Ménage

“ The week's washing for the family she must do, the mending and darning for the household is her task, the children must be washed and clothed and properly cared for by her. Of her many duties there is no end. ”

“ If the management of a house be urged as more important than the management of an immortal mind, the situation of a housekeeper would have been more suitable than that of a wife or mother to the woman who offers this excuse. ”

“ Sometimes I shall go to a patient’s house, and nurse her there; sometimes—if her own house is unsuitable, or if she is a poor governess, or a worker who hasn’t got a home—I’ll take her in, and look after her in my own rooms. At other times I’ll have convalescents who want kitchen food and kindness. Sometimes I’ll have guests—poor, dull drones who are suffering from all work and no play, and dose them with kindness and amusement. Then I shall fed of some use, and that my house is doing good to other people besides myself. ”

“ If I meet with a laborer, hedging, ditching, or mending the highways, with his stockings and shirt tight and whole, however mean and bad his other garments are, I have seldom failed, on visiting his cottage, to find that also clean and [Pg 9] well ordered, and his wife notable, and worthy of encouragement. Whereas, a poor woman, who will be lying a-bed, or gossiping with her neighbors when she ought to be fitting out her husband in a cleanly manner, will seldom be found to be very good in other respects. ”

“ Here and there we catch a description of this simple, exhilarating, innocuously enterprising life, either in some Canadian settlement, or in the forests of America, or even in the Bush of Australia. There is rude health in all the family; housekeeping is a sort of perpetual pic-nic, full of amusing make-shifts; there is rudeness, but not barbarism; little upholstery, but wife and child are caressed with as much amenity and gentle fondness as in carpeted and curtained drawing-rooms. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Domestic life to the young and untried housekeeper is something of an ordeal. She may have had her own place in her father's home, her own special duties to attend to, even her own share of responsibility. Still, it is an altogether different matter to have the entire care of a household, to guide all its concerns, and be responsible for the domestic comfort of all within the four walls of the house. ”

“ He leaves the nats of the household to the especial care of his wife, who covers all the posts within the rooms with white cloth, so that they may be comfortable while sitting in their favourite places. To counteract the effect of the evil spirits who may wish to take up their dwelling within the home, the careful housewife keeps near at hand a jar of water that has been blessed, and daily sprinkles floor and roof for the protection of her family. ”

“ A man's whole household may have been swept off--young and old, babe and suckling, sister and brother, and aged mother, and wife, and children, and servant, and friend--every soul of them involved in one hideous, horrible calamity. The steward of the manor was not concerned with any but the head of the house--the tenant of the manor. ”

“ A little later, my husband secured the services of a very competent housekeeper, and my distresses and responsibilities were much diminished. After some years of this indulgence, I felt bound to make a second and more strenuous effort at housekeeping, and succeeded much better than before, having by this time managed to learn something of the nature and needs of household machinery. [p. 216]
As I now regard these matters, I would say to every young girl, rich or poor, gifted or dull: "Learn to make a home, and learn this in the days in which learning is easy. ”

“ One solitary old labourer, a dreary bachelor, inhabited, it is true, a corner of the old roomy house, calculated for the convenient accommodation of the patriarchal family of sons and daughters, men-servants and maid-servants, of which a farmer's household consisted in former days ”

“ 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. ”

“ The happy medium is secured, by a course of real kindness in manner and treatment, attended with the manifestation of a calm determination, that the plans and will of the housekeeper, and not of the domestic, shall control the family arrangements. ”

“ That a household which held its head so high should be content with a parlour furnished like a barn, sit down to meals scarcely better than the day-labourers' about them, and rest ignored by families of decent position in the neighbourhood, puzzled and irritated her. ”

“ Like a layman, he has his own domicile and fireside, his parsonage in the country with a garden, or an apartment in town—in any event, his own home and household, a servant or housekeeper, who is often either his mother or a sister ”

“ Then the thriftless young housekeepers from boarding-school life have no ability either to teach or to control their incompetent assistants, while ceaseless "worries" multiply in parlor, nursery, and kitchen. The husband is discouraged by the waste and extravagance, and wearied with endless complaints, and home becomes any thing but the harbor of comfort and peace. ”

“ Every thing will be right when we get to —— Street. The house, under this system of feeling, begins to wear a desolate look. Every thing is permitted, according to the old Scottish phrase, just to hang as it grows. The whole bonds of household discipline are relaxed. The servants, who are to be changed too perhaps, as well as the house, begin to do things any way, and yet the mistress hardly chides them. ”

“ But like a mother in the midst of her young daughters we have desired to stand, answering such questions as they would naturally ask, pointing out mistakes that they are likely to make, showing where the error lies, and trying to offer a remedy; not in household affairs alone, but in many phases of the duties that belong to the wife and mother as well as to the housekeeper. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There might always, in a country-house, be one or more young girls, according to the size of the establishment; to be placed under older servants, or be instructed by the mistress herself, in all household occupations, from the hardest work and most simple offices, to the more delicate arts of housekeeping, including needle-work. ”

