Chapter 18

The usual method of London housekeeping, even in the second ranks of the middle-classes, is for the mistress to give her orders in the kitchen in the morning, leaving the cook to pass them on to the tradespeople when they call. If she is not very indolent, and if she has a due regard for neatness and cleanliness, she may supplement her kitchen commands by going up stairs through some of the bedrooms; but after a kind word of advice to the housemaid if she is sweet-tempered, or a harsh word of censure if she is of the cross-grained type, her work in that department will be done, and her duties for the day are at an end. There is none of the clever marketing by which fifty per cent. is saved in the outlay if a woman knows what she is about, and how to buy; none of the personal superintendence so encouraging to servants when genially performed, and rendering slighted work impossible; none of that "seeing to things" herself, or doing the finer parts of the work with her own hands, which used to form part of a woman's unquestioned duty. She gives her orders, weighs out her supplies, then leaves the maids to do the best they know or the worst they will, according to the degree in which they are supplied with faculty or conscience. Many women boast that their housekeeping takes them perhaps an hour, perhaps half an hour, in the morning, and no more; and they think themselves clever and commendable in proportion to the small amount of time given to their largest family duty. This is all very well where the income is such as to secure first-class servants--professors of certain specialities of knowledge, and far in advance of the mistress; but how about the comfort of the house with this hasty generalship, when the maids are mere scrubs who would have to go through years of training before they were worth their salt? It may be very well too in large households governed by general system, and not by individual ruling; but where the service is scant and poor, it is a stupidly uncomfortable as well as a wasteful way of housekeeping. It is analogous to English cookery--a revolting poverty of result with flaring prodigality of means; all the pompous paraphernalia of tradespeople, and their carts, and their red-books for orders, with nothing worth the trouble of booking, and everything of less quantity and lower quality than might be if personal pains were taken, which is always the best economy practicable.

What is there in practical housekeeping less honorable than the ordinary work of middle-class gentlewomen? and why should women shrink from doing for utility, and for the general comfort of the family, what they would do at any time for vanity or idleness? No one need go into extremes, and wish our middle-class gentlewomen to become Cinderellas sitting among the kitchen ashes, Nausicaaes washing linen, or Penelopes spending their lives in needlework only. But, without undertaking anything unpleasant to her senses or degrading to her condition, a lady might do hundreds of things that are now left undone in a house altogether, or are given up to the coarse handling of servants, and domestic life would gain infinitely in consequence.

What degradation, for instance, is there in cookery? and how much more home happiness would there not be if wives would take in hand that great cold-mutton question! But women are both selfish and small on this point. Born for the most part with very feebly developed gustativeness, they affect to despise the stronger instinct in men, and think it low and sensual if they are expected to give any special attention to the meals of the man who provides the meat. This contempt for good living is one cause of the ignorance there is among them of how to secure good living. Those horrible traditions of "plain roast and boiled" cling about them as articles of culinary faith; and because they have reached no higher knowledge for themselves, they decide that no one else shall go beyond them.

For one middle-class gentlewoman who understands anything about cookery, or who really cares for it as a scientific art or domestic necessity, there are ten thousand who do not; yet our mothers and grandmothers were not ashamed to be known as deft professors, and homes were happier in proportion to the respect paid to the stewpan and the stockpot. And cookery is more interesting now than it was then, because more advanced, more scientific, and with improved appliances; and, at the same time, it is of confessedly more importance. It may seem humiliating, to those who go in for spirit pure and simple, to speak of the condition of the soul as in any way determined by beef and cabbage; but it is so, nevertheless, the connection between food and virtue, food and thought, being a very close one; and the sooner wives recognise this connection the better for them and for their husbands.

The clumsy savagery of a plain cook, or the vile messes of a fourth-rate confectioner, are absolute sins in a house where a woman has all her senses, and can, if she will, attend personally to the cooking. Many things pass for crimes which are really not so bad as this. But how seldom now do we find a house where the lady does look after the cooking, where clean hands and educated brains are put to active service for the good of others! The trouble would be too great in our fine-lady days, even if there was the requisite ability; but there is as little ability as there is energy, and the plain cook with her savagery, or the fourth-rate confectioner with his rancid pastry, have it all their own way, according to the election of economy or ostentation.

