"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 watchmaker, 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 which are distasteful to you, and contrary to the genius of
your housekeeping. Such require that their mistress shall understand
at 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 Dickinson, 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, harness 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."
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