"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 resume," 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 a 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 dressmaking, 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.
"When the time arrives that such a girl comes to a house of her own,
she 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 practice 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
backache,--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 of 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 Jenny. "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 practicing 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 a 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
at 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 anteroom, from it came forth first soup, then fish, then roasts 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 debris 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."