By FRANCES POWER COBBE.
I have no sympathy at all with those ladies who are seeking to promote
coöperative housekeeping—in other words, to abolish the institution
of the home. There may be, indeed, specially gifted women—artists,
musicians, literary women—whom I could imagine finding it an interruption
to their pursuits to take charge of a house. But, strange to say, though
I have had a pretty large acquaintance with many of the most eminent
of such women, I have almost invariably found them particularly proud
of their housekeeping, and clever at the performance of all household
duties, not excepting the ordering of “judicious” dinners. Not to make
personal remarks on living friends, I will remind you that the greatest
woman mathematician of any age, Mary Somerville, was renowned for her
good housekeeping, and, I can add from my own knowledge, was an excellent
judge of a well-dressed _déjeuner_; while Madame de Staël, driven by
Napoleon from her home, went about Europe, as it was said, “preceded by
her reputation and followed by her cook.”
Rather, I suspect, it is not higher genius, but feeble inability to
cope with the problems of domestic government, which generally inspires
the women who wish to abdicate their little household thrones. Some
sympathy may be given to them, but I should be exceedingly sorry to see
many women catching up the cry and following their leading to the dismal
_disfranchisement_ of the home—the practical homelessness of American
boarding-houses or Continental _pensions_. I think for a woman to fail to
make and keep a happy home is to be a “failure” in a truer sense than to
have failed to catch a husband.
The making of a true home is really our peculiar and inalienable right—a
right which no man can take from us; for a man can no more make a home
than a drone can make a hive. He can build a castle or a palace; but—poor
creature!—be he wise as Solomon and rich as Crœsus, he can not turn it
into a home. No masculine mortal can do that. It is a woman, and only
a woman—a woman all by herself, if she likes, and without any man to
help her—who can turn a house into a home. Woe to the wretched man who
disputes her monopoly, and thinks, because he can arrange a club, he can
make a home! Nemesis overtakes him in his old bachelorhood, when a home
becomes the supreme ideal of his desires; and we see him—him who scorned
the home-making of a _lady_—obliged to put up with the oppression of his
cook or the cruelty of his nurse!
In the first place, if home be our kingdom, it must be our joy and
privilege to convert that domain, as quickly and as perfectly as we may,
into a little province of the Kingdom of God; for remember that we may
look on all our duties in this cheering and beautiful light—first, to set
up God’s Kingdom in our own hearts, making them pure and true and loving,
and then to make our homes little provinces of the same kingdom, and,
lastly, to try to extend that kingdom through the world—the empire of
Justice, Truth and Love. We are entirely responsible for our own souls,
and very greatly responsible for those of all the dwellers in our homes;
and, in a lesser way, we are answerable for each widening circle beyond
us. How shall we set about making our homes provinces of the Divine
Kingdom?
1. Nobody must be morally the worse for living under our roof, if we
can possibly help it. It is the _minimum_ of our duties to make sure
that temptations to misconduct or intemperance are not left in any one’s
way, or bad feelings suffered to grow up, or habits of moroseness or
domineering formed, or quarrels kept hot, as if they were toasts before
the kitchen fire. As much as possible, on the contrary, everybody must
be helped to be better—not made better by act of the drawing-room,
remember—that is impossible—but _helped_ to be better. The way to do
this, I apprehend, is neither very much to scold, or exhort, or insist
on people going to church whether they like it or not, or reading family
prayers (excellent though that practice may be), but rather to spread
through the house such an atmosphere of frank confidence and kindliness
with servants, and of love and trust with children and relations, that
bad feelings and doings will really have no place, no temptation, and, if
they intrude, will soon die out.
One such point out of many I may cite as specially concerning us women.
Is it not absurd for a lady who spends hundreds of pounds and thousands
of hours on her toilet, and takes evident pleasure in attracting
admiration in fashionable raiment not always perfectly decent, to turn
and lecture poor Mary Ann, her housemaid, on sobriety in attire, and set
forth to her the peril and folly of flowers in her bonnet? The mistress
who dresses modestly and sensibly may reasonably hope in time that her
servants will dress modestly and sensibly likewise; but certainly they
will not do so while she exhibits to their foolish young eyes the example
of extravagance and folly.
