First, there is the trial of non-appreciation. That is what made
Martha so mad with Mary. The younger sister had no estimate of her
older sister's fatigues. As now, men bothered with the anxieties of
the store, and office, and shop, or coming from the Stock Exchange,
they say when they get home: "Oh, you ought to be in our factory a
little while; you ought to have to manage eight, or ten, or twenty
subordinates, and then you would know what trouble and anxiety are!"
Oh, sir, the wife and the mother has to conduct at the same time a
university, a clothing establishment, a restaurant, a laundry, a
library, while she is health officer, police and president of her
realm! She must do a thousand things, and do them well, in order to
keep things going smoothly; and so her brain and her nerves are taxed
to the utmost.
I know there are housekeepers who are so fortunate that they can sit
in an arm-chair in the library, or lie on the belated pillow, and
throw off all the care upon subordinates who, having large wages and
great experience, can attend to all of the affairs of the household.
Those are the exception. I am speaking this morning of the great mass
of housekeepers--the women to whom life is a struggle, and who, at
thirty years of age, look as though they were forty, and at forty look
as though they were fifty, and at fifty look as though they were
sixty. The fallen at Chalons, and Austerlitz, and Gettysburg, and
Waterloo are a small number compared with the slain in the great
Armageddon of the kitchen. You go out to the cemetery and you will see
that the tombstones all read beautifully poetic; but if those
tombstones would speak the truth thousands of them would say: "Here
lies a woman killed by too much mending, and sewing, and baking, and
scrubbing, and scouring; the weapon with which she was slain was a
broom, or a sewing machine, or a ladle."