Woman's Home Companion

“ It is hoped a time is at hand when every woman will be trained to some employment by which she can secure to herself an independent home and means to support a family, in case she does not marry, or is left a widow, with herself and a family to support. ”

“ Women should make their homes as comfortable as they can, with the means at their command, that the husband, the children and all that belong to the family may be glad to come home to enjoy the society of the family circle. ”

“ If she was willing to teach women how to become accomplished housewives, it was that they might administer to the comfort and satisfy the appetite of their fathers and brothers and husbands and sons. The end of woman, according to her creed, is to make the home agreeable for man, and it would save us many of to-day's troubles if we agreed with her. ”

“ Women, unspecialised, refuse to benefit their families in like proportion; but offer to them only the grade of service which was proper enough in the Stone Age, but is a historic disgrace to-day.
A house does not need a wife any more than it does a husband. Are we never to have a man-wife? A really suitable and profitable companion for a man instead of the bond-slave of a house? ”

“ It was the presence of this gallant band, as well as their courage and endurance, which assures us of one of the most predominant traits of the most distinctive American womanhood in those days. That trait is the love of home. It was to seek a home, a habitation and spot of ground that should be their very own, that the pioneer and his wife dared the perils of the wilderness; and in this search the wife was at least as instrumental as the husband. To have a home was the ambition of every American woman of those times ”

“ And a woman that feareth the Lord and serveth him, is praised and prized beyond rubies. The next requisite to holiness may be said to be skilfulness in the home. Woman must be trained to household duties. If she lacks here, she is wanting in much that makes her a real wife or mother or sister.
America, the land of homes, finds the housewife essential to its future. Housework in woman is ever honorable. It ought to be her glory and her pride. ”

“ It looks very strange to us for a lady to speak in public, but we must remember that in the section of country from which this lady comes, the necessity of self-support bears equally upon women, and crowds them out of domestic life into vocations more congenial to the sterner sex. Happily our domestic institutions, by relieving women of the necessity to labor, protect them in the sacred privacy of home. ”

“ No married man wishes his wife to serve another man. This household service, being esteemed as a distinctly feminine function, closely involved with maternity, or at least with marriage, or, if not with marriage, at the very least with woman's devotion, and quite inconsistent with any other marriage; therefore we find the labours of the household performed by celibate women of a lower class. Our modern household is but a variation of the primitive group—the man and his serving women still. ”

“ The housemaid would be more of a step in advance if the housewife, released from her former duties, then entered the ranks of productive labour, paid her substitute, and contributed something further to the world's wealth. But nothing could be farther from the thoughts of the Lady of the House. Her husband being able to keep more than one woman to do the work of the house ”

“ No women on earth have a higher sense of their moral and religious responsibilities, or better understand, not only what is demanded of them, as housekeepers, but all the claims that rest upon them as wives, mothers, and members of a social community. An American woman, who is the mistress of a family, feels her obligations, in reference to her influence over her husband, and a still greater responsibility in rearing and educating her children. She feels, too, the claims which the moral interests of her domestics have on her watchful care. ”

“ The responsibilities of a family should be understood, and the wife regarded in her utilitarian aspect as a keeper of the home, as a mother, and as a guardian of the home comforts; marriage itself, as the sacred garden of the future of mankind, in which each party to the contract has the privilege of contributing to that future. ”

“ Whether rich or poor, young or old, married or single, a woman is always liable to be called to the performance of every kind of domestic duty, as well as to be placed at the head of a family; and nothing, short of a practical knowledge of the details of housekeeping, can ever make those duties easy, or render her competent to direct others in the performance of them. ”

“ Teaching presented itself as the only resource. In those days women's work and women's rights had not been discussed so freely as at present. There was a strong feeling that the principal thing required was our duties—owed to ourselves, our home, our family and friends. There was a deep conviction—now, alas! slowly disappearing—that a woman, single or married, should never throw herself out of the safe circle of domestic life till the last extremity of necessity ”

“ We are, then, very far from the dreaded dissolution of the home and of the family, through the fact that woman has been forced by changed social and economic conditions to give her time and strength to remunerative work. The home itself assumes the gentle feminine attributes of the domestic housewife. ”

“ I do not suppose that the household has ever been quite as much of a shelter for women as the Victorian philosophers said, and possibly believed; an elementary study of the feminist question will certainly incline the unprejudiced to see that the home, which has for so long masqueraded in the guise of woman's friend, has on the whole been her enemy ”

“ A wife's devotion, the purity of a sister's and a daughter's love, the smiles and tears and prayers of a mother—these make the sunshine which transforms the waste into a paradise, the wild into a garden, and expands the home by a law of organic growth into a well ordered community.
The basis of civil law and social order is the silent compact which binds the household into one sweet purpose of a common interest, a common happiness. Woman is the unconscious legislator of the frontier. ”

“ So complicated are the pursuits and so diverse the habits of the various members of a family, that it is almost impossible for every one to avoid interfering with the plans and taste of a housekeeper, in some one point or another. It is, therefore, most wise for a woman to keep the loins of her mind ever girt, to meet such collisions with a cheerful and quiet spirit. ”

“ Few servants will make a bed properly, without much attention from the mistress of the family; and every young woman who expects to have a household of her own to manage should be able to do it well herself, and to instruct others in doing it. ”