2. Next to the _virtue_ of those who live in our homes, their _happiness_
should occupy us. In the first place, no creature under our roof should
ever be miserable, if we can prevent it. In how many otherwise happy
homes is there not one such miserable being? Sometimes, it is the
sufferers’ own fault; their minds are warped and despairful, and our
utmost efforts perhaps can only cheer them a little. But much oftener
there is to be found in a large household some poor creature who has
fallen, through no fault, into the miserable position of the family
_butt_—the object of ill-natured and unfeeling jests and rude speeches,
the last person to be given any pleasure, and the first person to be
made to suffer any privation or ill-temper. Sometimes, it is a poor
governess or tutor; sometimes, an old aunt or poor relation; now and
then, but rarely in these days, a stupid servant; most often of all, a
child, who is, perhaps, a step-child or nephew or niece of the mistress
of the house, or, alas! her own child, only deformed in some way, or
deficient in intellect. Then, the hapless, frightened creature, afraid of
punishment, looks with furtive glances at the frowning faces about it,
tries to escape by some little transparent deception, and only incurs
the heavier penalty of falsehood and the name of a liar; and so the evil
goes on growing day by day. It is astonishing and horrible to witness
how the deep-seated, frightful human passion, which I have elsewhere
named _heteropathy_, develops itself in such circumstances—the sight of
suffering and down-trodden misery exciting not pity, but the reverse—a
sort of cruel _aversion_ in the bystanders, till the whole household
sometimes joins in hating the poor, helpless, and isolated victim.
My friends, if you ever see anything approaching to this in your homes,
for God’s sake, set your faces like a flint against it! If you dislike
and mistrust the poor victim yourself, as you probably will do at first,
never mind! Take my word for it, the first thing to be done in the
Kingdom of God is to do _justice_ to all—to secure that no creature,
however mean or even loathsome, should be treated with injustice. If you
are, as I am supposing, mistress of the house, stop this persecution
with a high hand; and if you have been in any way to blame in it, if
it be _your_ dislike which you see thus reflected in the faces of your
dependants, repent your great fault, and make amends to your victim. If
you are not mistress, only a guest perhaps, or a humble friend, even then
you can and ought to do much; you can look grave and pained whenever the
butt is laughed at and jeered; and you can deliberately fix your eyes on
him or her with sympathy, and treat him with respect. Even these little
tokens of condemnation of what is going on will have (you may be sure)
a startling effect on those whose custom it has become to treat the
poor soul with contempt; and they will probably be angry with you for
exhibiting them. You will never have borne resentment for a better cause.
Nor is it only human beings who are thus made too often household
victims. You must all know houses where some unlucky animal—a cat or
dog—beginning by being the object of somebody’s senseless antipathy,
becomes the general _souffre-douleur_ of masters and servants. The dog
or cat (especially if it happens to be cherished by the human victim) is
spoken to so roughly, driven out of every room, and perhaps punished for
all sorts of offences it has never committed, that the animal assumes
a downcast, sneaking aspect, which inevitably produces fresh and fresh
_heteropathy_. You attempt, perhaps, to give it a little pat of sympathy,
and the poor frightened beast snaps at you, expecting a blow, or runs
off to hide under a sofa. Mistresses of homes, don’t let there be a dog
or a cat or a donkey or any other creature, in or about your homes,
which shrinks when a man or woman approaches it. And here I may add
that, without thus specially victimizing the animals through dislike, a
household frequently makes the life of some poor brute one long martyrdom
through neglect. The responsibility for this neglect lies primarily with
the mistress of the house. She must not only direct her servants, but
_see that her directions be carried out_, in the way of affording water
and food and needful exercise. A pretty “Kingdom of Heaven” some houses
would be, if the poor brutes could speak—houses, possibly, with prayers
going on twice a day, and grace said carefully before long, luxurious
meals, and all the time the children’s birds and rabbits left untended in
foul cages, without fresh food; mice thrown out of the traps on the fire,
aged or diseased cats or superfluous puppies given to boys to destroy
in any way their cruel invention may suggest, fowls for the consumption
of the house carelessly and barbarously killed; and, worst of all, the
poor house-dog, perhaps some loving-hearted little Skye or noble old
mastiff or retriever, condemned for life to the penalties which we should
think too severe for the worst of malefactors; chained up by the neck
through all the long, bright summer days, under a burning sun, with its
water-trough unfilled for days, or through the winter’s frost in some
dark, sunless corner, freezing with cold and in agonies of rheumatism
for want of straw or the chance of warming itself at a fire or by a run
in the snow. And all this as a reward for the poor brute’s fidelity!
When this kind of thing goes on for a certain time, of course the dog
becomes horribly diseased. His longing to bound over the fresh grass,
expressed so affectingly by his leaps and bounds when we approach his
miserable dungeon, is not merely a longing for his natural pleasure, but
for that which is indispensable to his health—namely, exercise and the
power to eat grass; and, if refused, he very soon falls into disease;
his beautiful coat becomes mangy and red; he is irritable, and becomes
revolting to everybody, and the nurse cries to the children, who were his
only friends and visitors, “Don’t go near that dog!”
