Good Housekeeping

“ A young woman who would create an ideal home must possess some judgment, and a heart in which charity and sympathy have a large place.
2My idea of good housekeeping is where a woman keeps her home sweet and orderly; provides simple, well cooked food; makes her home so restful and cheerful that all who come into it shall be better for breathing the atmosphere of kindness and cheerfulness that pervades the place ”

“ And one has only to look about the world as it stands at present, servant-problem and all, to realize that it is the value of good domestic service which actually creates and keeps alive the problem itself. For even if the happy housewife enjoys every single item of housekeeping and cookery, there are times when her personal attention to them is obviously undesirable.
Imagine our servantless cottage as an example. Milady sings at her work. The portable vacuum cleaner—milord keeps up with all the latest improvements—gratefully eats up its daily dust. ”

“ We sweep twice a week, only, and we wash windows when they need washing, not all the time. The attic and cellar are to be kept in order, but not put in order daily, you know. The really good housekeeper does a little putting to rights all the time, and every day she takes a certain part of the house and makes it clean, but she never tries to do more in one day than belongs to that one. To know how to keep a house nice is quite as necessary as to know how to make it so. ”

“ Housecleaning of any sort can hardly fail to be a time of turmoil and weariness for the housekeeper. Her help is to remember that if the family have good food and comfortable beds and are not scolded or quarrelled with, they are well enough off to wait several days or even weeks for curtains, clean windows and slippery floors. ”

“ My mother desires me to tell you that I am a very good housekeeper, which I have no reluctance in doing, because I really think it my peculiar excellence, and for this reason — I always take care to provide such things as please my own appetite, which I consider as the chief merit in housekeeping. ”

“ "And your modest ambition is to be a good housekeeper, isn't it?"
"Well, yes, papa; but not only that. I was thinking about it afterward by myself, and I think that the housekeeping is the practical part of it—and that's a good big part too—but what I really want to be is a lovely, good, womanly woman, like Aunt Alice, you know. ”

“ Now, the people who are said to have too much for their own good, keep butlers, ladies’ maids, governesses, who like Mahomet’s coffin hover between the parlor and the kitchen, superfine laundresses, pages in buttons, and other housekeeping accessories, and domestic life grows bravely more and more complex. ”

“ How many, and which of these small services you are able to do, depend on how long your school hours are, and on what sort of health you have, and on how much of the housework is done by the family. It is not fatal if you do not do any of them, provided your reason is not laziness or selfishness. ”

“ Care of our clothes is not directly related to housekeeping—it is only a collateral relation. A neat house, however, is marred if the housekeeper herself is untidy. For our immediate purpose, though, the point is, that the habit of caring for our clothes, and the deftness and inventiveness which such care requires, are qualities constantly useful in housekeeping. ”

“ In housekeeping, as in all else, one must learn the lesson for one's self. All the rules and theories in all the books and periodicals in the country are worth little compared with three months of personal experience. Happy is the young wife who has had some practice in housekeeping in her father's house before the heavier responsibility of a home of her own rests on her shoulders.
Let me remind our Mary, first of all, of the truth that there is no meanness in economy, and that—as I cannot repeat too often [57] or too strongly—waste is vulgar. ”

“ When housekeeping becomes an enthusiasm, and its study and practice a fashion, then we shall have in America that class of persons to rely on for help in household labors who are now going to factories, to printing-offices, to every kind of toil, forgetful of the best life and sphere of woman. ”

“ In modern society, being a middle class or upper class housekeeper means something entirely different from being a housekeeper in a farmer's cottage or a workingman's fiat. On the one hand we have the woman whose housekeeping means actual, domestic labor: cooking, washing, scrubbing, etc. ”

“ Constantly striving to promote the prosperity of the household, she should oversee all that goes on in the house, that every department is thoroughly attended to, and that the servants are comfortable, at the same time that their various duties are properly performed.
Cleanliness, punctuality, and method are essentials in the character of a good housekeeper. Without these qualities, no household can be well managed. ”

“ Where there are carking cares, querulousness, untidiness, slovenliness, and dirt, there can be little comfort either for man or woman. The husband who has been working all day, expects to have something as a compensation for his toil. The least that his wife can do for him, is to make his house snug, clean, and tidy, against his home-coming at eve. That is the truest economy—the best housekeeping—the worthiest domestic management—which makes the home so pleasant and agreeable, that a man feels when approaching it, that he is about to enter a sanctuary ”

“ In the present comparison of housework with work in factories, stores, and offices, a recital of the advantages of domestic service, even under the present method of housekeeping, must not be omitted, for such advantages are important, although unfortunately they do not outweigh the present disadvantages. ”

“ Oh! if only every single person would know and learn each separate detail which goes to make up the perfect house and housekeeping, life would not be half as expensive, half as ‘sketchy’ and untidy as it now is in the vast majority of households, where people are content to jog along comfortably if things are just bearable, and where no preaching will, I fear, induce them to cultivate the twin talents of observation and regularity,{274} which alone suffice to keep any house going in the way it most undoubtedly should go. ”

“ All regular, useful work must be monotonous, but love ought to make it easy; and at any rate the tedium of housework is not any greater than the tedium of office work. As for housekeeping being degrading, that is the veriest nonsense. Home is a little royalty; and if the housewife and mother be of elements finely mixed and loftily educated, all the more she will regard the cold-mutton question of importance, and consider the quality of the soup, and the quantity of chutnee in the curry, as requiring her best attention. ”

