comes to it as unskilled in all household lore, with muscles as
incapable of domestic labor, and nerves as sensitive, as if she had been
leading the most luxurious, do-nothing, fashionable life. How different
would be her preparation, had the forming years of her life been spent
in the labors of a family! I know at this moment a lady at the head of a
rich country establishment, filling her station in society with dignity
and honor, who gained her domestic education in a kitchen in our
vicinity. She was the daughter of a small farmer, and when the time came
for her to be earning her living, her parents wisely thought it far
better that she should gain it in a way which would at the same time
establish her health and fit her for her own future home. In a cheerful,
light, airy kitchen, which was kept so tidy always as to be an
attractive sitting-room, she and another young country-girl were trained
up in the best of domestic economies by a mistress who looked well to
the ways of her household, till at length they married from the house
with honor, and went to practise in homes of their own the lessons they
had learned in the home of another. Formerly, in New England, such
instances were not uncommon;--would that they might become so again!"
"The fact is," said my wife, "the places which the daughters of American
farmers used to occupy in our families are now taken by young girls from
the families of small farmers in Ireland. They are respectable, tidy,
healthy, and capable of being taught. A good mistress, who is reasonable
and liberal in her treatment, is able to make them fixtures. They get
good wages, and have few expenses. They dress handsomely, have abundant
leisure to take care of their clothes and turn their wardrobes to the
best account, and they very soon acquire skill in doing it equal to that
displayed by any women of any country. They remit money continually to
relatives in Ireland, and from time to time pay the passage of one and
another to this country,--and whole families have thus been established
in American life by the efforts of one young girl. Now, for my part, I
do not grudge my Irish fellow-citizens these advantages obtained by
honest labor and good conduct; they deserve all the good fortune thus
accruing to them. But when I see sickly, nervous American women jostling
and struggling in the few crowded avenues which are open to mere brain,
I cannot help thinking how much better their lot would have been, with
good strong bodies, steady nerves, healthy digestion, and the habit of
looking any kind of work in the face, which used to be characteristic of
American women generally, and of Yankee women in particular."
"The matter becomes still graver," said I, "by the laws of descent. The
woman who enfeebles her muscular system by sedentary occupation, and
over-stimulates her brain and nervous system, when she becomes a mother,
perpetuates these evils to her offspring. Her children will be born
feeble and delicate, incapable of sustaining any severe strain of body
or mind. The universal cry now about the ill health of young American
girls is the fruit of some three generations of neglect of physical
exercise and undue stimulus of brain and nerves. Young girls now are
universally _born_ delicate. The most careful hygienic treatment during
childhood, the strictest attention to diet, dress, and exercise,
succeeds merely so far as to produce a girl who is healthy so long only
as she does nothing. With the least strain, her delicate organism gives
out, now here, now there. She cannot study without her eyes fail or she
has headache,--she cannot get up her own muslins, or sweep a room, or
pack a trunk, without bringing on a back-ache,--she goes to a concert or
a lecture, and must lie by all the next day from the exertion. If she
skates, she is sure to strain some muscle; or if she falls and strikes
her knee or hits her ankle, a blow that a healthy girl would forget in
five minutes terminates in some mysterious lameness which confines our
poor sibyl for months.
"The young American girl of our times is a creature who has not a
particle of vitality to spare,--no reserved stock of force to draw upon
in cases of family exigency. She is exquisitely strung, she is
cultivated, she is refined; but she is too nervous, too wiry, too
sensitive,--she burns away too fast; only the easiest of circumstances,
the most watchful of care and nursing, can keep her within the limits of
comfortable health; and yet this is the creature who must undertake
family life in a country where it is next to an absolute impossibility
to have _permanent_ domestics. Frequent change, occasional entire
breakdowns, must be the lot of the majority of
housekeepers,--particularly those who do not live in cities."
