Section I: The Domestic Traditions
Chapter IV: Domesticity as a Vocation
"Woman's work is a round of endless detail. Little, insignificant, provoking items, that she gets no credit for doing, but fatal discredit for leaving undone. Nobody notices that things are as they should be; but if things are not as they should be, it were better for her that a mill-stone were hanged about her neck. . . . A woman who is satisfied with the small economies, the small interests, the constant contemplation of the small things which a household demands, is a very small sort of woman. . . . A noble discontent, not a peevish complaining, but a universal and spontaneous protest, is a woman's safeguard against the deterioration which such a life threatens; her proof of capacity and her note of preparation for a higher."
—Gail Hamilton.
"That's what makes women a curse—all life is stunted to their littleness."
—From Felix Holt, George Eliot.
"Any industry, task, or occupation that deforms the hand and hollows the chest, mars the features and destroys the beauty, the health and self-respect of the workers—that makes them indifferent and careless to their personal appearance and cleanliness—is unprofitable, both for the worker and for the community. . . . Any form of woman's work, whether in the home or out of it, that produces similar results will soon come under the ban . . . whether that work be the slavery of the factory or the shop, the drudgery of the household, excessive childbearing, or the slavish care of more children than can be properly supported and given a civilized chance with the means at her disposal."
—Woods Hutchinson.
In the making of a human being there are three variables—what he was when he came into the world, what he found there, and what he made of it and of himself when he grew up. Boys and girls, if not precisely alike in the beginning, were probably substantially equal, the advantage of greater size in the one being made up in the other by finer nervous organization and endurance. What each sex found in our American world in the Nineteenth Century was, however, very different; for social tradition ordained a wide differentiation in nurture and habit, which was justified in theory by the sex-specialization of females. Neither the education nor the duties of girls, in spite of their special function, prepared them in any direct fashion for motherhood; rather, they were consciously designed to fit them to be domestic servers and housekeepers.
There had been a time in history not long past, when the choice of a vocation was confined to certain occupations open to the class in which men happened to be born, but in the new democracy every field was at least nominally open to any man. Women, meanwhile, whether married or not, whether likely to be mothers or not, were still limited to the group of occupations which could be carried on under the home roof. At the beginning of the last century these comprised a variety of crafts and manufactures, but in the course of fifty years the sphere of the domestic countrywoman was coming to be limited to a few miscellaneous and belated trades, which were still assigned to women merely because they were performed within the household.
Although it continued to be assumed that the static and limited condition of women was due chiefly to their primary function as mothers and nurses, an analysis of these purely domestic lives will show that a relatively small portion of women's time and energy was spent in actual mothering. Less than half the fifty years of her adult life were so consumed by the average woman; and in all but the largest families the wife actually occupied more hours per day in washing and laundry work than in the care of children. If the capacity to bear children had in fact incapacitated women for other physical exertion to the extent that it was always assumed it did whenever women wished to do anything outside the home, most families would have lacked food, clothing, and comfort for long periods of time.
From six to twelve children were born during twenty years to the average wife, and during those years she did most of the labor of the household, including a good deal of manufacturing now done in factories, with only such help as the older children could give. The life of my own grandmother was typical of that of many another well-to-do farmer's wife between 1825 and 1875, and an almost exact counterpart of that of Lucy Read Anthony, as described by her daughter.
"Lucy Anthony soon became acquainted with the stern realities of life. Her third baby was born when the first was three years and two months old. That summer she boarded eleven factory hands who roomed in her house, and she did all the cooking, washing, and ironing, with no help except that of a thirteen-year-old girl, who went to school, and did chores night and morning. The cooking for a family of sixteen was done on the hearth in front of the fireplace, and in a brick oven at the side. Daniel Anthony was a generous man, loved his wife, and was well able to hire help, but such a thing was not thought of at that time. No matter how heavy the work, the woman of the household was expected to do it, and probably would have been the first to resent the idea that assistance was needed."