If by chance one stumbles on a household where the woman does not disdain housewifely work, and specially the practical superintendence of the kitchen, there we may be sure we shall find cheerfulness and content. There seems to be something in the life of a practical housekeeper that answers to the needs of a woman's best nature, and that makes her pleasant and good-tempered. Perhaps it is the consciousness that she is doing her duty--of itself a wonderful sweetener of the nature; perhaps the greater amount of bodily exercise keeps the liver in good tone; whatever the cause, sure it is that the homes of the active housekeepers are more harmonious than those of the feckless and do-nothing sort. Yet the snobbish half of the middle-classes holds housewifely work as degrading, save in the trumpery pretentiousness of "giving orders."

A woman may sit in a dirty drawing-room which the slipshod maid has not had time to clean, but she must not take a duster in her hands and polish the legs of the chairs; there is no disgrace in the dirt, only in the duster. She may do fancy work of no earthly use, but she must not be caught making a gown. Indeed very few women could make one, and as few will do plain needlework. They will braid and embroider, "cut holes, and sew them up again," and spend any amount of time and money on beads and wools for messy draperies which no one wants; the end, being finery, sanctions the toil and refines it; but they will not do things of any practical use, or if they are compelled by the exigencies of circumstances, they think themselves petty martyrs, and badly used by the fates.

The whole scheme of woman's life at this present time is untenable and unfair. She wants to have all the pleasures and none of the disagreeables. Her husband goes to the city, and does monotonous and unpleasant work there; but his wife thinks herself in very evil case if asked to do monotonous housework at home. Yet she does nothing more elevating or more advantageous. Novel-reading, fancy-work, visiting, letter-writing, sum up her ordinary occupations; and she considers these more to the point than practical housekeeping. In fact it becomes a serious question what women think themselves sent into the world for, what they hold themselves designed by God to be or to do. They grumble at having children, and at the toil and anxiety which a family entails; they think themselves degraded to the level of servants if they have to do any practical housework whatever; they assert their equality with man, and express their envy of his life, yet show themselves incapable of learning the first lesson set to men, that of doing what they do not like to do. What, then, do they want? What do they hold themselves made for?

Certainly some of the more benevolent sort carry their energies out of doors, and leave such prosaic matters as savory dinners and fast shirt-buttons for committees and charities, where they get excitement and _kudos_ together. Others give themselves up to what they call keeping up society, which means being more at home in every person's house than their own; and some do a little weak art, and others a little feeble literature; but there are very few indeed who honestly buckle to the natural duties of their position, and who bear with the tedium of home work as men bear with the tedium of office work. The little royalty of home is the last place where a woman cares to shine, and the most uninteresting of all the domains she seeks to govern. Fancy a high-souled creature, capable of aesthetics, giving her mind to soup or the right proportion of chutnee for the curry! Fancy, too, a brilliant creature foregoing an evening's conversational glory abroad for the sake of a prosaic husband's more prosaic dinner! He comes home tired from work, and desperately in need of a good dinner as a restorative; but the plain cook gives him cold meat and pickles, or an abomination which she calls hash, and the brilliant creature, full of mind, thinks the desire for anything else rank sensuality.

It seems a little hard, certainly, on the unhappy fellow who works at the mill for such a return; but women believe that men are made only to work at the mill that they may receive the grist accruing, and be kept in idleness and uselessness all their lives. They have no idea of lightening the labor of that mill-round by doing their own natural work cheerfully and diligently. They will do everything but what they ought to do; they will make themselves doctors, committee-women, printers, what not, but they won't learn cooking, and they won't keep their own houses. There never was a time when women were less the helpmates of men than they are at present; when there was such a wide division between the interests and the sympathies of the sexes in the endeavor, on the one side, to approximate their pursuits.

There is a great demand made now for more work for woman, and wider fields for her labor. We confess we should feel a deeper interest in the question if we saw more energy and conscience put into the work lying to her hand at home, and we hold that she ought to perform perfectly the duties instinctive to her sex before claiming those hitherto held remote from her natural condition. Much of this demand, too, springs from restlessness and dissatisfaction; little, if any, from higher aspirations or nobler unused energies. Indeed, the nobler the woman the more thoroughly she will do her own proper work, in the spirit of old George Herbert's well-worn line, and the less she will feel herself above her work. It is only the weak who cannot raise their circumstances to the level of their thoughts; only the poor who cannot enrich their deeds by their thoughts.

That very much of this demand for more power of work comes from necessity and the absolute need of bread, we know; and that the demand will grow louder as marriage becomes scarcer, and there are more women left adrift in the world without the protection and help of men, we also know. But this belongs to another part of the subject. What we want to insist on now is the pitiable ignorance and shiftless indolence of most middle-class housekeepers; and we would urge on woman the value of a better system of life at home, before laying claim to the discharge of extra-domestic duties abroad.