"In fact," said my wife, "we in America have so far got out of the way
of a womanhood that has any vigor of outline or opulence of physical
proportions, that, when we see a woman made as a woman ought to be, she
strikes us as a monster. Our willowy girls are afraid of nothing so much
as growing stout; and if a young lady begins to round into proportions
like the women in Titian's and Giorgione's pictures, she is distressed
above measure, and begins to make secret inquiries into reducing diet,
and to cling desperately to the strongest corset-lacing as her only
hope. It would require one to be better educated than most of our girls
are, to be willing to look like the Sistine Madonna or the Venus of
Milo.
"Once in a while our Italian opera-singers bring to our shores those
glorious physiques which formed the inspiration of Italian painters; and
then American editors make coarse jokes about Barnum's fat woman, and
avalanches, and pretend to be struck with terror at such dimensions.
"We should be better instructed, and consider that Italy does us a
favor, in sending us specimens, not only of higher styles of musical
art, but of a warmer, richer, and more abundant womanly life. The
magnificent voice is only in keeping with the magnificent proportions of
the singer. A voice which has no grate, no strain, which flows without
effort,--which does not labor eagerly up to a high note, but alights on
it like a bird from above, there carelessly warbling and trilling,--a
voice which then without effort sinks into broad, rich, sombre depths of
soft, heavy chest-tone,--can come only with a physical nature at once
strong, wide, and fine,--from a nature such as the sun of Italy ripens,
as he does her golden grapes, filling it with the new wine of song."
"Well," said I, "so much for our strictures on Miss Letitia's letter.
What comes next?"
"Here is a correspondent who answers the question, 'What shall we do
with her?'--_apropos_ to the case of the distressed young woman which we
considered in our first chapter."
"And what does he recommend?"
"He tells us that _he_ should advise us to make our distressed woman
Marianne's housekeeper, and to send South for three or four contrabands
for her to train, and, with great apparent complacency, seems to think
that course will solve all similar cases of difficulty."
"That's quite a man's view of the subject," said Jennie. "They think
any woman who isn't particularly fitted to do anything else can keep
house."
"As if housekeeping were not the very highest craft and mystery of
social life," said I. "I admit that our sex speak too unadvisedly on
such topics, and, being well instructed by my household priestesses,
will humbly suggest the following ideas to my correspondent.
"1st. A woman is not of course fit to be a housekeeper because she is a
woman of good education and refinement.
"2d. If she were, a family with young children in it is not the proper
place to establish a school for untaught contrabands, however desirable
their training may be.
"A woman of good education and good common sense may _learn_ to be a
good housekeeper, as she learns any trade, by going into a good family
and practising first one and then another branch of the business, till
finally she shall acquire the comprehensive knowledge to direct all.
"The next letter I will read.
"'DEAR MR. CROWFIELD,--Your papers relating to the domestic problem
have touched upon a difficulty which threatens to become a matter
of life and death with me.
"'I am a young man, with good health, good courage, and good
prospects. I have, for a young man, a fair income, and a prospect
of its increase. But my business requires me to reside in a country
town near a great manufacturing city. The demand for labor there
has made such a drain on the female population of the vicinity,
that it seems, for a great part of the time, impossible to keep any
servants at all; and what we can hire are of the poorest quality,
and want exorbitant wages. My wife was a well-trained housekeeper,
and knows perfectly all that pertains to the care of a family; but
she has three little children, and a delicate babe only a few weeks
old; and _can_ any one woman do all that is needed for such a
household? Something must be trusted to servants; and what is thus
trusted brings such confusion and waste and dirt into our house,
that the poor woman is constantly distraught between the disgust of
having them and the utter impossibility of doing without them.
"'Now it has been suggested that we remedy the trouble by paying
higher wages; but I find that for the very highest wages I secure
only the most miserable service; and yet, poor as it is, we are
obliged to put up with it, because there is an amount of work to be
done in our family that is absolutely beyond my wife's strength.
"'I see her health wearing away under these trials, her life made
a burden; I feel no power to help her; and I ask you, Mr.
Crowfield, What are we to do? What is to become of family life in
this country?
"'Yours truly,
"'A YOUNG FAMILY MAN.'