Domesticity is here used for convenience to designate all the duties which a married woman of the past century was expected to perform. It consisted first of the physiological functions of wifehood and motherhood; second, of the handicrafts of a civilized household—cooking, sewing, washing, cleaning, and household decoration; and third, the social duties of hospitality and the cultivation of good manners. In the earlier part of the century it involved also the manufacture of nearly all the raw products of the farm into the necessary food, clothing, and bedding for a family of six to twelve persons. The household was then not merely a shelter and a boarding-house, but a miniature factory, to which the men-folk furnished the raw products, and over which the wife presided as the working boss.
The amount of labor, skill, and knowledge necessary to the successful performance of such a variety of duties may be imagined when one remembers that from this family-factory have already been differentiated the separate vocations of nursing, dressmaking, tailoring, knitting, laundering, and baking, every kind of cloth manufacture, and almost all the primary preparation of foods. If a woman really mastered to the point of competence the essentials of most of these handicrafts, she was necessarily strong, intelligent, and skilful. Under such circumstances the vocation of domesticity was an immense and stimulating field of action, and likely, therefore, to produce a high quality of mind and character.
In the attempt to measure the effect of domestic occupations upon women's capacity and character, it is difficult to find any perfect analogy with men's industries. Most of the occupations assigned to men had long ago been specialized into separate trades; while there remained to women, even after a considerable portion of the domestic processes had been transferred to factories, sev eral miscellaneous vocations which had no inherent connection except that they were undertaken under a single family roof. In this respect domesticity was heterogeneous in much the same sense that general farming was, and still is. Agriculture, as practised in America before the War, comprised several branches, which had no necessary relation except that all of them required the use of land. The raising of grain and hay, of livestock of the several kinds; the production of butter, milk, and cheese; the growing and marketing of vegetables and fruit; all required a vast amount and variety of technique and knowledge, but the farmer's education, like the housewife's, consisted in acquiring the traditional methods of several, if not of all these specialties. Although they involved such difficult scientific subjects as the chemistry of soils, the effects of tillage and moisture, the laws of heredity and breeding, the chemistry of milk and its products, the growth and fertilization of plants; there was no available fund of information and no opportunity for systematic education on these points. Each farmer started with his father's traditional ideas and methods; if he learned to think for himself, he varied them, made some experiments on his own account, and, if he were successful, was imitated by a few of his neighbors, thus promoting the progress of science. If he failed he paid a pen alty in a loss of profits and reaped the scorn of the neighborhood.
Housewifery, though as heterogeneous in character and traditional in method as farming, differed from it in several other ways. Though the farmer's work was from "sun to sun," the woman's work was never done. During all the years of child-bearing the mother added to a twelve-or fourteen-hour day of housework the nightly tending of children; and, in case of illness in the family, nursing as well. Toward the latter part of the century, the agitation by workingmen for a shorter day in other occupations reacted to shorten the farmer's day; and, coincidently, the removal of manufactures from the home lessened the amount of labor in the house. It did not, however, perceptibly alter the intermittent character of domestic occupations and, as a rule, it tended to make them less and less educative.
The domestic sphere was gradually being narrowed in much the same way as the shoemaker's. He had once been a highly skilled workman, whose trade demanded a knowledge of a number of skilful processes, from the tanning of leather to the designing of lasts. If he followed his trade into the factory he was reduced to performing a few monotonous operations requiring little intelligence; if he remained outside he became a handy repairer of half-worn footwear. Like the housewife, he was left with only the fragmentary processes of his trade, and those the least interesting, and gradually lost the stimulus to originality and skill which had been in itself an education.