PAPAL WOMAN.

The wonderful instinct which has always guided the Papacy in distinguishing between forces that it may safely oppose and forces before which it must surrender, has just received a startling illustration in a scene reported to have taken place at the Vatican a few days ago. Rome may refuse all compromise with Italy, but even Rome shrinks from encountering the hostility of woman. The Brief of October last sounded, indeed, marvellously like a declaration of war; even in a Pope it argued no little resolution to denounce the "license of the female toilet," the "fantastic character of woman's head-dress," and the "scandalous indecency" of woman's attire. More worldly critics would hardly have ventured to describe a piquant chignon or a suggestive boddice as "a propaganda of the devil;" it will be long, at any rate, before censors of this class will meet with the reward of a deputation and a testimonial from the fair objects of their criticism.

St. Peter, however, we are adroitly reminded, after his miraculous delivery from prison by an angel, found an asylum among women; and, fresh from his troubles with the red-shirts of Monte Rotondo, the successor of St. Peter seems to have found himself wonderfully at home among the flounces that thronged the other day to his public audience at the Vatican. A hundred ladies--the presence amongst whom of a number of English Catholics gives us a national interest in the scene--came forward to express their gratitude for the censures of the Papal Briefs, and the adhesion of their sex to the orthodox doctrines of the toilet. The speech in which one of the fair deputation expressed the sentiments of her fellows has been unfortunately suppressed, but the letter of Pope Pius to the Bishop of Orleans explains the secret of this dramatic reconciliation, and the terms of the Concordat which has been arranged between Woman and the Papacy.

A common danger has driven the two Powers to this fresh alliance. If Garabaldi threatens the supremacy of the Holy See, the educational reforms of M. Duruy menace the domestic tyranny of woman. Woman sees herself in peril of deposition at home by the same spirit of democratic and intellectual equality which would drive the Pope from the Vatican. In presence of such a peril, mutual concession becomes easy, and the fair votaries pardon all references to their "propaganda of the devil" in consideration of a Papal assault on the "cynical writers who are desirous of attacking woman."

The motive of the Papacy, in opposing a system of education which emancipates woman from the intellectual control of the priesthood and plunges her into the midst of the doubts and questionings of sceptical man, is of course plain enough. We feel no particular surprise when the attendance of girls at the public classes of a Professor is denounced as tending to "despoil woman of her native modesty, to drag her before the public, to turn her from domestic life and duties, to puff her up with vain and false science." It is the adhesion of woman to this view of the case which puzzles us a little at first. We recall her aspirations after a higher training, and her bitter contempt for the unhappy censors who venture to remind her of certain primary truths respecting puddings and pies.

But the same problem meets us in other halls than those of the Vatican. Everywhere woman poses herself as a social martyr, as the victim of conventional bonds, as reduced to intellectual torpor by the refusal of intellectual facilities and intellectual distinctions, as excluded by sheer masculine tyranny from the larger sphere of thought and action which the world presents, as chained, like Prometheus, to the rock of home by necessity and force. It is only when some amiable enthusiast is taken in by all this admirable acting, and ventures to propose a plan for her deliverance, that one finds how wonderfully contented, after all, woman is with her bonds and her prison-house.

The philosopher who comes forward with his pet theory of the enfranchisement of woman, who recognizes the necessity for loosening the matrimonial tie, for securing to woman her property and its responsibilities, for levelling all educational differences and abolishing all social distinctions between the sexes, only finds himself snubbed for his pains. He is calmly assured that home is the sphere of woman, and the care of a family the first of woman's duties; the domestic martyr of yesterday proves from Proverbs and the _Princess_ that marriage is the completion of woman, and that her office is but to wed the "noble music" of her feminine nature to the "noble words" of the nature of her spouse.

In a word, woman knows her own business a great deal better than her friends. She does not believe in the intellectual equality which she is always preaching about, and when M. Duruy offers it, a shriek of horror goes up from half the mothers of France. What she does believe is that, in seeking the educational Will-o'-the-Wisp, she may lose the solid pudding of domestic supremacy, and domestic supremacy is worth all the sciences in the world. Her position, as the Vatican suggests, is a religious, not an intellectual one, and her policy lies in an alliance with the priesthood, whose position is one with her own. So woman makes her submission to the Papacy, and the Pope snubs M. Duruy.

