delicacy, her frailty, which protects and cares for her, is, I think,
the crown of manhood; and without it a man is only a rough animal. But
our fair aristocrats and their knightly defenders need to be cautioned
lest they lose their position, as many privileged orders have before
done, by an arrogant and selfish use of power.
"I have said that the vices of aristocracy are more developed among
women in America than among men, and that, while there are no men in the
Northern States who are not ashamed of living a merely idle life of
pleasure, there are many women who make a boast of helplessness and
ignorance in woman's family duties which any man would be ashamed to
make with regard to man's duties, as if such helplessness and ignorance
were a grace and a charm.
"There are women who contentedly live on, year after year, a life of
idleness, while the husband and father is straining every nerve, growing
prematurely old and gray, abridged of almost every form of recreation or
pleasure,--all that he may keep them in a state of careless ease and
festivity. It may be very fine, very generous, very knightly, in the man
who thus toils at the oar that his princesses may enjoy their painted
voyages; but what is it for the women?
"A woman is a moral being--an immortal soul--before she is a woman; and
as such she is charged by her Maker with some share of the great burden
of _work_ which lies on the world.
"Self-denial, the bearing of the cross, are stated by Christ as
indispensable conditions to the entrance into his kingdom, and no
exception is made for man or woman. Some task, some burden, some cross,
each one must carry; and there must be something done in every true and
worthy life, not as amusement, but as duty,--not as play, but as earnest
_work_,--and no human being can attain to the Christian standard without
this.
"When Jesus Christ took a towel and girded himself, poured water into a
basin, and washed his disciples' feet, he performed a significant and
sacramental act, which no man or woman should ever forget. If wealth and
rank and power absolve from the services of life, then certainly were
Jesus Christ absolved, as he says,--'Ye call me Master, and Lord. If I,
then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash
one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do
as I have done to you.'
"Let a man who seeks to make a terrestrial paradise for the woman of his
heart,--to absolve her from all care, from all labor,--to teach her to
accept and to receive the labor of others without any attempt to offer
labor in return,--consider whether he is not thus going directly against
the fundamental idea of Christianity,--taking the direct way to make his
idol selfish and exacting, to rob her of the highest and noblest beauty
of womanhood.
"In that chapter of the Bible where the relation between man and woman
is stated, it is thus said, with quaint simplicity: 'It is not good that
the man should be alone; I will make him a _help meet_ for him.' Woman
the _helper_ of man, not his toy,--not a picture, not a statue, not a
work of art, but a HELPER, a doer,--such is the view of the Bible and
the Christian religion.
"It is not necessary that women should work physically or morally to an
extent which impairs beauty. In France, where woman is harnessed with an
ass to the plough which her husband drives,--where she digs, and wields
the pickaxe,--she becomes prematurely hideous; but in America, where
woman reigns as queen in every household, she may surely be a good and
thoughtful housekeeper, she may have physical strength exercised in
lighter domestic toils, not only without injuring her beauty, but with
manifest advantage to it. Almost every growing young girl would be the
better in health, and therefore handsomer, for two hours of active
housework daily; and the habit of usefulness thereby gained would be an
equal advantage to her moral development. The labors of modern,
well-arranged houses are not in any sense severe; they are as gentle as
any kind of exercise that can be devised, and they bring into play
muscles that ought to be exercised to be healthily developed.
"The great danger to the beauty of American women does not lie, as the
writer of the Post contends, in an overworking of the physical system
which shall stunt and deform; on the contrary, American women of the
comfortable classes are in danger of a loss of physical beauty from the
entire deterioration of the muscular system for want of exercise. Take
the life of any American girl in one of our large towns, and see what it
is. We have an educational system of public schools which for
intellectual culture is a just matter of pride to any country. From the
time that the girl is seven years old, her first thought, when she
rises in the morning, is to eat her breakfast and be off to her school.
There really is no more time than enough to allow her to make that
complete toilet which every well-bred female ought to make, and to take
her morning meal before her school begins. She returns at noon with just
time to eat her dinner, and the afternoon session begins. She comes home
at night with books, slate, and lessons enough to occupy her evening.
What time is there for teaching her any household work, for teaching her
to cut or fit or sew, or to inspire her with any taste for domestic
duties? Her arms have no exercise; her chest and lungs, and all the
complex system of muscles which are to be perfected by quick and active
movement, are compressed while she bends over book and slate and
drawing-board; while the ever-active brain is kept all the while going
at the top of its speed. She grows up spare, thin, and delicate; and
while the Irish girl, who sweeps the parlors, rubs the silver, and irons
the muslins, is developing a finely rounded arm and bust, the American
girl has a pair of bones at her sides, and a bust composed of cotton
padding, the work of a skilful dress-maker. Nature, who is no respecter
of persons, gives to Colleen Bawn, who uses her arms and chest, a beauty
which perishes in the gentle, languid Edith, who does nothing but study
and read."
