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
Moreover, we can not in this country maintain to any great extent large
retinues of servants. Even with ample fortunes, they are forbidden by
the general character of society here, which makes them cumbrous and
difficult to manage. Every mistress of a family knows that her cares
increase with every additional servant. Two keep the peace with each
other and their employer; three begin a possible discord, which
possibility increases with four, and becomes certain with five or six.
Trained housekeepers, such as regulate the complicated establishments
of the old world, form a class that are not, and from the nature of
the case never will be, found in any great numbers in this country.
All such women, as a general thing, are keeping, and prefer to keep,
houses of their own.
A moderate style of housekeeping, small, compact, and simple domestic
establishments, must necessarily be the general order of life in
America. So many openings of profit are to be found in this country,
that domestic service necessarily wants the permanence which forms so
agreeable a feature of it in the old world.
This being the case, it should be an object in American to exclude
from the labors of the family all that can, with greater advantage,
be executed out of it by combined labor.
Formerly, in New England, soap and candles were to be made in each
separate family; now, comparatively few take this toil upon them. We
buy soap of the soap-maker, and candles of the candle-factor. This
principle might be extended much further. In France, no family makes
its own bread, and better bread can not be eaten than can be bought
at the appropriate shops. No family does its own washing; the family's
linen is all sent to women who, making this their sole profession, get
it up with a care and nicety which can seldom be equaled in any family.
How would it simplify the burdens of the American housekeeper to have
washing and ironing day expunged from her calendar! How much more
neatly and compactly could the whole domestic system be arranged! If
all the money that each separate family spends on the outfit and
accommodations for washing and ironing, on fuel, soap, starch, and the
other requirements, were united in a fund to create a laundry for every
dozen families, one or two good women could do in first rate style
what now is very indifferently done by the disturbance and
disarrangement of all other domestic processes in these families.
Whoever sets neighborhood laundries on foot will do much to solve the
American housekeeper's hardest problem.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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