American Woman's Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science;: Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian HomesStowe, Harriet Beecher
Religion
American Woman's Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science;: Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Home economics
In the same manner, lessons must be given 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, a good servant may be made out of an indifferent one.
Some of the best girls have been those who came 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 self-opinionated, with
ways which are distasteful, and contrary to the genius of one's
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 been trained.
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, almost
every body begins to feel that it is rather degrading for a woman in
good society to be much tied down to family affairs; especially since
in these Woman's Rights Conventions there is so much dissatisfaction
expressed at those who would confine her ideas to the kitchen and
nursery.
Yet these 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 every thing 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. Every woman has rights as a human
being 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 any thing 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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