“ Have you more trouble than your neighbour? You have lost your all—no, no, say not so; your neighbour has lost houses and lands, but his health has gone also; and while you are robust, he lies on the uneasy pillow of sickness, and watches some faithful menial prepare his scanty meal, and then waits till a trusty hand bears the food to his parched lips.
Do you suffer more than your neighbour? True; Saturday night tests your poverty; you have but money enough for the bare necessaries of life; your children dress meagerly, and your house is scantily furnished ”

“ I will venture to say that there are at least, to speak very moderately, a hundred houses where these humble lines will be read and discussed, where there are no servants except the ladies of the household. I will venture to say, also, that these households, many of them, are not inferior in the air of cultivation and refined elegance to many which are conducted by the ministration of domestics. ”

“ They don't know what us wants." Sympathy with, interest in the poor so as to help them, can only be got by long and close intercourse with each in her own house—not patronising—not "talking down" to them—not "prying about;" sympathy which will grow in insight and love with every visit; which will enable you to show the cottage mother on the spot how to give air to the bedroom, &c. You could not get through the daily work of the cottage mother—the washing, cooking, cleaning, mending, making. ”

“ The care of a modern household grows in difficulty. Although the housekeeper has been relieved of performing certain economic functions that added to the burden of her grandmother, her responsibilities have been complicated by a number of conditions that are peculiar to the modern life of the town. Social custom demands of the upper classes a far more careful observance of fashion in dress and household furnishings, and in the exchange of social courtesies. ”

“ A child in a fairly well-to-do working home, whose mother has been a servant, goes out to service with some knowledge of her work, but as a rule the conditions in cottages and town workers' dwellings are so utterly different from those in the homes of the well-to-do that the young girl can scarcely be blamed when she breaks and spoils and makes more dust and muddle than she clears away. ”

“ In one class, the father may be busy in his office; and the mother in ordering a large household, taking care of the poor in her neighbourhood, and in study or keeping up her accomplishments; while the boys are with their tutor, and the girls with their governess, and the infants in the nursery.—In another, the mother may be instructing her girls, while busy at her needle ”

“ The 'husbands' are above, or possibly beneath, the manly household duty of inspecting plumbers' work and drains. The 'housewives' also, occupied with elegancies, find efficient household work and care unsuitable; and fevers, typhoid, and diphtheria are allowed to decimate their families. Besides, the house in sanitary matters is not separate from the furniture that it contains, nor this, again, from clothing and the family that wear it. ”

“ With our volunteers, home claims must and should come first; and it is precisely those whose claims are deepest, and whose family life is the noblest, who have the most precious influence in the homes of the poor. ”

“ And yet Nature herself protested against making this woman a housekeeper. Even when a child, owing probably to hereditary heart-disease, she did not love to run and skip like other children, and as a matron, walking seemed unnatural and even painful to her. ”

“ I do not bring up either dressmakers, or waiting-women, or housekeepers, but women for modest and poor households. The mother, in a poor household, is the housekeeper of the family."
The spirit of the age and the fascinations of luxury in an agitated epoch were too strong for the determined and reasoned will of the legislator. ”

“ The lady of the household has for several days been storing all kinds of small things by into drawers and boxes, that they might the more safely be transported, so that the family finds itself already deprived of the half of those things which are necessary to comfort, and the whole of what minister to luxury. ”

“ So, an American mother and housekeeper, who looks at her position in the aspect presented in the previous pages, and who rightly estimates the long train of influences which will pass down to thousands, whose destinies, from generation to generation, will be modified by those decisions of her will, which regulated the temper, principles, and habits, of her family, must be elevated above petty temptations, which would otherwise assail her. ”

“ Her children she scarcely sees, and the management of her house is entirely removed from her hands. The housekeeper takes all the accounts to her husband, who meekly pays the same, and lives for the most part at his club, or at the houses of his various sporting friends. “Home” is for him a mere farce. ”

“ Unwilling to quit the village without first satisfying myself whether what I had seen was a solitary instance or a sample of its general state, or whether the extremity of poverty I had just beheld had arisen from peculiar improvidence and want of management in one wretched family, I went into an adjoining habitation, where I found a poor old woman of eighty, whose miserable existence was painfully continued by the maintenance of her granddaughter. ”

“ For each household held within itself, its own fountain of light.
Faithful was the rural housewife, taking charge of all intrusted things,
Prolonging the existence of whatever needed repair,
Requiring children to respect the property of their parents,
Not to waste or destroy, but be grateful for food and clothing;
Teaching them industry, and the serious value of fleeting time,
Strict account of which must be rendered to the Master and Giver of Life. ”

“ It is, indeed, not improbable, for there is in every clime the tradition of a time when household helpers were abundant, competent, and cheap,—a golden age when harmony reigned in the household and domestic discord was unknown. ”