But if the pursuit of a separate and independent career should not
disincline girls to marriage, you think it would unfit them for its
duties; that an education, an occupation, and an interest in any other
than a domestic direction would produce an indifferent housewife. Is
this necessary? Is it even probable? Is there any sufficient reason
why a woman who has trained her judgment in a medical school, shall
not go into life, not only with no disadvantage, but with positive
advantage from such training? If her mind have acquired power of
observation, and her fingers skill in execution, will she not be so
much the better prepared for the duties of her situation, whatever
they may be? The ordering of a family is not like a trade,--a thing to
be learned. It is multifarious and distracting. The mistress of a
household is like the sovereign of a free empire. She does not need,
and cannot serve, an apprenticeship. The only way to prepare her for
its duties is to enlarge her capacity to discharge them. She needs a
thorough education. Everything that helps to build up mind and
body,--everything that makes her healthful, hopeful, cheerful,
spirited, self-reliant, energetic, strong, helps her to administer her
affairs successfully. A woman who can do one thing can do another
thing, and she can do it all the better for having done the other one
first; so that the pursuit of a profession, instead of incapacitating
her for a domestic life, makes her better fitted for it. If for a
year, or two or three, she has been studying the human system, or the
stars, or the flowers, or the mysteries of cloak, or bonnet, or
counter, or mint, she can turn aside at the beck of the master just as
well as if she had been all the while frittering herself away, and she
will also be a great deal better worth beckoning to. The entrance upon
a "career" does not, as many seem to think and fear, prescribe
perpetual adherence to it.
A girl may have a certain end in view, and design most clearly to
follow it, and she does follow it--God bless her! But Nature also has
her ends, and when her unerring finger points in another quarter,
"This is the way, walk ye in it," be sure the girl will go. Activity
will never keep her from happiness, but it will keep her from byways
and stumbling-blocks, from the traps which Nature never set, but which
a sentimentalism, born of selfishness, has put in her path. And be
doubly sure of this: if one or two or a dozen years of industry and
resolution unfit a girl to be a wife, she would never have been a
prize. Any intelligent girl can learn household science in six months,
and every girl ought to have, and generally does have, at least six
months' warning. Experience will do the rest for her, and do it well,
if she is a girl of sense; and if not, nothing would have helped the
matter. One of the best cooks I know started in life with only a
cabbage for capital; and with sense and spirit, out of that solitary
cabbage, with whose proper management she chanced to be acquainted,
sprang pies, puddings, preserves, such as it is not well even to think
of in war-times.
So much for that portion of the objection which is put forward and has
a just foundation. But the main part of it is under ground. In my
opinion, the real danger lies in quite the opposite quarter from the
one that is sought to be defended. The trouble is not that women do
not think enough about household affairs. It is that they think too
much. But if one might judge from the tenor of public and private
talk, one would suppose that cooking was the chief end of woman and
the chief solace of man. I distinguish cooking above all the other
items of the domestic establishment, because I find it so
distinguished before me. Four hundred volumes of papyrus, recovered
from Herculaneum, related chiefly to music, rhetoric, and cookery. The
god of whom Paul told the Philippians, even weeping, is worshipped
to-day. Isaac acted after his kind when he loved Esau because he did
eat of his venison! To know how to cook, to keep the husband in good
humor with tempting viands, to prevent his being annoyed with burnt
meat, soured with heavy bread, or vexed by late dinners, is the burden
of a thousand ditties besides that of our sarcastic sonneteer. Printed
"Advice to Marriageable Young Ladies" informs them that "a man is
better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his
wife talks good French." I should like to be absolute monarch of
America long enough to enact a decree that every man who opens his
mouth to tell girls to learn to make bread, shall live a week on putty
and water. What! are girls then to neglect to learn to make bread? By
no means. Nor to roast beef, nor to boil potatoes. But suppose General
Hooker should lead out his whole army against a detachment of the
Rebels, and, neglecting Lee and Jackson with their myrmidons, should
expend all his ammunition and skill on a handful of the foe, would you
not adjudge him worthy of court-martial? But the detachment ought to
be captured. Perhaps it ought. Send out a detachment and capture it.
But do not waste your whole strength on an awkward squad, and leave
the main body of the enemy to ravage at will. Defeat the latter, and
the former will disappear of themselves.
Now when you bring out your drums and beat your dismal tattoo about
learning to cook, you are doing just this; you are devoting all your
strength to the destruction of an outwork whose fall will but very
remotely affect the citadel. The remedy for an ignorance of cookery is
not necessarily a knowledge of cookery. What is the reason that a man
has cause to complain that his wife does not know how to cook? Is it
that she devoted too much of her maiden time to teaching, preaching,
doctoring, and dressmaking? Ten thousand to one, no. It is because she
is ignorant or because she is silly. Treat girls sensibly. Educate
their observation, their perception, their judgment. Give them a
knowledge of human nature: and then be yourself so noble as to command
their respect, and so amiable as to secure their affection, and you
will have no trouble with heavy bread. If you insist on making women
ignorant and silly, be sure their ignorance and silliness will crop
out. Thrust them down in one place, and they will immediately rise in
another. Sooner or later, you will prove the truth of Lord Burleigh's
assurance to his son, and "find to your regret that there is nothing
more fulsome than a she-fool."
