Then the old lady broke away and returned to her rural home. "They took away my Shakespeare, and they took away my God," said she; "but when they took away my chemise I couldn't stand it."
We have seen the home robbed and depleted as years have passed; with struggle and objection, no doubt, but inevitably shrinking. Out went the shears and the carders, out went the dye tub and the spinning-wheels; big wool wheel, little flax wheel, all gone. Out went the clattering loom; out went the quilting-frame, the candle-mould, the little mallet to break up the tall blue-papered "sugar loaves."
Some of us have seen all these. In long remote places they are still to be found. In the neighborhood of Chicago's Hull House was found a woman to whom the spinning-wheel was a wonderful modern invention! She spun with a spindle—like Clotho.
Now why do reasoning people, seeing all this behind them, so dread and resist the next step before them—the eliminating of the kitchen? Shall we never learn, that as a means of feeding the world it is not a success? It does not bring health and happiness. Every competent woman is not a competent cook and never will be; any more than every man is a competent carpenter. The preparation of food is too important a task to be left to a private servant—whether hired or married.
There are reasons, many, and good, why the kitchen must go; reasons of health, of economy, of happiness; but this last reason is a good accelerator—the Horror of the Fly.
Here he is by millions and millions: Here She is, by trillions. Their hairy feet, their whiskered probosces, slop and paddle in every foul and nauseous thing. They sit twiddling their paws on the pauper's sickbed; and then twiddle those same paws on our warm chocolate-cake.
And every home that keeps a kitchen, with its attendant stables, helps to maintain and disseminate this scourge of humanity, this universal purveyor of infectious disease—The Kitchen Fly.
ALAS!
Have those in monstrous hats no glimmering dream
Of the high beauty of the human head,
House of the brain: seat of the sentient soul;
Haloed for sainthood; crowned for royalty;
Bright-ringed with roses, wreathed with noble bays,
Most beautifully bound with shining hair.
Alas for the soft glory they have lost!
Alas for the Ashantee wigs they wear!
Nor plait nor coil nor ringlet, but a mass
Of shorn dead hair from poorer women's heads.
Of bulging wire and hard, stiff, glittering bands.
A heap no loving hand would long to touch.