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 order that servants may be treated with respect and courtesy, it
is not necessary, as in simpler patriarchal days, that they sit at the
family-table. Your carpenter or plumber does not feel hurt that you
do not ask him to dine with you, nor your milliner and mantua-maker
that you do not exchange ceremonious calls and invite them to your
parties. It is well understood that your relations with them are of
a mere business character. They never take it as an assumption of
superiority on your part that you do not admit them to relations of
private intimacy. There may be the most perfect respect and esteem and
even friendship between then and you, notwithstanding. So it may be
in the case of servants. It is easy to make any person understand that
there are quite other reasons than the assumption of personal
superiority for not wishing to admit servants to the family privacy.
It was not, in fact, to sit in the parlor or at the table in themselves
considered, that was the thing aimed at by New--England girls; these
were valued only as signs that they were deemed worthy of respect and
consideration, and, where freely conceded, were often in point of fact
declined.
Let servants feel, in their treatment by their employers and in the
atmosphere of the family, that their position is held to be a
respectable one; let them feel, in the mistress of the family, the
charm of unvarying consideration and good manners; let their work-
rooms be made convenient and comfortable, and their private apartments
bear some reasonable comparison in point of agreeableness to those of
other members of the family, and domestic service will be more
frequently sought by a superior and self-respecting class. There are
families in which such a state of things prevails; and such families,
amid the many causes which unite to make the tenure of service
uncertain, have generally been able to keep good permanent servants.
There is an extreme into which kindly disposed people often run with
regard to servants which may be mentioned here. They make pets of them.
They give extravagant wages and indiscreet indulgences, and, through
indolence and easiness of temper, tolerate neglect of duty. Many of
the complaints of the ingratitude of servants come from those who have
spoiled them in this way; while many of the longest and most harmonious
domestic unions have sprung from a simple, quiet course of Christian
justice and benevolence, a recognition of servants as fellow-beings
and fellow-Christians, and a doing to them as we would in like
circumstances that they should do to us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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