"But is it not a fact," said Rudolph, "as stated by our friend of the
Post, that American matrons are perishing, and their beauty and grace
all withered, from overwork?"
"It is," said my wife; "but why? It is because they are brought up
without vigor or muscular strength, without the least practical
experience of household labor, or those means of saving it which come by
daily practice; and then, after marriage, when physically weakened by
maternity, embarrassed by the care of young children, they are often
suddenly deserted by every efficient servant, and the whole machinery of
a complicated household left in their weak, inexperienced hands. In the
country, you see a household perhaps made void some fine morning by
Biddy's sudden departure, and nobody to make the bread, or cook the
steak, or sweep the parlors, or do one of the complicated offices of a
family, and no bakery, cook-shop, or laundry to turn to for alleviation.
A lovely, refined home becomes in a few hours a howling desolation; and
then ensues a long season of breakage, waste, distraction, as one wild
Irish immigrant after another introduces the style of Irish cottage life
into an elegant dwelling.
"Now suppose I grant to the Evening Post that woman ought to rest, to be
kept in the garden of life, and all that, how is this to be done in a
country where a state of things like this is the commonest of
occurrences? And is it any kindness or reverence to woman, to educate
her for such an inevitable destiny by a life of complete physical
delicacy and incapacity? Many a woman who has been brought into these
cruel circumstances would willingly exchange all her knowledge of German
and Italian, and all her graceful accomplishments, for a good physical
development, and some respectable _savoir faire_ in ordinary life.
"Moreover, American matrons are overworked because some unaccountable
glamour leads them to continue to bring up their girls in the same
inefficient physical habits which resulted in so much misery to
themselves. Housework as they are obliged to do it, untrained, untaught,
exhausted, and in company with rude, dirty, unkempt foreigners, seems to
them a degradation which they will spare to their daughters. The
daughter goes on with her schools and accomplishments, and leads in the
family the life of an elegant little visitor during all those years when
a young girl might be gradually developing and strengthening her muscles
in healthy household work. It never occurs to her that she can or ought
to fill any of the domestic gaps into which her mother always steps; and
she comforts herself with the thought, 'I don't know how; I can't; I
haven't the strength. I _can't_ sweep; it blisters my hands. If I should
stand at the ironing-table an hour, I should be ill for a week. As to
cooking, I don't know anything about it.' And so, when the cook, or the
chambermaid, or nurse, or all together, vacate the premises, it is the
mamma who is successively cook, and chambermaid, and nurse; and this is
the reason why matrons fade and are overworked.
"Now, Mr. Rudolph, do you think a woman any less beautiful or
interesting because she is a fully developed physical being,--because
her muscles have been rounded and matured into strength, so that she can
meet the inevitable emergencies of life without feeling them to be
distressing hardships? If there be a competent, well-trained servant to
sweep and dust the parlor, and keep all the machinery of the house in
motion, she may very properly select her work out of the family, in some
form of benevolent helpfulness; but when the inevitable evil hour comes,
which is likely to come first or last in every American household, is a
woman any less an elegant woman because her love of neatness, order, and
beauty leads her to make vigorous personal exertions to keep her own
home undefiled? For my part, I think a disorderly, ill-kept home, a
sordid, uninviting table, has driven more husbands from domestic life
than the unattractiveness of any overworked woman. So long as a woman
makes her home harmonious and orderly, so long as the hour of assembling
around the family table is something to be looked forward to as a
comfort and a refreshment, a man cannot see that the good house fairy,
who by some magic keeps everything so delightfully, has either a wrinkle
or a gray hair.
"Besides," said I, "I must tell you, Rudolph, what you fellows of
twenty-one are slow to believe; and that is, that the kind of ideal
paradise you propose in marriage, is, in the very nature of things, an
impossibility,--that the familiarities of every-day life between two
people who keep house together must and will destroy it. Suppose you are
married to Cytherea herself, and the next week attacked with a rheumatic
fever. If the tie between you is that of true and honest love, Cytherea
will put on a gingham wrapper, and with her own sculptured hands wring
out the flannels which shall relieve your pains; and she will be no true
woman if she do not prefer to do this to employing any nurse that could
be hired. True love ennobles and dignifies the material labors of life;
and homely services rendered for love's sake have in them a poetry that
is immortal.