But the general direction of your counsel is wrong, even supposing the
immediate object at which it is aimed to be right. Its tendency is to
induce women to give more attention to cookery than they now do; and
they already devote to it a great deal more than they ought. They do
not cook too well, but too much. A few mixtures should be better
arranged than now, but a great many should be left alone. Cooking is
the chief concern of a very large number of New England wives and
mothers. They spend the larger part of their ingenuity in devising,
and the larger part of their strength and skill and time in preparing,
food which is unnecessary and often hurtful. It never occurs to them
to alter their course. They do not think of it as an unjust conjugal
exaction, but as a Divine allotment. It is not always the one, and
seldom if ever the other; but it is a custom. We are pre-eminently an
eating people. Our women are cooking themselves to death, and cooking
the nation into a materialism worse than death. Suppose you have been
boarding or visiting for a month or two in a stranger family, and some
one asks you if they live well, what do you understand him to mean? Is
he inquiring if they are honorable, if they conduct their lives on
Christian principles, if they are courteous, and self-respectful and
self-controlled? Are they just in their dealings, disinterested in
their motives, pure in word and work? Nothing is further from his
thoughts. He means--and you at once understand him--Do they have
highly-spiced and numerous meats, much cake and pie, many sauces and
preserves? To what degradation have we descended! To live well is to
eat rich food! Honor, integrity, refinement, culture, are all chopped
up into mince-pie. Heart and soul are left to shift for themselves,
and the guaranty of right and righteous living is
"A fair round belly with good capon lined."
In the olden times there lived, we are told, a race of men called
Bisclaverets, who were half man and half wolf; or, to speak more
accurately, were half the time man and half the time wolf. Some
indications in our own day lead us to believe that the race of the
Bisclaverets is not wholly extinct. Some stragglers must have found
their way from the shores of Bretagne to our Western wilds, and left a
posterity whose name is Legion. I copy from one of the most prominent
and liberal of our religious newspapers the following "elegant
extract," not original in its columns, but adopted from some other
paper, with such undoubted indorsement and commendation as an
insertion without comment implies:--
"The business man who has been at work hard all day, will enter his
house for dinner as crabbed as a hungry bear,--crabbed because he is
as hungry as a hungry bear. The wife understands the mood, and, while
she says little to him, is careful not to have the dinner delayed. In
the mean time, the children watch him cautiously, and do not tease him
with questions. When the soup is gulped, and he leans back and wipes
his mouth, there is an evident relaxation, and his wife ventures to
ask for the news. When the roast beef is disposed of, she presumes
upon gossip, and possibly upon a jest; and when, at last, the dessert
is spread upon the table, all hands are merry, and the face of the
husband and father, which entered the house so pinched, and savage,
and sharp, becomes soft, and full, and beaming as the face of the
round summer moon."
Are we talking about a man or a wild beast? Is it wife or female? Are
they children or cubs? Does he wipe his mouth or lick his chops?
"_Ventures_ to ask the news"! "_Presumes_ upon a jest"! The whole
picture is disgusting from beginning to end. It is the portraiture of
sensuality and despotism. Hunger is not a sublime sensation, nor is
eating a graceful act; but both are ordained of God, and are given us
with that broad blank margin which almost invariably accompanies His
gifts. Religion and culture can take up the necessity, and work so
deftly that it shall become an adornment; and the ordinance of eating
stand for the sunniest part of life. The grossness of the act, the
mere animal and mechanical function of furnishing supplies, can be so
larded with wit and wisdom, with love and good-will, with pleasant
talk, interchange of civilities and courtesies, and all the light,
sweet, gentle amenities of life, that a bare act becomes almost a
rite. The rough structure is veiled into beauty with roses and lilies
and the soft play of lights and shadows. But this paragraph portrays
gobbling. A woman, instead of pandering to it by service and silence,
ought to lift up her voice and repress it in its earliest stages. Make
a man understand that he shall eat his dinner like a gentleman or he
shall have no dinner to eat. If he will be crabbed and gulp, let him
go down into the coal-bin and have it out alone; but do not let him
bring his Feejeeism into the dining-room to defile the presence of his
wife and corrupt the manners of his children.
If you think the picture is overdrawn, I pray you to remember that I
did not draw it. It is a published, and, I think, a man's sketch of
manhood. I only take it as I find it. I do not myself think that
materialism has attained quite that degree of repulsiveness, but it is
too near it. Eating is not perpetrated, but the appetite is pampered.
If a man is able to hire a cook, very well. Cooking is the cook's
profession; she ought to attain skill, and her employer has a right to
require it, and as great a variety and profusion of dishes as he can
furnish material for. But if he is not able to hire a cook, and must
depend entirely upon his wife, the case is different. Cooking is not
her profession. It is only one of the duties incident to her station.
