"You know, Marianne, I proposed to you to be our family bread-maker for
one month of the year before you married."
"Yes, mamma, I remember; but I was like other girls; I thought there was
no need of it. I never liked to do such things; perhaps I had better
have done it."
"You certainly had," said I; "for the first business of a housekeeper in
America is that of a teacher. She can have a good table only by having
practical knowledge, and tact in imparting it. If she understands her
business practically and experimentally, her eye detects at once the
weak spot; it requires only a little tact, some patience, some clearness
in giving directions, and all comes right. I venture to say that your
mother would have exactly such bread as always appears on our table, and
have it by the hands of your cook, because she could detect and explain
to her exactly her error."
"Do you know," said my wife, "what yeast she uses?"
"I believe," said Marianne, "it's a kind she makes herself. I think I
heard her say so. I know she makes a great fuss about it, and rather
values herself upon it. She is evidently accustomed to being praised for
her bread, and feels mortified and angry, and I don't know how to manage
her."
"Well," said I, "if you carry your watch to a watch-maker, and undertake
to show him how to regulate the machinery, he laughs and goes on his own
way; but if a brother-machinist makes suggestions, he listens
respectfully. So, when a woman who knows nothing of woman's work
undertakes to instruct one who knows more than she does, she makes no
impression; but a woman who has been trained experimentally, and shows
she understands the matter thoroughly, is listened to with respect."
"I think," said my wife, "that your Bridget is worth teaching. She is
honest, well-principled, and tidy. She has good recommendations from
excellent families, whose ideas of good bread it appears differ from
ours; and with a little good-nature, tact, and patience, she will come
into your ways."
"But the coffee, mamma,--you would not imagine it to be from the same
bag with your own, so dark and so bitter; what do you suppose she has
done to it?"
"Simply this," said my wife. "She has let the berries stay a few moments
too long over the fire,--they are burnt, instead of being roasted; and
there are people who think it essential to good coffee that it should
look black, and have a strong, bitter flavor. A very little change in
the preparing will alter this."
"Now," said I, "Marianne, if you want my advice, I'll give it to you
gratis:--Make your own bread for one month. Simple as the process seems,
I think it will take as long as that to give you a thorough knowledge of
all the possibilities in the case; but after that you will never need to
make any more,--you will be able to command good bread by the aid of all
sorts of servants; you will, in other words, be a thoroughly prepared
teacher."
"I did not think," said Marianne, "that so simple a thing required so
much attention."
"It is simple," said my wife, "and yet requires a delicate care and
watchfulness. There are fifty ways to spoil good bread; there are a
hundred little things to be considered and allowed for that require
accurate observation and experience. The same process that will raise
good bread in cold weather will make sour bread in the heat of summer;
different qualities of flour require variations in treatment, as also
different sorts and conditions of yeast; and when all is done, the
baking presents another series of possibilities which require exact
attention."
"So it appears," said Marianne, gayly, "that I must begin to study my
profession at the eleventh hour."
"Better late than never," said I. "But there is this advantage on your
side: a well-trained mind, accustomed to reflect, analyze, and
generalize, has an advantage over uncultured minds even of double
experience. Poor as your cook is, she now knows more of her business
than you do. After a very brief period of attention and experiment, you
will not only know more than she does, but you will convince her that
you do, which is quite as much to the purpose."
"In the same manner," said my wife, "you will have to give lessons to
your other girl on the washing of silver and the making of beds. Good
servants do not often come to us; they must be made by patience and
training; and if a girl has a good disposition and a reasonable degree
of handiness, and the housekeeper understands her profession, she may
make a good servant out of an indifferent one. Some of my best girls
have been those who came to me directly from the ship, with no
preparation but docility and some natural quickness. The hardest cases
to be managed are not of those who have been taught nothing, but of
those who have been taught wrongly,--who come to you self-opinionated,
with ways that are distasteful to you, and contrary to the genius of
your housekeeping. Such require that their mistress shall understand a
least so much of the actual conduct of affairs as to prove to the
servant that there are better ways than those in which she has hitherto
been trained."