"No true-hearted woman can find herself, in real, actual life, unskilled
and unfit to minister to the wants and sorrows of those dearest to her,
without a secret sense of degradation. The feeling of uselessness is an
extremely unpleasant one. Tom Hood, in a very humorous paper, describes
a most accomplished schoolmistress, a teacher of all the arts and crafts
which are supposed to make up fine gentlewomen, who is stranded in a
rude German inn, with her father writhing in the anguish of a severe
attack of gastric inflammation. The helpless lady gazes on her suffering
parent, longing to help him, and thinking over all her various little
store of accomplishments, not one of which bear the remotest relation to
the case. She could knit him a bead-purse, or make him a guard-chain, or
work him a footstool, or festoon him with cut tissue-paper, or sketch
his likeness, or crust him over with alum crystals, or stick him over
with little rosettes of red and white wafers; but none of these being
applicable to his present case, she sits gazing in resigned imbecility,
till finally she desperately resolves to improvise him some gruel, and,
after a laborious turn in the kitchen,--after burning her dress and
blacking her fingers,--succeeds only in bringing him a bowl of _paste_!
"Not unlike this might be the feeling of many an elegant and
accomplished woman, whose education has taught and practised her in
everything that woman ought to know, except those identical ones which
fit her for the care of a home, for the comfort of a sick-room; and so I
say again, that, whatever a woman may be in the way of beauty and
elegance, she must have the strength and skill of a _practical worker_,
or she is nothing. She is not simply to _be_ the beautiful,--she is to
_make_ the beautiful, and preserve it; and she who makes and she who
keeps the beautiful must be able _to work_, and know how to work.
Whatever offices of life are performed by women of culture and
refinement are thenceforth elevated; they cease to be mere servile
toils, and become expressions of the ideas of superior beings. If a true
lady makes even a plate of toast, in arranging a _petit souper_ for her
invalid friend, she does it as a lady should. She does not cut
blundering and uneven slices; she does not burn the edges; she does not
deluge it with bad butter, and serve it cold; but she arranges and
serves all with an artistic care, with a nicety and delicacy, which make
it worth one's while to have a lady friend in sickness.
"And I am glad to hear that Monsieur Blot is teaching classes of New
York ladies that cooking is not a vulgar kitchen toil, to be left to
blundering servants, but an elegant feminine accomplishment, better
worth a woman's learning than crochet or embroidery; and that a
well-kept culinary apartment may be so inviting and orderly that no lady
need feel her ladyhood compromised by participating in its pleasant
toils. I am glad to know that his cooking academy is thronged with more
scholars than he can accommodate, and from ladies in the best classes
of society.
"Moreover, I am glad to see that in New Bedford, recently, a public
course of instruction in the art of bread-making has been commenced by a
lady, and that classes of the most respectable young and married ladies
in the place are attending them.
"These are steps in the right direction, and show that our fair
countrywomen, with the grand good-sense which is their leading
characteristic, are resolved to supply whatever in our national life is
wanting.
"I do not fear that women of such sense and energy will listen to the
sophistries which would persuade them that elegant imbecility and
inefficiency are charms of cultivated womanhood or ingredients in the
poetry of life. She alone can keep the poetry and beauty of married life
who has this poetry in her soul; who with energy and discretion can
throw back and out of sight the sordid and disagreeable details which
beset all human living, and can keep in the foreground that which is
agreeable; who has enough knowledge of practical household matters to
make unskilled and rude hands minister to her cultivated and refined
tastes, and constitute her skilled brain the guide of unskilled hands.
From such a home, with such a mistress, no sirens will seduce a man,
even though the hair grow gray, and the merely physical charms of early
days gradually pass away. The enchantment that was about her person
alone in the days of courtship seems in the course of years to have
interfused and penetrated the _home_ which she has created, and which in
every detail is only an expression of her personality. Her thoughts, her
plans, her provident care, are everywhere; and the _home_ attracts and
holds by a thousand ties the heart which before marriage was held by the
woman alone."
V.
THE TRANSITION.
"The fact is, my dear," said my wife, "that you have thrown a stone into
a congregation of blackbirds, in writing as you have of our family wars
and wants. The response comes from all parts of the country, and the
task of looking over and answering your letters becomes increasingly
formidable. Everybody has something to say,--something to propose."
"Give me a _résumé_," said I.
"Well," said my wife, "here are three pages from an elderly gentleman,
to the effect that women are not what they used to be,--that daughters
are a great care and no help,--that girls have no health and no energy
in practical life,--that the expense of maintaining a household is so
great that young men are afraid to marry,--and that it costs more now
per annum to dress one young woman than it used to cost to carry a whole
family of sons through college. In short, the poor old gentleman is in a
desperate state of mind, and is firmly of opinion that society is going
to ruin by an express train."
"Poor old fellow!" said I, "the only comfort I can offer him is what I
take myself,--that this sad world will last out our time at least. Now
for the next."
"The next is more concise and spicy," said my wife. "I will read it.
