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
Let us suppose a colony of cultivated and Christian people, having
abundant wealth, who now are living as the wealthy usually do,
emigrating to some of the beautiful Southern uplands, where are rocks,
hills, valleys, and mountains as picturesque as those of New England,
where the thermometer but rarely reaches 90 degrees in summer, and in
winter as rarely sinks below freezing-point, so that outdoor labor goes
on all the year, where the fertile soil is easily worked, where rich
tropical fruits and flowers abound, where cotton and silk can be raised
by children around their home, where the produce of vineyards and
orchards finds steady markets by railroads ready made; suppose such
a colony, with a central church and school-room, library, hall for
sports, and a common laundry, (taking the most trying part of domestic
labor from each house,)--suppose each family to train the children to
labor with the hands as a healthful and honorable duty; suppose all
this, which is perfectly practicable, would not the enjoyment of this
life be increased, and also abundant treasures be laid up in heaven,
by using the wealth thus economized in diffusing similar enjoyments
and culture among the poor, ignorant, and neglected ones in desolated
sections where many now are perishing for want of such Christian example
and influences?
III.
A HEALTHFUL HOME.
When "the wise woman buildeth her house," the first consideration will
be the health of the inmates. The first and most indispensable requisite
for health is pure air, both by day and night.
If the parents of a family should daily withhold from their children
a large portion of food needful to growth and health, and every night
should administer to each a small dose of poison, it would be called
murder of the most hideous character. But it is probable that more
than one half of this nation are doing that very thing. The murderous
operation is perpetrated daily and nightly, in our parlors, our
bed-rooms, our kitchens, our schoolrooms; and even our churches are
no asylum from the barbarity. Nor can we escape by our railroads, for
even there the same dreadful work is going on.
The only palliating circumstance is the ignorance of those who commit
these wholesale murders. As saith the Scripture, "The people do perish
for lack of knowledge." And it is this lack of knowledge which it is
woman's special business to supply, in first training her household
to intelligence as the indispensable road to virtue and happiness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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