The truth is that the status of domestic labor is low. An exception is
made in favor of the cook, but only by people who know what cooking is,
which excludes the majority of the world. It is true that of late years
attempts have been made to raise the capacity of the domestic laborer by
inducing her to attend classes on cooking, on child nurture, etc., but,
in the main, in ninety-nine per cent of bourgeois marriages, it is
assumed that any fool can run a house. It matters very little whether a
fool can run a house or not; what does matter from the woman's point of
view is that she is given no credit for efficient household management,
and that is one reason why she has rebelled. It does not matter whether
you are a solicitor, an archbishop, or a burglar, the savor goes out of
your profession if it is not publicly esteemed at its true worth. We
have heard of celebrated impostors, of celebrated politicians, but who
has ever heard of a celebrated housekeeper?
The modern complaint of woman is that the care of the house has divorced
her from growing interests, from literature and, what is more important,
from the newspaper, partly from music, entirely from politics. It is a
purely material question; there are only twenty-four hours in every day,
and there are some things one cannot hustle. One can no more hustle the
English joint than the decrees of the Supreme Court. Moreover, and this
is a collateral fact, an emptiness has formed around woman; while on
the one side she was being tempted by the professions that opened to
her, by the interests ready to her hand, the old demands of less
organized homes were falling away from her. Once upon a time she was a
slave; now she is a half-timer, and the taste of liberty that has come
to her has made her more intolerant of the old laws than she was in the
ancient days of her serfdom. Not much more than seventy years ago it was
still the custom in lower middle-class homes for the woman to sew and
bake and brew. These occupations were relinquished, for the distribution
of labor made it possible to have them better done at a lower cost.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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