"My friend's letter," said I, "touches upon the very hinge of the
difficulty of domestic life with the present generation.
"The real, vital difficulty, after all, in our American life is, that
our country is so wide, so various, so abounding in the richest fields
of enterprise, that in every direction the cry is of the plenteousness
of the harvest and the fewness of the laborers. In short, there really
are not laborers enough to do the work of the country.
"Since the war has thrown the whole South open to the competition of
free labor, the demand for workers is doubled and trebled. Manufactories
of all sorts are enlarging their borders, increasing their machinery,
and calling for more hands. Every article of living is demanded with an
imperativeness and over an extent of territory which set at once
additional thousands to the task of production. Instead of being easier
to find hands to execute in all branches of useful labor, it is likely
to grow every year more difficult, as new departments of manufacture
and trade divide the workers. The price of labor, even now higher in
this country than in any other, will rise still higher, and thus
complicate still more the problem of domestic life. Even if a reasonable
quota of intelligent women choose domestic service, the demand will be
increasingly beyond the supply."
"And what have you to say to this," said my wife, "seeing you cannot
stop the prosperity of the country?"
"Simply this,--that communities will be driven to organize, as they now
do in Europe, to lessen the labors of individual families by having some
of the present domestic tasks done out of the house.
"In France, for example, no housekeeper counts either washing, ironing,
or bread-making as part of her domestic cares. All the family washing
goes out to a laundry; and being attended to by those who make that
department of labor a specialty, it comes home in refreshingly beautiful
order.
"We in America, though we pride ourselves on our Yankee thrift, are far
behind the French in domestic economy. If all the families of a
neighborhood should put together the sums they separately spend in
buying or fitting up and keeping in repair tubs, boilers, and other
accommodations for washing, all that is consumed or wasted in soap,
starch, bluing, fuel, together with the wages and board of an extra
servant, the aggregate would suffice to fit up a neighborhood laundry,
where one or two capable women could do easily and well what ten or
fifteen women now do painfully and ill, and to the confusion and
derangement of all other family processes.
"The model laundries for the poor in London had facilities which would
enable a woman to do both the washing and ironing of a small family in
from two to three hours, and were so arranged that a very few women
could with ease do the work of the neighborhood.
"But in the absence of an establishment of this sort, the housekeepers
of a country village might help themselves very much by owning a mangle
in common, to which all the heavier parts of the ironing could be sent.
American ingenuity has greatly improved the machinery of the mangle. It
is no longer the heavy, cumbersome structure that it used to be in the
Old World, but a compact, neat piece of apparatus, made in three or four
different sizes to suit different-sized apartments.
"Mr. H. F. Bond of Waltham, Massachusetts, now manufactures these
articles, and sends them to all parts of the country. The smallest of
them does not take up much more room than a sewing-machine, can be
turned by a boy of ten or twelve, and thus in the course of an hour or
two the heaviest and most fatiguing part of a family ironing may be
accomplished.
"I should certainly advise the 'Young Family Man' with a delicate wife
and uncertain domestic help to fortify his kitchen with one of these
fixtures.
"But after all, I still say that the quarter to which I look for the
solution of the American problem of domestic life is a wise use of the
principle of association.
"The future model village of New England, as I see it, shall have for
the use of its inhabitants not merely a town lyceum-hall and a town
library, but a town laundry, fitted up with conveniences such as no
private house can afford, and paying a price to the operators which will
enable them to command an excellence of work such as private families
seldom realize. It will also have a town bakery, where the best of
family bread, white, brown, and of all grains, shall be compounded; and
lastly a town cook-shop, where soup and meats may be bought, ready for
the table. Those of us who have kept house abroad remember the ease with
which our foreign establishments were carried on. A suite of elegant
apartments, a courier, and one female servant, were the foundation of
domestic life. Our courier boarded us at a moderate expense, and the
servant took care of our rooms. Punctually to the dinner-hour every day,
our dinner came in on the head of a porter from a neighboring
cook-shop. A large chest lined with tin, and kept warm by a tiny
charcoal stove in the centre, being deposited in an ante-room, from it
came forth, first, soup, then fish, then roast of various names, and
lastly pastry and confections,--far more courses than any reasonable
Christian needs to keep him in healthy condition; and dinner being over,
our box with its _débris_ went out of the house, leaving a clear field.
