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
Many of the domestic evils in America originate, in the fact that,
while society here is professedly based on new principles which ought
to make social life in every respect different from the life of the
Old World, yet these principles have never been so thought out and
applied as to give consistency and harmony to our daily relations.
America starts with a political organization based oh a declaration
of the primitive freedom and equality of all men. Every human being,
according to this principle, stands on the same natural level with
every other, and has the same chance to rise according to the degree
of power or capacity given by the Creator. All our civil institutions
are designed to preserve this equality, as far as possible, from
generation to generation: there is no entailed property, there are no
hereditary titles, no monopolies, no privileged classes--all are to
be as free to rise and fall as the waves of the sea.
The condition of domestic service, however, still retains about it
something of the influences from feudal times, and from the near
presence of slavery in neighboring States. All English literature of
the world describes domestic service in the old feudal spirit and with
the old feudal language, which regarded the master as belonging to a
privileged class and the servant to an inferior one. There is not a
play, not a poem, not a novel, not a history, that does not present
this view. The master's rights, like the rights of kings, were supposed
to rest in his being born in a superior rank. The good servant was one
who, from childhood, had learned "to order himself lowly and reverently
to all his betters." When New-England brought to these shores the
theory of democracy, she brought, in the persons of the first pilgrims,
the habits of thought and of action formed in aristocratic communities.
Winthrop's Journal, and all the old records of the earlier colonists,
show households where masters and mistresses stood on the "right divine"
of the privileged classes, howsoever they might have risen up against
authorities themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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