and especially by a vivid and unfailing memory of what happened when it was done in one special way and what happened when it was done in some other way. By these means I gained the power to do these things and to gain these successes. It was not so easy as it may seem." Thus might the ghostly grandmother speak if she could come back and let her voice be heard and then she would point to the long rows of soap-bars, put away side by side, white or brown or yellow according to the purity of the grease that had been used, to become dry and fit for household use for the next half-year. Meantime the tallow would have been saved out to be used for dipping the candles or for molding them out in the tin candle-forms. The cotton cord would be strung through the long tin tubes and pulled out at the lower end for the wick end; or the strings of wicking would be hung along a pole, to be dipped into the melted fat again and again as fast as the grease would cool on the strings and thus increase with every dipping the size of the slender tapering candle. Between the intervals of dipping, the little mother would hurry back to her chair and there sit and cut long strips of cloth and sew them together into carpet rags. When the piles on the floor at her side would be high enough, she would run them off around her elbow into a hank ready to be colored. The little girls in the family would have peeled bark from the butternut trees and gathered golden rod and other herbs and these would have been steeped thoroughly for the magical liquors which would be standing ready in crocks full of dyes to give the brown and yellow and green and blue tint to these hanks of rag-cord. Then the weaving loom would be got ready in the attic and the shuttle would fly back and forth and the rags would soon be transformed into a smooth, well-striped carpet, which would come off in pieces several yards long. Later on these would be sewed together into a beautiful floor covering to be used for the parlor first, afterward, when the freshness was somewhat worn off, for the living-room; later for some hallway, and last of all, what remained from many footsteps would be made into little rugs to be put down extra in such places as needed special protection.
The craftswoman who did all this was equally gifted in making the cross-stitch initials for the corner of the bolster and the knitted lace for its edge. She was master of all tricks with the needle as well as with the shuttle and the wooden spoon. Moreover, that grandmother was the mother of fifteen children, and there was nobody but herself to make mittens and stockings for all of them for both winter and summer. So her knitting-needles simply had to fly in all the interstices between tasks of weaving and spinning and dyeing and soap-making and candle-making and other work. All this was to be done besides what the average women of to-day have to do and think pretty hard for them.
Edith Abbott in her book, Woman in Industry, mentions forty-nine different processes in the factory of to-day that now take the place of the work of one woman as she stitched a pair of shoes in her home, as women often did in the middle New England pioneering era, to accomplish the detail of all the industries that passed through the hands of that capable little grandmother of ours in, say, 1790 or thereabouts.
In still earlier days the women performed prodigies of heavy labor and bore a child a year while they did it. History, however, grimly adds the illuminating note that most of these had a short career. And it is just possible that the women of that earlier time went beyond their strength, exhausting their resources of vigor, so that the women of to-day have not their full share of energy for the tasks before them and therefore do not add to the sum of life in the same numbers that their foremothers did.
Such grandmothers, such mothers as those, were "the kind of mothers that men must worship," says Sarah Comstock in The Soddy as she describes the trials of women in present-day pioneering; and she adds, "worshiping mothers makes men great!" Is it not clear where the true greatness of America lies? If there are old men living who are the sons of such mothers, though they may be worshipers of the memory of their heroism, if those sons have any spark of chivalry remaining in their bosoms, they will wish that their mothers had lived to-day instead of then, that their labor might be lessened by modern work-saving methods and their lives brightened by modern amplitude of resource.
The practical executive ability of those great women of one, two, and three generations ago should be the inheritance of the Country Girls of to-day, and their faithful examples should be an inspiration to them. But the loyal descendants of those self-sacrificing and sacrificed women should say that they will do all in their power to make the time come swiftly when there shall be a new day in the kitchen, a day when the housework may be a joy and not a burden to press the strength and buoyancy out of the young spirits of those who prefer—if they can get themselves to be brave enough—to enter upon the long service of life in the environment of the open country.