Household Papers and StoriesStowe, Harriet Beecher
General
Household Papers and Stories
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Didactic fiction; Home economics -- Fiction; Short stories
inward yawning, crowded, jostled, breathing hot air, and crushed in
halls and stairways, without a moment of leisure for months and
months, till brain and nerve and sense reel, and the country is longed
for as a period of resuscitation and relief! Such is the release from
labor and fatigue brought by wealth. The only thing that makes all
this labor at all endurable is, that it is utterly and entirely
useless, and does no good to any one in creation; this alone makes it
genteel, and distinguishes it from the vulgar toils of a housekeeper.
These delicate creatures, who can go to three or four parties a night
for three months, would be utterly desolate if they had to watch one
night in a sick-room; and though they can exhibit any amount of
physical endurance and vigor in crowding into assembly rooms, and
breathe tainted air in an opera-house with the most martyr-like
constancy, they could not sit one half-hour in the close room where
the sister of charity spends hours in consoling the sick or aged
poor."
"Mr. Theophilus is quite at home now," said Jenny; "only start him on
the track of fashionable life, and he takes the course like a hound.
But hear, now, our champion of the 'Evening Post':--
"'The instinct of women to seek a life of repose, their eagerness to
attain the life of elegance, does not mean contempt for labor, but it
is a confession of unfitness for labor. Women were not intended to
work,--not because work is ignoble, but because it is as disastrous
to the beauty of a woman as is friction to the bloom and softness of a
flower. Woman is to be kept in the garden of life; she is to rest, to
receive, to praise; she is to be kept from the workshop world, where
innocence is snatched with rude hands, and softness is blistered into
unsightliness or hardened into adamant. No social truth is more in
need of exposition and illustration than this one; and, above all, the
people of New England need to know it, and, better, they need to
believe it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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