It is incumbent upon her to spread a plentiful and wholesome table. It
is culpable inefficiency to do less than this. It is palpable
immorality to do more. No matter how fond of cooking, or how skilful
or alert a woman may be, she has only twenty-four hours in her day,
and two hands for her work; and one woman who has the sole care of a
family cannot, if she has any rational and Christian idea of life, of
personal, household, and social duties, have any more time and
strength than is sufficient for their simple discharge. Overdoing in
one direction must be compensated by underdoing in another. She cannot
pamper Peter without pinching Paul. Much that you laud as a virtue I
lament as a vice. You revel in the cakes and the pastries and the
dainties, and boast the skill of the housewife; and indeed her marvels
are featly wrought, sweet to the taste, and to be desired if honestly
come by; but if there has been plunder and extortion, if it is a soul
that flakes in the pastry, if it is a heart that is embrowned in the
gravies; if leisure and freshness and breadth of sympathy and keen
enjoyment have been frittered away on the fritters, and simmered away
in the sweetmeats, and battered away in the puddings, give me, I pray
you, a dinner of herbs. Johnny-cake was royal fare in Walden woods
when a king prepared the banquet and presided at the board. Peacocks'
tongues are but common meat to peacocks.
The _pate de foie gras_ is a monstrous dish. A goose is kept in some
warm, confined place that precludes any extended motion, and fed with
fattening food, so that his liver enlarges through disease till it is
considered fit to be made into a pie,--a luxury to epicures, but a
horror to any healthful person. Just such a goose is many a woman,
confined by custom and her consenting will in a warm, narrow kitchen,
only instead of her liver it is her life which she herself makes up
into pies; but the pastry which you find so delicious seems to me
disease.
The ancients buried in urns the ashes of their bodies: we deposit in
urns the ashes of our souls, and pass them around at the tea-table.
Women not only injure themselves by what they neglect, but injure
others by what they perform. Such stress is laid upon the commissary
department, that they lose discrimination, and come to think that
dainty morsels are a panacea for all the ills of the flesh, instead of
being the chief cause of most of them. I knew a young wife whose
husband used to come down from his study worn and weary with much
brain-work, his muscles flaccid, his eyes heavy, his circulation
sluggish, and she would come up from the kitchen her face all aglow
with eagerness and love and cooking-stove heat, her hands full of
abominable little messes which she had been plotting against him,
reeking with butter and sugar, and all manner of glorified
greasiness,--I am happy to say I do not know by what name she called
her machinations, but I call them broiled dyspepsia, toasted
indigestions, fricasseed nightmare,--and the poor husband would nibble
here and nibble there, sure of grim consequences, but loath to seem a
churl by indifference, and neither give nor take satisfaction. I could
bear his suffering with great equanimity, for there was a poetic
justice in it, though he himself was not a sinner above others, nor
yet so much as many. If only those men who are continually preaching
the larder could be forced, sick or well, to swallow every combination
which the fertile feminine brain can devise, and the nimble feminine
fingers accomplish, I should listen to their exhortations with the
most lively satisfaction. But even that would not atone for the female
suffering. With what disconsolate countenance would my tender, anxious
young wife ring the bell and send away the scarcely-diminished
dish-lings, and wonder in her fond tortured heart what next she could
do to smooth the wrinkled brow and light up the dull eyes, and so
revolve perpetually in her troubled mind the mysterious question that
loomed up mystically before us all in our Mother Goose days, "Why
didn't Jack eat his supper?"
Why? O sweet and silly little wife? Because he wanted a thorough
shaking-up. Because mind and body were flabby from too long poring
over his books. If you could but have performed the impossible; if you
could but have parted with the feeble cant which you had learned from
infancy; if you would but have driven him out alike from his study and
your sitting-room, going with him, if such inducement became
necessary, into the fresh air; if you would but have walked him, or
worked him, or in some way kneaded him into firm, hard thew and sinew,
and kept him out and active till he should have got such an appetite
that cold brown bread and molasses would have seemed to him a dish fit
to set before a king, you would have done him true wifely service.
Then you might have come home and fed him with butter and sugar to
your heart's content,--and not to the perpetual discontent and
rebellion of his body.
But among all the lectures to young wives or old wives or no wives at
all, I never heard or read one that counselled a woman to take her
husband out walking, or rowing, or riding, or driving, or bowling, or
do any other sensible thing. I have dived into oceans of nonsense, but
never found the pearl.
Our New England people considers itself to have advanced much further
in civilization than the aborigines, whose chief occupation, according
to the histories, is hunting and fishing. But why is it barbarous to
devote your life to procuring food, and civilized to devote your life
to cooking it? Of the two, I think I should prefer the former. The
Savage may not present an inviting bill of fare; but the excitement of
the chase, the close contact with nature, the wide freedom of sea and
sky, the grand play of all the powers, the mighty strengthening of all
the organs, the fine culture of the senses, the health and vigor of
every nerve and tissue, the leap and sparkle of all the springs of
life, this, surely, would be no insignificant compensation: but a
continual pottering over gridirons and frying-pans is good for neither
brain nor brawn. Civilization may quick upfly and kick the beam: I
would much rather be a good Sioux Indian than most New England
housewives.