"Don't you think, mamma," said Marianne, "that there has been a sort of
reaction against woman's work in our day? So much has been said of the
higher sphere of woman, and so much has been done to find some better
work for her, that insensibly, I think, almost everybody begins to feel
that it is rather degrading for a woman in good society to be much tied
down to family-affairs."
"Especially," said my wife, "since in these Woman's-Rights Conventions
there is so much indignation expressed at those who would confine her
ideas to the kitchen and nursery."
"There is reason in all things," said I. "Woman's-Rights Conventions are
a protest against many former absurd, unreasonable ideas,--the mere
physical and culinary idea of womanhood as connected only with puddings
and shirt-buttons, the unjust and unequal burdens which the laws of
harsher ages had cast upon the sex. Many of the women connected with
these movements are as superior in everything properly womanly as they
are in exceptional talent and culture. There is no manner of doubt that
the sphere of woman is properly to be enlarged, and that republican
governments in particular are to be saved from corruption and failure
only by allowing to woman this enlarged sphere. Every woman has rights
as a human being first, which belong to no sex, and ought to be as
freely conceded to her as if she were a man,--and first and foremost,
the great right of doing anything which God and Nature evidently have
fitted her to excel in. If she be made a natural orator, like Miss
Dickenson, or an astronomer, like Mrs. Somerville, or a singer, like
Grisi, let not the technical rules of womanhood be thrown in the way of
her free use of her powers. Nor can there be any reason shown why a
woman's vote in the State should not be received with as much respect as
in the family. A State is but an association of families, and laws
relate to the rights and immunities which touch woman's most private and
immediate wants and dearest hopes; and there is no reason why sister,
wife, and mother should be more powerless in the State than in the home.
Nor does it make a woman unwomanly to express an opinion by dropping a
slip of paper into a box, more than to express that same opinion by
conversation. In fact, there is no doubt, that, in all matters relating
to the interests of education, temperance, and religion, the State would
be a material gainer by receiving the votes of women.
"But, having said all this, I must admit, _per contra_, not only a great
deal of crude, disagreeable talk in these conventions, but a too great
tendency of the age to make the education of women anti-domestic. It
seems as if the world never could advance, except like ships under a
head-wind, tacking and going too far, now in this direction, and now in
the opposite. Our common-school system now rejects sewing from the
education of girls, which very properly used to occupy many hours daily
in school a generation ago. The daughters of laborers and artisans are
put through algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and the higher mathematics,
to the entire neglect of that learning which belongs distinctively to
woman. A girl cannot keep pace with her class, if she gives any time to
domestic matters; and accordingly she is excused from them all during
the whole term of her education. The boy of a family, at an early age,
is put to a trade, or the labors of a farm; the father becomes impatient
of his support, and requires of him to care for himself. Hence an
interrupted education,--learning coming by snatches in the winter months
or in the intervals of work. As the result, the females in our
country-towns are commonly, in mental culture, vastly in advance of the
males of the same household; but with this comes a physical delicacy,
the result of an exclusive use of the brain and a neglect of the
muscular system, with great inefficiency in practical domestic duties.
The race of strong, hardy, cheerful girls, that used to grow up in
country-places, and made the bright, neat, New-England kitchens of old
times,--the girls that could wash, iron, brew, bake, tackle a horse and
drive him, no less than braid straw, embroider, draw, paint, and read
innumerable books,--this race of women, pride of olden time, is daily
lessening; and in their stead come the fragile, easily fatigued, languid
girls of a modern age, drilled in book-learning, ignorant of common
things. The great danger of all this, and of the evils that come from
it, is that society by-and-by will turn as blindly against female
intellectual culture as it now advocates it, and, having worked
disproportionately one way, will work disproportionately in the opposite
direction."
"The fact is," said my wife, "that domestic service is the great problem
of life here in America; the happiness of families, their thrift,
well-being, and comfort, are more affected by this than by any one thing
else. Our girls, as they have been brought up, cannot perform the labor
of their own families, as in those simpler, old-fashioned days you tell
of; and what is worse, they have no practical skill with which to
instruct servants, and servants come to us, as a class, raw and
untrained; so what is to be done? In the present state of prices, the
board of a domestic costs double her wages, and the waste she makes is a
more serious matter still. Suppose you give us an article upon this
subject in your 'House and Home Papers.' You could not have a better
one."