Kate Stephens

“ Scattered far and wide over the granitic soil of New England there have been the women unmarried. Through the seafaring life of the men, through the adventures of the pioneer enchanting the hot-blooded and daring; through the coaxing away of sturdy youthful muscle by the call of the limitless fat lands to the west; through the siren voice of the cities; and also through the loss of men in war—that untellable misery—these less fortunate women—the unmarried—have in all New England life been many. ”

“ But although he grubs up the wild rose and morning-glory, ploughing his mellow soil deep for settings of peach and grape, and supplants the beauty of the purple iris and prairie verbena with the practicalities of corn and wheat, he has 31 yet to learn the moral effect of time and aggregation—that a moon’s cycle is not a millennium, a June wind fragrant with the honey of his white clover not all of his fair climate, and that a political colossus cannot stand when it has no more substantial feet than the yellow clay which washes and swirls in the river that waters his great State. ”

“ Those winters held genial hours. Nuts from the woods and cider from the orchard stood on the board near by. Home-grown wood blazed in the chimney; home-grown chestnuts, hidden in the ashes by busy children, popped to expectant hands; house-mothers sat with knitting and spinning, and the father and farm-men mended fittings 168 and burnished tools for the spring work. Outside the stars glittered through a clear sky and the soundless earth below lay muffled in sleep.
Over yonder across the road was the village post-office, and not far away were stores of merchant supplies. ”

“ The cook-book is not a modern product. The Iliad is the hungriest book on earth, and it is the first of our cook-books aside from half-sacred, half-sanitary directions to the early Aryans and Jews. It is that acme of poetry, that most picturesque of pictures, that most historical of histories, that most musical and delicious verse, the Iliad, which was the first popularly to teach the cooking art—the art in its simplicity, and not a mere handmaid to sanitation, jurisprudence, or theology. ”

“ To have a home in which daily duties move without noise and as like a clock as its human machinery will permit, and to have a table of simplicity and excellence, is worth a pleasure-giving ambition and a womanly ambition. It is to bring, in current critical phrase, three-fourths of the comfort of life to those whose lives are joined to the mistress of such a household—the loaf-giver who spends her brains for each ordered day and meal. Moreover, and greatest of 272 all, to plan and carry on so excellent an establishment is far-reaching upon all men. ”

“ Until honor is stronger among human beings—that is, until the business world is something other than a maelstrom of hell—it is unmanly and unwomanly to gibe at the “unauthoritative” young woman writing at so much a mile. She may be bearing heavy burdens of debt incurred by another. She may be supporting a decrepit father or an idle brother. She is bread-earning. Oftenest she is gentle, and, like the strapped dog which licks the hand that lays bare his brain, she does not strike back. ”

“ Each man of them—and each woman also—was in fixed principle and earnestness a pioneer, in pursuit of and dwelling in a world not yet before the eyes of flesh but sun-radiant to the eyes of the spirit—the ideal the pioneer must ever see—and holding the present and actual as but a mote in the beam from that central light. ”

“ In the mouths of many who use it to excess—those mainly at fault are innocently imitative, unthinking, or pretentious women—it sounds ungracious, if not vulgar, and distinctly untrue to those who made the country for us and desirable for us to live in; and untrue also to the best social feeling of to-day. It is still for a genuine American rather hard to imagine a person such as the word “servant” connotes—a lackey, a receiver of tips of any sort—with an election ballot in hand and voting thinkingly, knowingly, intelligently for the guidance of our great government. ”

“ What irony of history if on New England soil!! Possibly, the custom that now pertains of paying women less than men for the same work, the habit in all businesses of giving women the drudging details,—necessary work, indeed, but that to which no reputation is affixed,—and giving to men the broader tasks in which there is contact with the world and the result of contact, growth, may ultimately react, just as out of injustice and brutalities centuries ago arose a chivalrous ideal and a knightly redresser. ”

“ It is therefore not to be wondered at that these young people come to their University with little of the glamour nourished by delicate environment and the graces of life. Their earliest years have been spent upon the bed-rock of nature wrestling with the hardest facts and barest realities. They have suffered the deprivations and the unutterable trials of patience and faith which the world over are the lot of pioneers; and they have had the returns 48 of their courage. ”

