THE PARABLE OF THE RICH WOMAN AND THE FARMER'S WIFE.
The rich woman was born and brought up in New York City; the farmer's
wife in Indiana.
They were as far apart in education and social station as if they had
belonged to different races and had lived in different hemispheres.
They were as near akin in circumstances and in suffering as if they
had been twin sisters, and brought up under the same roof.
The husband of one wrote "Honorable" before his name, and reckoned his
dollars by the million. He was, moreover, a man of imposing
deportment, bland in manner and ornate in language. As riches
increased he set his heart upon them and upon the good things that
riches buy. He had four children, and he erected ("built" was too
small a word) a palatial house in a fashionable street.
Each child had a suite of three rooms. Each apartment was elaborately
decorated and furnished. The drawing-rooms were crowded with
bric-a-brac and monuments of the upholsterer's ingenuity. It was a
work of art and peril to dust them every day. He developed a taste for
entertaining as time went on and honors thickened upon him, and he
mistook, like most of his guild, ostentation for hospitality. Every
dish at the banquets for which he became famous was a show piece. He
swelled with honest pride in the perusal of a popular personal
paragraph estimating the value of his silver and cut glass at $50,000.
The superintendent, part owner, and the slave of all this magnificence
was his wife. She was her own housekeeper, and employed, besides the
coachman, whose business was in the stables and upon his box, five
servants. There were twenty-five rooms in the palatial house, giving
to each servant five to be kept in the spick-and-span array demanded
by the master's position and taste. As a matter of course something
was neglected in every department, the instinct of self-preservation
being innate and cultivated in Abigail, Phyllis and Gretchen, "Jeems"
and "Chawls." Even more as a matter of course, the nominal mistress
supplemented the deficiencies of her aids.
The house was as present and forceful a consciousness with her as his
Dulcinea with David Copperfield at the period when the "sun shone
Dora, and the birds sang Dora, and the south wind blew Dora, and the
wild flowers were all Doras to a bud." No snail ever carried her abode
upon her back more constantly than our poor rich woman the
satin-lined, hot-aired and plate-windowed stone pile, with her. The
lines that criss-crossed her forehead, and channeled her cheeks, and
ran downward from the corners of her mouth, were hieroglyphics
standing in the eyes of the initiated for the baleful legend--
"HOUSE AND HOUSEKEEPING."
When she drove abroad in her luxurious chariot, behind high-stepping
bays, jingling with plated harness, or repaired in the season to
seashore or mountain, she was striving feebly to push away the tons of
splendid responsibility from her brain.
One day she gave over the futile attempt. Something crashed down upon
and all around her, and everything except inconceivable misery of soul
was a blank.
Expensive doctors diagnosed her case as nervous prostration. When she
vanished from the eyes of her public, and a high-salaried housekeeper,
a butler, a nursery governess and an extra Abigail took her place and
did half her work in the satin-lined shell out of which she had crept,
maimed and well-nigh murdered, it was announced that she was "under
the care of a specialist at a retreat."
A retreat! Heaven save and pardon us for making such homes part and
parcel and a necessity of our century and our land!
Our Rich Man's Wife never left it until she was borne forth into the
securer refuge of the narrow house that needed none of her
care-taking. Upon the low green thatch lies heavily the shadow of a
mighty monument that, to the satirist's eye, has a family likeness to
the stone pile which killed her.
The Farmer's Wife was born and bred among the prairies, out of sight
of which she had traveled but once, and that on her wedding journey.
She came back from the brief outing to take possession of "her own
house"--prideful phrase to every young matron.
It was an eight-roomed farmstead, with no modern conveniences. That
meant, that all the water used in the kitchen and dwelling had to be
fetched from a well twenty feet away; that there was no drain or sink
or furnace; that stationary tubs had not been heard of, and the
washing was wrung by hand. The stalwart farmer "calculated to hire" in
haying, harvesting, planting, plowing, threshing and killing times.
Whatever might have been the wife's calculations, she toiled unaided,
cooking, washing, ironing, scrubbing, sewing, churning, butter-making
and "bringing up a family," single-handed, with never a creature to
lift an ounce or do a stroke for her while she could stand upon her
feet.
When she was laid upon her bed--an unusual occurrence, except when
there was a fresh baby--a neighbor looked in twice a day to lend a
hand, or Mrs. Gamp was engaged for a fortnight. It was not an unusual
occurrence for the nominally convalescent mother to get dinner for six
"men folks" with a three-weeks old baby upon her left arm.