"'_Christopher Crowfield, Esq._,
"'SIR,--If you want to know how American women are to be brought
back to family work, I can tell you a short method. Pay them as
good wages for it as they can make in any other way. I get from
seven to nine dollars a week in the shop where I work; if I could
make the same in any good family, I should have no objection to
doing it.
"'Your obedient servant,
"'LETITIA.'"
"My correspondent Letitia does not tell me," said I, "how much of this
seven or nine dollars she pays out for board and washing, fire and
lights. If she worked in a good family at two or three dollars a week,
it is easily demonstrable, that, at the present cost of these items, she
would make as much clear profit as she now does at nine dollars for her
shop-work.
"And there are two other things, moreover, which she does not consider:
First, that, besides board, washing, fuel, and lights, which she would
have in a family, she would have also less unintermitted toil. Shop-work
exacts its ten hours per diem; and it makes no allowance for sickness or
accident.
"A good domestic in a good family finds many hours when she can feel
free to attend to her own affairs. Her work consists of certain definite
matters, which being done her time is her own; and if she have skill and
address in the management of her duties, she may secure many leisure
hours. As houses are now built, and with the many labor-saving
conveniences that are being introduced, the physical labor of housework
is no more than a healthy woman really needs to keep her in health. In
case, however, of those slight illnesses to which all are more or less
liable, and which, if neglected, often lead to graver ones, the
advantage is still on the side of domestic service. In the shop and
factory, every hour of unemployed time is deducted; an illness of a day
or two is an appreciable loss of just so much money, while the expense
of board is still going on. But in the family a good servant is always
considered. When ill, she is carefully nursed as one of the family, has
the family physician, and is subject to no deduction from her wages for
loss of time. I have known more than one instance in which a valued
domestic has been sent, at her employer's expense, to the seaside or
some other pleasant locality, for change of air, when her health has
been run down.
"In the second place, family work is more remunerative, even at a lower
rate of wages, than shop or factory work, because it is better for the
health. All sorts of sedentary employment, pursued by numbers of persons
together in one apartment, are more or less debilitating and unhealthy,
through foul air and confinement.
"A woman's health is her capital. In certain ways of work she obtains
more income, but she spends on her capital to do it. In another way she
may get less income, and yet increase her capital. A woman cannot work
at dress-making, tailoring, or any other sedentary employment, ten hours
a day, year in and out, without enfeebling her constitution, impairing
her eyesight, and bringing on a complication of complaints, but she can
sweep, wash, cook, and do the varied duties of a well-ordered house with
modern arrangements, and grow healthier every year. The times, in New
England, when all women did housework a part of every day, were the
times when all women were healthy. At present, the heritage of vigorous
muscles, firm nerves, strong backs, and cheerful physical life has gone
from American women, and is taken up by Irish women. A thrifty young
man, I have lately heard of, married a rosy young Irish girl, quite to
the horror of his mother and sisters, but defended himself by the
following very conclusive logic: 'If I marry an American girl, I must
have an Irish girl to take care of her; and I cannot afford to support
both.'
"Besides all this, there is a third consideration, which I humbly
commend to my friend Letitia. The turn of her note speaks her a girl of
good common sense, with a faculty of hitting the nail square on the
head; and such a girl must see that nothing is more likely to fall out
than that she will some day be married. Evidently, our fair friend is
born to rule; and at this hour, doubtless, her foreordained throne and
humble servant are somewhere awaiting her.
"Now domestic service is all the while fitting a girl physically,
mentally, and morally for her ultimate vocation and sphere,--to be a
happy wife and to make a happy home. But factory work, shop work, and
all employments of that sort, are in their nature essentially
_undomestic_,--entailing the constant necessity of a boarding-house
life, and of habits as different as possible from the quiet routine of
home. The girl who is ten hours on the strain of continued,
unintermitted toil feels no inclination, when evening comes, to sit down
and darn her stockings, or make over her dresses, or study any of those
multifarious economies which turn a wardrobe to the best account. Her
nervous system is flagging; she craves company and excitement; and her
dull, narrow room is deserted for some place of amusement or gay street
promenade. And who can blame her? Let any sensible woman, who has had
experience of shop and factory life, recall to her mind the ways and
manners in which young girls grow up who leave a father's roof for a
crowded boarding-house, without any supervision of matron or mother, and
ask whether this is the best school for training young American wives
and mothers.
"Doubtless there are discreet and thoughtful women who, amid all these
difficulties, do keep up thrifty, womanly habits, but they do it by an
effort greater than the majority of girls are willing to make, and
greater than they ought to make. To sew or read or study after ten hours
of factory or shop work is a further drain on the nervous powers, which
no woman can long endure without exhaustion.