"Now I put it to the distressed 'Young Family Man' whether these three
institutions of a bakery, a cook-shop, and a laundry, in the village
where he lives, would not virtually annihilate his household cares, and
restore peace and comfort to his now distracted family.
"There really is no more reason why every family should make its own
bread than its own butter,--why every family should do its own washing
and ironing than its own tailoring or mantua-making. In France, where
certainly the arts of economy are well studied, there is some specialty
for many domestic needs for which we keep servants. The beautiful inlaid
floors are kept waxed and glossy by a professional gentleman who wears a
brush on his foot-sole, skates gracefully over the surface, and, leaving
all right, departeth. Many families, each paying a small sum, keep this
servant in common.
"Now if ever there was a community which needed to study the art of
living, it is our American one; for at present, domestic life is so
wearing and so oppressive as seriously to affect health and happiness.
Whatever has been done abroad in the way of comfort and convenience can
be done here; and the first neighborhood that shall set the example of
dividing the tasks and burdens of life by the judicious use of the
principle of _association_ will initiate a most important step in the
way of national happiness and prosperity.
"My solution, then, of the domestic problem may be formulized as
follows:--
"1st. That women make self-helpfulness and family helpfulness
fashionable, and every woman use her muscles daily in enough household
work to give her a good digestion.
"2d. That the situation of a domestic be made so respectable and
respected that well-educated American women shall be induced to take it
as a training-school for their future family life.
"3d. That families by association lighten the multifarious labors of the
domestic sphere.
"All of which I humbly submit to the good sense and enterprise of
American readers and workers."
VI.
BODILY RELIGION: A SERMON ON GOOD HEALTH.
One of our recent writers has said, that "good health is physical
religion"; and it is a saying worthy to be printed in golden letters.
But good health being physical religion, it fully shares that
indifference with which the human race regards things confessedly the
most important. The neglect of the soul is the trite theme of all
religious teachers; and, next to their souls, there is nothing that
people neglect so much as their bodies. Every person ought to be
perfectly healthy, just as everybody ought to be perfectly religious;
but, in point of fact, the greater part of mankind are so far from
perfect moral or physical religion that they cannot even form a
conception of the blessing beyond them.
The mass of good, well-meaning Christians are not yet advanced enough to
guess at the change which a perfect fidelity to Christ's spirit and
precepts would produce in them. And the majority of people who call
themselves well, because they are not, at present, upon any particular
doctor's list, are not within sight of what perfect health would be.
That fulness of life, that vigorous tone, and that elastic cheerfulness,
which make the mere fact of existence a luxury, that suppleness which
carries one like a well-built boat over every wave of unfavorable
chance,--these are attributes of the perfect health seldom enjoyed. We
see them in young children, in animals, and now and then, but rarely, in
some adult human being, who has preserved intact the religion of the
body through all opposing influences. Perfect health supposes not a
state of mere quiescence, but of positive enjoyment in living. See that
little fellow, as his nurse turns him out in the morning, fresh from his
bath, his hair newly curled, and his cheeks polished like apples. Every
step is a spring or a dance; he runs, he laughs, he shouts, his face
breaks into a thousand dimpling smiles at a word. His breakfast of plain
bread and milk is swallowed with an eager and incredible delight,--it is
_so good_ that he stops to laugh or thump the table now and then in
expression of his ecstasy. All day long he runs and frisks and plays;
and when at night the little head seeks the pillow, down go the
eye-curtains, and sleep comes without a dream. In the morning his first
note is a laugh and a crow, as he sits up in his crib and tries to pull
papa's eyes open with his fat fingers. He is an embodied joy,--he is
sunshine and music and laughter for all the house. With what a
magnificent generosity does the Author of life endow a little mortal
pilgrim in giving him at the outset of his career such a body as this!