I say it deliberately, the mistress of a house in whose yard a dog is
thus kept like a _forçat_—only worse treated than any murderer is treated
in Italy—is guilty of a _very great sin_; and till she has taken care
that the dog has his daily exercise and water, and that the cat and the
fowls and every other sentient creature under her roof is well and kindly
treated, she may as well, for shame’s sake, give up thinking she is
fulfilling her duties by reading prayers and subscribing to missions.
I assume that the master of the house, where there is one, will, as
usual, look after the stable department. Where there is no master, or
he does not interfere, the mistress is surely responsible for humane
treatment of the horses, if she keep any. Further, I think every lady is
bound to insist that any horse which draws her shall be free from the
misery of a bearing-rein. She ought not to allow her vanity and ambition
to be fashionable to induce her to connive at her coachman’s laziness and
cruelty.
When the mistress of a house has done all she can to _prevent the
suffering_, mental or physical, of any creature, human or infra-human,
under her roof, there remains still a delightful field for her ability
in actually _giving pleasure_. We all know that life is made up chiefly
of little pleasures and little pains, and how many of the former are in
the power of the mistress of a house to provide, it is almost impossible
to calculate. But let any clever woman simply take it to heart to make
everybody about her _as happy as she can_, and the result I believe will
always be wonderful. Let her see that, so far as possible, they have the
rooms they like best, the little articles of furniture and ornament they
prefer. Let her order meals with a careful forethought for their tastes
and for the necessities of their health, seeing that every one has what
he desires, and making him feel, however humble in position, that his
tastes have been remembered. Let her not disdain to pay such attention
to the position of the chairs and sofas of the family dwelling-rooms as
that every individual may be comfortably placed, and feel that he or she
has not been left out in the cold. And, after all these cares, let her
try not so much to make her rooms splendid and æsthetically admirable
as to make them thoroughly habitable and comfortable for those who are
to occupy them; regarding their comfort rather than her own æsthetic
gratification. A drawing-room bright and clean, sweet with flowers in
summer or with dried rose leaves in winter, with tables at which the
inmates may occupy themselves, and easy chairs wherever they are wanted,
and plenty of soft light and warmth, or else of coolness adapted to the
weather—this sort of room belongs more properly to a woman who seeks to
make her house a province of the Kingdom of _Heaven_ than one which might
be exhibited at South Kensington as having belonged to the Kingdom of
_Queen Anne_!
Then, for the moral atmosphere of the house, which depends so immensely
on the tone of the mistress, I will venture to make one recommendation.
Let it be as gay as ever she can make it. There are numbers of excellent
women—the salt of the earth—who seem absolutely oppressed with their
consciences, as if they were congested livers. They are in a constant
state of anxiety and care; and perhaps, with the addition of feeble
health, find it difficult to get through their duties except in a certain
lachrymose and dolorous fashion. Houses where these women reign seem
always under a cloud, with rain impending. Now, I conceive that good and
even high animal spirits are among the most blessed of possessions—actual
wings to bear us up over the dusty or muddy roads of life; and I think
that to keep up the spirits of a household is not only indefinitely to
add to its happiness, but also to make all duties comparatively light and
easy. Thus, however naturally depressed a mistress may be, I think she
ought to struggle to be cheerful, and to take pains never to quench the
blessed spirits of her children or guests. All of us who live long in
great cities get into a sort of subdued-cheerfulness tone. We are neither
very sad nor very glad.
One word in concluding these remarks on woman’s duties as a _Hausfrau_.
If we can not perform these well, if we are not orderly enough,
clear-headed enough, powerful enough, in short, to fulfil this immemorial
function of our sex well and thoroughly, it is somewhat foolish of us to
press to be allowed to share in the great housekeeping of the State. My
beloved and honored friend, Theodore Parker, argued for the admission
of women to the full rights of citizenship and share in government, on
the express grounds that few women keep house so badly or with such
wastefulness as Chancelors of the Exchequer keep the State, and womanly
genius for organization applied to the affairs of the nation would be
extremely economical and beneficial. But, if we can not keep our houses
and manage our servants, this argument, I am afraid, will be turned the
other way; and we shall be told that, _not_ having used our one talent,
it is quite out of question to give us ten. Having shown ourselves
incapable in little things, nobody in their senses will trust us with
great ones.