It is amusing to see how limited, after all, a man's power, the power even of the stoutest of men, is in his own house, and to watch the simple process by which woman establishes the limitation. It consists simply in asserting a specially religious character for her sex. She is never tired of telling us that the sentiments and sympathies of the feminine breast have a greater affinity for divine things than the rougher masculine nature; that her instincts are purer, more poetic, more refined; that her moral nature has a certain bloom upon it which contact with the world has brushed off from ours; that while we coarser creatures are driven to reason out our spiritual conclusions, she arrives at them by an intuitive process reserved for the angelic nature and her own.

And on the whole man accepts the claim. He is bribed perhaps into allowing it by his own desire to have something at home better and purer than himself. It is a startling thing perhaps to say, but in ninety-nine homes out of a hundred real humility of heart is to be found in the husband, not in the wife. The husband has very little belief in his own religion, in his unworldliness and spirituality; but he has an immense belief in the spirituality and the devotion of the being who fronts him over the breakfast-table. He does not profess to understand the character of her piety, her lore of sermons, the severity with which she visits the household after family prayers, or the extreme interest with which she peruses the geographical chapters of the Book of Joshua. But his incapacity to understand it is mixed with a certain awe. He never ventures to disturb, by "shadowed hint" of his own thoughts about the matter, the "simple views" of his spouse. He adroitly diverts the conversation of his dinner-table when it drifts near to the fatal pigeons of Colenso.

Sometimes he bends to a little gentle deceit, and wins a smile of approval by turning up at an early Litany, or by bringing home the newest photograph of a colonial metropolitan. In one way or another he practically acknowledges, like King Cnut, that there is a bound to his empire. Over bonnet bills and butchers' bills he may exercise a certain nominal control. It is possible that years of struggle might enable him to alter by half an inch the length of his wife's skirt, if fashion had not shortened it in the interval. But over the whole domain of moral and religious thought and action he is absolutely powerless. Woman meets him, if he attempts any interference, as Christian martyrs have always met their persecutors, with outstretched neck and on her knees. She prays for his return to better thoughts, and the whole household knows she is praying for him. She listens to all his remonstrances, professes obedience on every point but the one he wants, and keeps her finger all the time on the particular page of Thomas a Kempis at which the remonstrance found her. Before such an adversary, there is no shame in a defeat.

It is not that on all points of moral or religious life woman professes herself above criticism; to the criticisms of her religious teachers, for instance, we have seen her singularly obsequious. Woman and the priesthood in fact understand one another perfectly, and a tacit convention forces woman to submit to censures so long as those censures are reserved for one topic alone. To religion woman makes the sacrifice of her dress. It is not that she seriously intends to make the slightest amendments, or to withdraw before the exhortations of her spiritual guide into poke bonnets and print muslins. It is a sufficient mark of self-sacrifice if she listens patiently to a diatribe against butterfly bonnets, trains, or crinolines, or even thanks her pastor for describing evening costume as a "propaganda of the devil." The very minuteness, in fact, of censures such as these, is a flattering proof of the spiritual importance of even the most trivial details in the life of woman.

When Father Ignatius informed mankind that the angels bent down from heaven to weep over the flirtations of Rotten Row, the smallest child on her pony felt her ride, and her chatter over her palings, invested with certain celestial importance. Criticisms, too, so strictly reserved for the outside of the platter, are an immense compliment to the inside, and it is something to listen to half an hour of spiritual reproof, and to be able to pass oneself triumphantly as a "Fair Soul" after all. There is nothing revolutionary in a mere border-skirmish, which leaves the field of woman's sway not an inch the narrower. It is another matter when M. Duruy calls on Hermione to come down from her pedestal of worship, and in the long run to abdicate. For equality of education would, of course, even if it did nothing else, make mince-meat of the spiritual pretensions of woman. It would be impossible to preserve a domestic Papacy with a more than papal weakness for dogmatism and infallibility, if woman is to come down into school and share the common training of men.

If women are to be educated precisely as men are educated, they will share the reasonings, the scepticisms, the critical doubts of men. There will be no refuge for praying sisters in that world of "simple views" from which they come forth at present furnished with a social and domestic decalogue whose sacredness it is impious to doubt or to dispute. In other words, the power which woman now exercises will simply crumble to dust. Whether she might gain a power higher and more beneficial to the world and to herself, is a matter which we are not now discussing. What is perfectly certain is that such a power would not be the power she exercises now. The moral censorship of woman over woman, for example, would at once pass away. It rests on the belief that women have higher moral faculties than other beings, and that their treason to this higher form of moral humanity which is exhibited in womanhood is a treason of deeper dye than an offence against morality itself.