How miserable it is to look forward twenty years, when the same child,
now grown a man, wakes in the morning with a dull, heavy head, the
consequence of smoking and studying till twelve or one the night before;
when he rises languidly to a late breakfast, and turns from this, and
tries that,--wants a devilled bone, or a cutlet with Worcestershire
sauce, to make eating possible; and then, with slow and plodding step,
finds his way to his office and his books. Verily the shades of the
prison-house gather round the growing boy; for, surely, no one will deny
that life often begins with health little less perfect than that of the
angels.
But the man who habitually wakes sodden, headachy, and a little stupid,
and who needs a cup of strong coffee and various stimulating condiments
to coax his bodily system into something like fair working order, does
not suppose he is out of health. He says, "Very well, I thank you," to
your inquiries,--merely because he has entirely forgotten what good
health is. He is well, not because of any particular pleasure in
physical existence, but well simply because he is not a subject for
prescriptions. Yet there is no store of vitality, no buoyancy, no
superabundant vigor, to resist the strain and pressure to which life
puts him. A checked perspiration, a draught of air ill-timed, a crisis
of perplexing business or care, and he is down with a bilious attack, or
an influenza, and subject to doctors' orders for an indefinite period.
And if the case be so with men, how is it with women? How many women
have at maturity the keen appetite, the joyous love of life and motion,
the elasticity and sense of physical delight in existence, that little
children have? How many have any superabundance of vitality with which
to meet the wear and strain of life? And yet they call themselves well.
But is it possible, in maturity, to have the joyful fulness of the life
of childhood? Experience has shown that the delicious freshness of this
dawning hour may be preserved even to mid-day, and may be brought back
and restored after it has been for years a stranger. Nature, though a
severe disciplinarian, is still, in many respects, most patient and easy
to be entreated, and meets any repentant movement of her prodigal
children with wonderful condescension. Take Bulwer's account of the
first few weeks of his sojourn at Malvern, and you will read, in very
elegant English, the story of an experience of pleasure which has
surprised and delighted many a patient at a water-cure. The return to
the great primitive elements of health--water, air, and simple food,
with a regular system of exercise--has brought to many a jaded, weary,
worn-down human being the elastic spirits, the simple, eager appetite,
the sound sleep, of a little child. Hence, the rude huts and châlets of
the peasant Priessnitz were crowded with battered dukes and princesses,
and notables of every degree, who came from the hot, enervating luxury
which had drained them of existence to find a keener pleasure in
peasants' bread under peasants' roofs than in soft raiment and palaces.
No arts of French cookery can possibly make anything taste so well to a
feeble and palled appetite as plain brown bread and milk taste to a
hungry water-cure patient, fresh from bath and exercise.
If the water-cure had done nothing more than establish the fact that the
glow and joyousness of early life are things which may be restored after
having been once wasted, it would have done a good work. For if Nature
is so forgiving to those who have once lost or have squandered her
treasures, what may not be hoped for us if we can learn the art of never
losing the first health of childhood? And though with us, who have
passed to maturity, it may be too late for the blessing, cannot
something be done for the children who are yet to come after us?
Why is the first health of childhood lost? Is it not the answer, that
childhood is the only period of life in which bodily health is made a
prominent object? Take our pretty boy, with cheeks like apples, who
started in life with a hop, skip, and dance,--to whom laughter was like
breathing, and who was enraptured with plain bread and milk,--how did he
grow into the man who wakes so languid and dull, who wants strong coffee
and Worcestershire sauce to make his breakfast go down? When and where
did he drop the invaluable talisman that once made everything look
brighter and taste better to him, however rude and simple, than now do
the most elaborate combinations? What is the boy's history? Why, for the
first seven years of his life his body is made of some account. It is
watched, cared for, dieted, disciplined, fed with fresh air, and left to
grow and develop like a thrifty plant. But from the time school
education begins, the body is steadily ignored, and left to take care of
itself.