“ There is no reason why these facts should characterize so worthy a business, and there are conspicuous exceptions in which both the woman and the domicile remain invincibly warm-hearted and welcoming, but the rule still holds that only the rarest of women can invite the public into her home and not herself suffer from the exposure, only the rarest of women can as the mistress of a boarding-house still be perfectly herself. ”

“ In England, now, the progress of society has reached so admirable a pitch, that the position of the sexes is frequently reversed, and the husband is obliged to stay at home and "mind the house and bairns," while the wife goes forth to the employment she alone can secure. ”

“ But should you begin with large or small means, in either case your prospects of comfort and happiness are very insecure, if you enter the married state unwilling to acquire that which every woman should know,—the art of housekeeping. In after life, when home cares may be less pressing, become lawyer, judge, or President, if you can; but surely young women can find noble work, sufficient for all their talents and energies, in laying the foundation of and securely establishing a well-ordered and happy home. ”

“ Two women can not live happily in the same house unless they share the cares and responsibilities, and the honors. Every young woman going into her mother-in-law’s home should be taught this fact. It would save many a tear and heartache on the part of the poor old mothers. ”

“ So long as families live each in a separate home there will be a vast amount of domestic work to be done in the home, and a great deal of this work being suited to women’s strength and capacities, it seems more appropriate, as well as more economical, that each woman should do the domestic work of her own home, and do it to her liking among her own children and her own possessions, rather than go out and [90] do another woman’s work for wages. ”

“ Even as such she has more practical claim to respect than the wife who does not do this work nor any other; who is not the servant of the house, but merely its lady; who has absolutely no claim to human honour, no place in the social scheme, except that of the female.
Thus we find that the influence of the home upon man, as felt through the home-restricted woman, is not always for the best; and that even, as supposedly increasing the woman's charm, it does not work.
What follows further of the influence of the home upon man directly? How does it modify his personal life and development? ”

“ In what way does a woman best benefit her family? By staying at home and doing what she can with her own two hands—whereby no family ever has more than the labour of one affectionate amateur can provide—or by enlarging her motherhood as man has enlarged his fatherhood, and giving to her family the same immense advantages that he has given it? We have always assumed that the woman could do most by staying at home. ”

“ A lady of great wealth, high position, and elegant culture, in one of our large cities, hired and furnished a house adjacent to her own, and, securing the aid of another benevolent and cultivated woman, took twelve orphan girls, of different ages, and educated them under their joint care. Not only time and money were given, but love and labor, just as if these were their own children ”

“ The fact that in the early Victorian period girls living much at home learned, almost insensibly, from their mothers the routine of daily duties in the house, has made elder women look askance on the lectures dealing with domestic economy which appear to them so needless, and has led them to foster the superstition that woman qua woman should be equal to any demand that may be made upon her as organiser of her own household. ”

“ "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. ”

“ Throughout the ages of patriarchal faith women have been confined in the home, so that an understanding of the needs of the home is in their blood. May not the old ideals remain for service and find expression in the new work? ”

“ If the lady of the house, with one servant, were content to live exactly as she did before; keeping the work within the powers of the deputy, she would be simply and absolutely idle, and that is a very wearing condition; especially to woman, the born worker. So the lady of the house, mingling with other ladies of houses, none of them having anything but houses to play with, proceeds so to furnish, decorate, and arrange those houses, and so to elaborate the functions thereof, as to call for more and ever more housemaids to do the endless work. ”

“ Therefore Us, by virtue of our spiritual authority that, although unworthily exercised, we address you in the current Lent, mothers, to exhort you to think about your dignity and social mission. We wanted to talk about women and their social mission, because never before were women's social activities so discussed about as is today. It seems as they should become men. They are taken from home and thrown everywhere, even municipalities and political parliaments; and the household without the woman becomes empty. The household is the kingdom of the woman. ”

“ Every mother has a field of usefulness at home among her own children; this is her peculiar sphere. Do not let me be understood to mean that woman should be a fixture in the house, to be tied up to a table leg, or to a wash-tub. I think many of our sisters stay at home too much. If they would make it their business to take more out-door exercise they would find it a relief to the monotony of household work. I do not believe that women should be tied up at home; but I say that home is woman's peculiar sphere. ”

“ In any case, there must be a cleanly woman to superintend the affairs of the house; and she cannot be made so by Act of Parliament! The Sanitary Commissioners cannot, by any "Notification," convert the slatternly shrew into a tidy housewife, nor the disorderly drunkard into an industrious, home-loving husband. There must, therefore, be individual effort on the part of the housewife in every working man's Home. ”

“ There is, among others, this fundamental difference between the business life of men and women. For men who pursue occupations outside the home, there are women to manage that home. For women who pursue occupations outside the home, there are, not men, but other women, to manage the home. The final domestic care of the world must come upon women. The final attention to social life must come upon women. In behalf of the women who are constrained, or who choose, to sacrifice their share in this part of the world's necessary work, some other women must do double duty. ”

“ Nature meant that women should have periods of quiet. Let us honor our own natures, exalt our own opportunities, love and lead our own lives, and so bless the world and the Republic through perfected homes.
I have considered this question mainly from the view-point of the wife and mother; but the home relations are vastly broader. In regard to their whole scope, some of the Suffrage leaders have uttered this dictum: "The isolated household is responsible for a large share of woman's ignorance and degradation." ”