What has gone on in the United States during the past two generations
is full of lessons and warnings for the rest of the world. The American
housewife of an earlier day was famous for her unremitting diligence.
She not only cooked, washed and ironed; she also made shift to master
such more complex arts as spinning, baking and brewing. Her expertness,
perhaps, never reached a high level, but at all events she made a
gallant effort. But that was long, long ago, before the new
enlightenment rescued her. Today, in her average incarnation, she is
not only incompetent (alack, as I have argued, rather beyond her
control); she is also filled with the notion that a conscientious
discharge of her few remaining duties is, in some vague way,
discreditable and degrading. To call her a good cook, I daresay, was
never anything but flattery; the early American cuisine was probably a
fearful thing, indeed. But today the flattery turns into a sort of
libel, and she resents it, or, at all events, does not welcome it. I
used to know an American literary man, educated on the Continent, who
married a woman because she had exceptional gifts in this department.
Years later, at one of her dinners, a friend of her husband’s tried to
please her by mentioning the fact, to which he had always been privy.
But instead of being complimented, as a man might have been if told
that his wife had married him because he was a good lawyer, or surgeon,
or blacksmith, this unusual housekeeper, suffering a renaissance of
usualness, denounced the guest as a liar, ordered him out of the house,
and threatened to leave her husband.
This disdain of offices that, after all, are necessary, and might as
well be faced with some show of cheerfulness, takes on the character of
a definite cult in the United States, and the stray woman who attends
to them faithfully is laughed at as a drudge and a fool, just as she is
apt to be dismissed as a “brood sow” (I quote literally, craving
absolution for the phrase: a jury of men during the late war, on very
thin patriotic grounds, jailed the author of it) if she favours her
lord with viable issue. One result is the notorious villainousness of
American cookery—a villainousness so painful to a cultured uvula that a
French hack-driver, if his wife set its masterpieces before him, would
brain her with his linoleum hat. To encounter a decent meal in an
American home of the middle class, simple, sensibly chosen and
competently cooked, becomes almost as startling as to meet a Y. M. C.
A. secretary in a bordello, and a good deal rarer. Such a thing, in
most of the large cities of the Republic, scarcely has any existence.
If the average American husband wants a sound dinner he must go to a
restaurant to get it, just as if he wants to refresh himself with the
society of charming and well-behaved children, he has to go to an
orphan asylum. Only the immigrant can take his case and invite his soul
within his own house.