The duties of the housewife may not be as many, but the work they
involve may be more. This is true, for example, in the matter of
feeding the family. In Lithuania soup was the fare three times daily,
and there were only a few variations in kind. Here the family soon
demands meat, coffee, and other things that are different from the
food she has cooked in the old country.... Occasionally the situation
is further complicated by the insistence of dietetic experts that the
immigrant mother cannot feed her family intelligently unless she has
some knowledge of food values. In other words, the work of the
housewife was easy in the old country because it was well done--if it
was done in the way her mother did it--and conformed to the standards
that she knew. It could thus become a matter of routine that did not
involve the expenditure of nervous energy. Here, on the other hand,
she must conform to standards that are constantly changing, and must
learn to do things in a way her mother never dreamed of doing them.
And there is the new and difficult task of planning the use of the
family income, which takes on a new and unfamiliar form.
In spite of all that has been taken out of the home the duties of the
housewife remain manifold and various. She is responsible for the care
of the house, for the selection and preparation of food, for spending
the part of the income devoted to present needs, and for planning and
sharing in the sacrifices thought necessary to provide against future
needs. She must both bear and rear her children. The responsibilities
and satisfactions of her relationship with her husband are too often
last in the list of her daily preoccupations, but by no means least in
importance, if one of the essentials of a home is to be maintained.
The enumeration of the tasks of any wife and mother throws into relief
the difficulties of the foreign-born mother. The all too frequent
cases where homes are deprived of her presence emphasize how
indispensable she is. All case-work agencies have had to grapple with
the problem of families suffering this deprivation. It is these
motherless families that make us realize how many tasks and
responsibilities fall to the lot of the mother.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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