Her husband was energetic and "forehanded," and without the slightest
approach to intentional cruelty, looked to his wife to "keep up her
end of the log." He tolerated no wastefulness, and expected to be well
fed and comfortable; and comfort with this Yankee mother's son implied
tidiness. To meet his view, as well as to satisfy her own conscience,
his partner became a model manager, a woman of "faculty."
I saw her last year in the incurable ward of a madhouse. From sunrise
until dark, except when forced to take her meals, she stood at one
window and polished one pane with her apron, a plait like a trench
between her puckered brows, her mouth pursed into an anguished knot,
her hollow eyes drearily anxious--the saddest picture I ever beheld,
most awfully sad because she was a type of a class.
Some men--and they are not all ignorant men--are beginning to be
alarmed at the press of women into other--I had almost said any
other--avenues of labor than that of housewifery. Eagerness to break
up housekeeping and try boarding for a while, in order "to get rested
out," is not confined to the incompetent and the indolent. Nor is it
altogether the result of the national discontent with "the greatest
plague of life"--servants.
American women, from high to low, keep house too hard because too
ambitiously.
It is, furthermore, ambition without knowledge; hence, misdirected. We
have the most indifferent domestic service in the world, but we
employ, as a rule, too few servants, such as they are. It is
considered altogether sensible and becoming for the mechanic's wife to
do her own housework as a bride and as a matron of years. Unless her
husband prospers rapidly she is accounted "shiftless" should she hire
a washerwoman, while to "keep a girl" is extravagance, or a
significant stride toward gentility. The wife of the English joiner or
mason or small farmer, if brisk, notable and healthy, may dispense
with the stated service of a maid of all work, but she calls in a
charwoman on certain days, and is content to live as becomes the
station of a housewife who must be her own domestic staff.
Here is the root of the difference. In a climate that keeps the pulses
in full leap and the nerves tense, we call upon pride to lash on the
quivering body and spirit to run the unrighteous race, the goal of
which is to seem richer than we are, and make "smartness" (American
smartness) cover the want of capital. Having created false standards
of respectability, we crowd insane asylums and cemeteries in trying to
live up to them.
The tradesman who begins to acknowledge the probability that he will
become a rich citizen, and whose wife has "feelings" on the subject of
living as her neighbors do, takes the conventional step toward
asserting himself and gratifying her aspirations by moving into a
bigger house than that which has satisfied him up to now, and
furnishing it well--that is, smartly, according to the English
acceptance of the word.
Silks and moquette harmonize as well as calico and ingrain once did. A
three-story-and-a-half-with-a-high-stoop house, without a piano in the
back parlor, and a long mirror between the front parlor windows, would
be a forlorn contradiction of the genius of American progress. As flat
a denial would be the endeavor to live without what an old lady once
described to me as, a "pair of parlors." The stereotyped brace is
senseless and ugly, but one of the necessaries of life to our
ambitious housewife. She would scout as vulgar the homely cheerfulness
of the middle-class Englishman's single "parlor" where the table is
spread and the family receives visitors. Having saddled himself with a
house too big for his family, and stocked the showrooms with
plenishings so fine that the family are afraid to use them unless when
there is company, the prudent citizen satisfies the economic side of
him by making menials of wife and daughters without thought of the
opposing circumstance that he has practically endorsed their intention
to make fine ladies of themselves. Neither he nor the chief slave of
her own gentility, the wife, who will maintain her reputation for
"faculty" or perish in the attempt, has a suspicion that the strain to
make meet the ends of frugality and pretension, is palpably and
criminally absurd. By keeping up a certain appearance of affluence and
fashion, they assume the obligation to employ servants enough to carry
out the design, yet in nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of every
thousand, they ignore the duty.
I admit without demur that, as American domestics go, they are a
burden, an expense and a vexation. Notwithstanding all these
drawbacks, she who will not risk them should not live in such a way
that she must make use of such instruments or overwork herself
physically and mentally.
The entire social and domestic system of American communities calls
loudly for the reform of simplicity and congruity. We begin to build
and are not able to finish. Our economics are false and mischievous,
our aims are petty and low. The web of our daily living is not round
and even-threaded. The homes which are constructed upon the
foundations of deranged, dying and dead women, are a mockery of the
holy name. Our houses should be planned and kept for those who are to
live in them, not for those who tarry within the doors for a night or
an hour. When housekeeping becomes an intolerable care there is sin
somewhere and danger everywhere.