“ To cheapen and improve human homes, and especially to bring comfortable dwellings within the reach of the poor classes, is the object of this volume—an object of the highest practical utility to man.
How to Live: Saving and Wasting, or Domestic Economy Illustrated, by the Life of Two Families of Opposite Character, Habits and Practices, in a Pleasant Tale of Real Life, full of Useful Lessons in Housekeeping, and Hints How to Live, How to Have, How to Gain, and How to be Happy ”

“ THE time and strength necessary for housework, and the comfort and happiness resulting from the work depend much upon something which housekeepers have to a great extent the power to control. I mean the quantity and kind of things they have in their houses. ”

“ I often wonder if they attacked the proposition of housekeeping with the intention of seeing how much fun there is in it, of how much pleasure could be got out of making a home, not merely keeping house, and of feeding their conceit with the fuel of a determination to keep house better than any woman of their acquaintance. ”

“ Every novel convenience and comfort, every article of beauty and luxury, every means of refinement and enjoyment in our houses, has been so much added to the burdens of housekeeping, and the granddaughters have inherited from the grandmothers an undiminished conscience against rust and the moth, which will not suffer them to forget the least duty they owe to the naughtiest of their superfluities. ”

“ Details are in themselves wearying, and to most men their relation to housekeeping is unaccountable. The day's work of a systematic housekeeper would confound the best-trained man of business. In the woman's hand is the key to home-happiness, but it is folly to assert that all lies with her. ”

“ They should have some insight into the sanitary, economic, and social problems that are involved in housekeeping, so that they may develop an increased appreciation of the importance of the home-maker's work. ”

“ They are cases of failure in the woman's profession, and, trivial or great, they arise from the same cause, from the neglect of that thing we don't like about housekeeping—its unique characteristic—its effacement. Our work as housekeepers is only notable when it is not noticed. ”

“ If to the management of our towns—which are, after all, only our homes on a larger scale—were applied the principles used by a good housekeeper in ordering her home, then cleanliness, beauty, and convenience would increase around us. A science of economics so modified would recall to a scholar the original meaning of the word ”

“ One should especially beware while house cleaning of what Bishop Hall calls the "lust of finishing." Try to clean only as much each day as can be put back into habitable order by the time the men of the household come home. One room a day is all a woman unaided should try to do. Mankind are [338] pleased to make jokes about house cleaning and glad am I that they can take it that way, for really it is a trial of character to come home tired and hungry and find the house cold, the rooms in disorder and a picnic supper spread in the kitchen by an overwrought wife. ”

“ Again, home-making must be made interesting. The man regards his business as a pleasure. He plays it as he plays a game, and he plays to win. And so housekeeping has become a 189“game, not a duty.” In a natural, enjoyable way our girls should be taught to play the game of household administration. Home duties are not mere duties any longer; the old way of “doing up the housework” made every act an end in itself. Now every act is simply a means to an end; every move is important,—the way the dishes are washed, the beds made, the cooking done, may win or lose the game. ”

“ We are eager to study social problems and take up settlement work, but we do not think it worth while to study our own cooks. We feel in ourselves a power to organize and betake us to the club, and leave the cook and the nursemaid to organize our homes and our children's lives. We have raised the woman's work of teaching and of nursing into excellent professions, and yet we are ready to sit down and cry before the difficulties of housekeeping. ”

“ I will not stop to speak of all phases of it; but as I have observed men and women for years, and have seen the suffering from needless backaches caused by climbing stairs and doing housework in an unnecessarily hard way, as I have seen the complexity and endless details of our modern life crowd out, in the lives of all but the 129rich, the leisure which their children should have, and which they need for their own self-development, I have racked my brains to see what could be done to simplify the petty details of modern housekeeping. ”

“ A household run on a strict schedule becomes an institution, not a home; on the other hand, a household in which the work is done at any time or no time is neither clean, restful nor knit together with the bonds of mutual service and mutual compliance.
Housework is some of it daily, and some of it periodical. Bedmaking is daily; sweeping is periodical. There is also work which may be done by the workers in the house, or by others coming from without. In one family the laundry work, bread making, window cleaning, floor polishing and the like will be done by those in the house ”

“ The simplification of methods by classification would do much, and the evolution of possible devices for saving labour would do still more, to establish a favourable view of housekeeping. What is worth doing is worth doing well; but it is “doing” unnecessarily that spells drudgery.
Our attitude in considering household problems turns almost involuntarily to cooking, but the need for an intellectual grasp of matters domestic is equally potent in methods of cleaning. ”

“ Present-day, up-to-date books on housekeeping stand for the fact that in our households, whatever the estimates of the past and of other social conditions, all work is dignified—none is menial. For besides intelligent knowledge and execution, what in reality, they ask, gives dignity to labor? ”

“ Fellows talking with Alice about looking for houses for you, and I must tell you that I am astonished that you should think of such a thing. Housekeeping is very expensive, if you keep house with the least attention to appearance ”

“ Consequently many have to learn, after marriage, how to take care of a family; and thus their housekeeping is, frequently, little else than a series of experiments; often unsuccessful, resulting in mortification and discomfort in the parlor, and waste and ill temper in the kitchen. ”

“ And “patient continuance in well-doing,” frequent, careful, but kindly oversight, thorough but not suspicious inspection of kitchen, store-rooms, closets, etc., will lessen many others; the remainder we must endure until, among all the reformatory movements of this progressive age, some good spirit shall effect a deliverance from the heaviest burden that oppresses the housekeeper,—unfaithful, inefficient servants. ”

“ It thus happens that at various times of the year a great number of men, unable to leave their business, are left to their own resources as housekeepers in their deserted houses and apartments. It is for their benefit that I have put together these hints on housekeeping for men. ”