To be sure! Why can’t they? For the very reason that our husbands cannot eat “ever so many” pickles, pies, gingerbread, and big bowls of bread and milk, as they used to do on returning from school; finish off with a pocketful of apples, and then be half ready to cry that their containing powers are not equal to their appetites. A good game of “tag,” however, up the front stairs, down the back, through the long hall once or twice, soon remedied that difficulty in boyhood. If husbands will only let their brains run wild for a short time, quit study, forget business, gold markets, and all such corroding cares, and be wild, harum-scarum boys once more, their wives’ gingerbread will taste just as good as their mothers’ and grandmothers’ did. That is the trouble with the husbands’ appetites. But the housekeepers’ troubles lie deeper than this.
The whole routine of modern housekeeping is much more complex than in our parents’ time. To be sure, they rose early; parents and children then knew what “sunrise” meant, for they were dressed and at work before the sun’s red wheel began to rise over the eastern border. The cows were milked, the milk put in the cool milk-cellar, the butter made, the breakfast ready—a good substantial, healthy breakfast—long before the time when our housekeepers of to-day are out of their beds. “Early to bed, early to rise,” simple, nourishing meals, quiet home pleasures,—not many hours spent in senseless calls, but an occasional good old-fashioned visit to keep the heart fresh and living,—these insured health and strength, good digestion, tranquil sleep, and cheerful homes.
Early rising facilitates the action of the domestic machinery in a wonderful manner. One hour lost or wasted in the morning clogs the wheels, and the work drags heavily all day. One hour gained is the best lubricator in the world. Everything glides along smoothly,—head, heart, and hands work in harmony.
Once, when a little girl, we were in despair because our “stent” was not finished in season for us to go a berrying with the brothers and sisters. Taking her kerchief from the black satin reticule that always hung on her arm when knitting, the dear old grandmother gently wiped the fast-falling tears, saying, “Ah, little one! you didn’t want to get up this morning when the others did. Remember that if you lose an hour in the morning you will waste half a dozen hunting it all day long, and deprive yourself of much pleasure. I’d try and remember, if I were you, never to lose another.”
We regret, for their own comfort, that our present housekeepers do not retain their parents’ habits of early rising. But contrast the life of our parents with the modern life of their descendants. The demands of society, late hours, too much visiting and company, make laggards in the morning; and the appetite, injured by untimely eating at these late hours, is supposed to need coaxing with dainties at breakfast. The elaborate breakfast requires as much time and labor as belongs to a dinner; and the dinner, with all the variety that etiquette claims,—several courses, and a multitude of dishes consequent upon these courses,—increases the labor immensely; and, unless blessed with a good corps of servants, requiring little oversight, we can secure little time for rest, reading, or sewing. Such servants are seldom granted to mortals in our times. Twenty years ago, one girl, without any of the modern improvements,—water to be brought from the street pumps, suds to be taken up and emptied in the gutter,—accomplished more work, and made the family more comfortable, than three or four will do now.
We are inclined to believe that the heaviest trials of housekeeping may be traced, not to the degeneracy of our mothers’ daughters, but to a marked and most unfortunate change in the character and capacity of our “help.”(?) This is no freak of the imagination. Some few families still retain servants that have been with them for years, and such housekeepers have no sympathy with their less favored sisters; but let death or marriage remove these comforts, and compel them to seek others to replace the old and well-tried ones, and they will learn that this complaint has very substantial foundations.
What remedy may be found it is impossible to say. In part our housekeepers are to blame. They have such horror of being left without help, such dread of constant changes, that they live as slaves to the whims and caprices of an ignorant class of persons, who soon recognize their fears and dependence, and use this knowledge to extort high wages for very little service,—compelling then mistresses to pass over their impudence and arrogance by bold threats of leaving.
This lack of independence, this fear to assert their own authority and rights, is, we apprehend, in a great measure the cause of the insubordination and uselessness of the girls of the present time. When they learn that their services will not be accepted unless faithfully rendered, we may look for easier and happier times. But how is this to be accomplished? A few cannot remedy the evil. It can only be effected by general co-operation. We are not willing to acknowledge that the housekeepers of the past were any more capable than those of our time; but we do think that our position, owing to the great annoyance we are subjected to from the kitchen cabinet, is far more trying than our mothers’ could have been.
What sort of housekeepers our daughters will become, enervated by late hours and all the gay and strange excitement of modern life, and crippled by the hideous freaks of fashion, it is painful to imagine and impossible to foretell.