“ The voice is an unconscious index of one’s spiritual tone; hers is metallic. At times it is deep, with a masculine note and force. The gift of flexible English speech, belonging to her by the right of inheritance of every American—she is at times of the old American stock, but more often of foreign-born parents,—she is apt to wrap in stereotyped phrases or newspaper slang. In her bustling life, formed, stamped, and endowed in spirit by an iron-grooved, commercial world, she gives little consideration to use of the greatest of all instruments and the mightiest of all arts. ”

“ And in this country, where Aladdin-fortunes spring into being by the rubbing of a lamp—where families of, for example, many centuries of the downtrodden life of European peasant jump from direst poverty to untold wealth—environment 268 has often no opportunity to form the folk of gentle breeding. Many instances are not lacking where those who wait are more gently bred than those who are waited upon.
In their larger discourse, then, up-to-date household books stand for the very essence of democracy and human-heartedness—which is also the very essence of aristocracy. ”

“ This woman has therefore in her hands no feeling of the real relation and friendship that grow between mistress and maid who live the joys and sorrows of years together. By the less fortunate themselves, as well as by her own shallow skimming, her sympathies with the less fortunate are dwarfed. She looks upon her domestic as a serving sub-human animal, infinitely below herself, tolerated because of its menial performance, and barely possessed of the soul which her ecclesiastical tradition says is in every human form. ”

“ He values openly what the world in its heart knows is best, and like all idealists foreruns his time. The legend is always about him of how the men and women of the early fifties hitched their wagon to a star—and the stars in his infinity above are divinely luminous and clear. His meliorism—which would lead his fellows and then the whole world aright—is nothing if not magnificent. ”

“ The lands that border the Big Muddy have more of the old American spirit than the extreme East. The proportions of the old American blood are there greater than upon the sea-coast, where Europeans of a tradition far different from the ideals and enthusiasms of our early comers have dropped and settled, and in such numbers that they can and do knit their old mental and social habits into a garment which is impervious to true American influences. ”

“ She undoes the decree of old Pope Innocent III., to whom is ascribed the ordination of marriage as a function of his church and the claim of its sanctified indissolubility. In the light of her action marriage is truly and purely a civil contract, and devoid of that grace, resignation, forbearance, patience, tenderness, sweetness, and calm which make it truly religious.
She is strong, she is hopeful, she is ardent. She knows herself and her power—that it is of the flesh which aims at prettiness. The divine beauty of spirit in the countenance she does not know. ”

“ I exclaimed—or if not just that then its German equivalent—thinking of the perfectly kept homes from the rocks and pines of Maine to the California surf; “you German women with your little haushaltungen, heating your rooms with porcelain stoves, and your frequent reversion in meals to the simplicity of wurst and beer, have no conception of the size and complexity of American households and the executive capabilities necessary to keep them in orderly work. Yours is mere doll’s housekeeping—no furnaces, no hot water, no electricity, no elevators, no telephone, and no elaborate menus.” ”

“ Holiday enjoyment means in many cases sowing money in barbaric fashion, in every thinkable triviality that entails expense. That which he has bent every nerve toward getting, for which he has grown prematurely careworn, the possession of which vulgar philosophy counts the summa summarium of life, this he must scatter broadcast, not in the real things of art and literature and bettering the condition of the less fortunate, but in sordid pleasure and vacuous rushing hither and yon. ”

“ Heaped upon one’s table, the open pages and appetiteful illustrations put one to thinking that if women of intelligence, and of leisure except for burdens they assume under so-called charity or a faddish impulse, were to take each some department of the household, and give time and effort to gaining a complete knowledge of that department—a knowledge of its evolution and history, of its scientific and hygienic bearings, of its gastronomic values if it touched upon the table—there would be great gain to the world at large and to their friends. ”

“ Originally he was a reactionist against feudal bondage, the old bondage of human to human and of human to land. Later his soul took fire at the new bondage of human to wage and job. He would have every man and woman about him as free in person as he was in idea. ”