Courtship and Marriage, and the Gentle Art of Home-MakingSwan, Annie S.
General
Courtship and Marriage, and the Gentle Art of Home-Making
Swan, Annie S.
Family life; Home economics; Marriage
Some little boys who afterwards became good and noble men have not
disdained dolls as a baby amusement, and you generally find that the
small boy who takes a kind interest in his sister's dolls, and who does
not spend his leisure in concocting schemes for their torture and
dismemberment, has the fatherly instinct very strongly developed, and
will in his own home be tenderly devoted to his children.
Boys ought to be taught early the beauty of little kindly attentions and
thoughtfulness for others. On no account ought their sisters to be
allowed to fetch and carry for them. There may be a system of mutual
obligation if you like, but boys of a certain age are apt to become very
arbitrary, and to consider their sisters in the light of body servants.
By allowing boys to order their sisters about, to bring them things and
give in always, you foster a spirit of selfishness, which grows
tyrannical as the years go by, and paves the way for some domestic
discomfort in a future home which will be beyond your jurisdiction.
They tell us the age of chivalry is dead; and really manners do not seem
to be as they were. The changed order of things concerning women, who
are no longer cooped up within the four walls of a house, and told that
that is their sphere spelled with a very big S, but who are pushing
their way steadily to the front in every walk of life, no doubt partly
accounts for this; still the lapse of that old-fashioned and gracious
courtesy of men to women is to be deplored, and I cannot but think that
we who have raw material to work upon in the nursery might do something
to restore it. We cannot afford to lose any of the graces of life.
Heaven knows things are reduced to a prosaic enough level with us in
these days, when the fret and fever seem to leave time for nothing but
the barest realities.
As we have already admitted that early impressions and early training
never quite lose their hold, so if we teach our boys to be gracious,
courteous, considerate always to their sisters because they are little
women, some women of a later date will be grateful to us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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