A Treatise on Domestic Economy; For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at SchoolBeecher, Catharine Esther
General
A Treatise on Domestic Economy; For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School
Beecher, Catharine Esther
Home economics
She has a husband, to whose peculiar tastes and habits she must
accommodate herself; she has children, whose health she must guard,
whose physical constitutions she must study and develope, whose temper
and habits she must regulate, whose principles she must form, whose
pursuits she must direct. She has constantly changing domestics, with
all varieties of temper and habits, whom she must govern, instruct, and
direct; she is required to regulate the finances of the domestic state,
and constantly to adapt expenditures to the means and to the relative
claims of each department. She has the direction of the kitchen, where
ignorance, forgetfulness, and awkwardness, are to be so regulated, that
the various operations shall each start at the right time, and all be in
completeness at the same given hour. She has the claims of society to
meet, calls to receive and return, and the duties of hospitality to
sustain. She has the poor to relieve; benevolent societies to aid; the
schools of her children to inquire and decide about; the care of the
sick; the nursing of infancy; and the endless miscellany of odd items,
constantly recurring in a large family.
Surely, it is a pernicious and mistaken idea, that the duties, which tax
a woman's mind, are petty, trivial, or unworthy of the highest grade of
intellect and moral worth. Instead of allowing this feeling, every woman
should imbibe, from early youth, the impression, that she is training
for the discharge of the most important, the most difficult, and the
most sacred and interesting duties that can possibly employ the highest
intellect. She ought to feel, that her station and responsibilities, in
the great drama of life, are second to none, either as viewed by her
Maker, or in the estimation of all minds whose judgement is most worthy
of respect.
She, who is the mother and housekeeper in a large family, is the
sovereign of an empire, demanding more varied cares, and involving more
difficult duties, than are really exacted of her, who, while she wears
the crown, and professedly regulates the interests of the greatest
nation on earth, finds abundant leisure for theatres, balls, horseraces,
and every gay pursuit.
There is no one thing, more necessary to a housekeeper, in performing
her varied duties, than _a habit of system and order_; and yet, the
peculiarly desultory nature of women's pursuits, and the embarrassments
resulting from the state of domestic service in this Country, render it
very difficult to form such a habit. But it is sometimes the case, that
women, who could and would carry forward a systematic plan of domestic
economy, do not attempt it, simply from a want of knowledge of the
various modes of introducing it. It is with reference to such, that
various modes of securing system and order, which the writer has seen
adopted, will be pointed out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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