Cooking, which was the most varied of the crafts left in the home, became more and more elaborate as women expended more time and thought upon it. Every housewife tried to vie with her neighbor in concocting some new combination of eggs, milk, sugar, and flour, et cetera; recipes became more complicated and laborious—though the food did not become more nutritious and digestible—until the principal literature of the self-educated woman consisted of cookbooks filled with hundreds of formulae. Such meager schooling as she received had no relation either to housewifery or motherhood. It was inevitable that when she had mastered the technique of ordinary homekeeping, whatever originality and ambition she might possess would have to be exercised within the limits of her sphere, and would, therefore, develop in the direction of elaboration of living. As we shall see in the chapters on dress, personal adornment and clothes became almost an occupation in themselves, engaging more and more time and attention. Like a squirrel in a cage, she must exercise herself by running around in the wheel contrived for her, instead of roaming freely at large to gather nuts against the winter's need.
Another simple difference between domesticity and farming—the difference between indoor and outdoor life—has produced effects upon women so far-reaching as to be incalculable. The farmer, as general agriculture began to be subdivided into special lines, concentrated his energy and technique on those to which his taste and his land were adapted. He was not shut up in the barn to devote himself solely to milking cows and currying horses and feeding the animals three times a day. Merely from a hygienic standpoint, housekeeping, as it became more narrow and more elaborate, became less healthful. Thousands of steps—patter, patter from one end of the house to the other, upstairs and down cellar; hundreds of mechanical operations—sweeping, dusting, beating of eggs, kneading bread, washing, ironing, and scrubbing; millions of stitches in sewing, mending, knitting, quilting—these and similar petty labors, varied by three meals a day and three piles of dishes to wash, and, mayhap, the care of a baby or two, made up the vocation of domesticity. It was a monotony of heterogeneous drudgery, comparable only to farming, and as much more enervating as four walls and a roof are than the blue sky, the brown furrow, and the live and growing world outside.
A few years ago two college women tested the ordinary household operations by the criteria of hygienic gymnastics. Beginning with the customary assumption that "gravity is the enemy of woman," they found that all the work of the housewife except scrubbing kept her on her feet excessively, that most of the arm and back movements were in a cramped and strained position; and that she walked from five to eight miles a day in dead, if not altogether bad, air—in short, that housekeeping was hard manual labor. Though every housewife knew this without scientific demonstration, it has not been sufficiently recognized that housework of the old-fashioned kind lacked fresh air, variety, and exhilaration precisely as factory labor does, and to a much greater degree than farming.
The mental element of joy in the product, which is the highest compensation one can have for any labor, was to a great extent lost in the repetition involved in domestic production. No doubt the woman who made the first chocolate cake or the first pumpkin pie got lots of fun out of it, and so long as she kept her reputation as the superior and original maker, she was stimulated to further skill. But no woman could keep up her enthusiasm for preparing potatoes three times a day, much less for washing the tri-daily dishes, any more than the ditchdigger could develop his mind and continue to lift with zest so many hundred shovelfuls of dirt during three hundred days in a year.
Work is, undoubtedly, the chief means by which human capacity is increased and moral perceptions lifted to a higher level; but drudgery—that is, the indefinite repetition of operations requiring the minimum of technique and intelligence—deadens the mind and, if pursued in the midst of filth and darkness, brutalizes the worker. In our day it is being recognized that in proportion as drudgery is done under healthful conditions and for the attainment of an interesting and worthy goal, it may become a means of self-development. Professor Lillien J. Martin made more than seventy-five thousand observations, extending over a period of three years, on one subject, in order to determine a certain fact in experimental psychology; in point of repetition it was as wearisome as if she had washed dishes three times a day for a lifetime; but in point of mental interest it had the zest of working in a new field, and for its goal the greatest intellectual joy in life, the making of a scientific discovery.
One further parallel may be drawn between domesticity as a vocation and the occupations of men. At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century the American family was still an industrial unit. All of its members were producers according to their age, sex, and ability, and all pooled their products and shared the results. Very little ready money was in circulation, and the male head of the family had relatively small chance to rob his dependents while living, although he might distribute his estate very unjustly after he was dead. When the family gradually ceased to be an industrial unit, the minor children began to control their own earnings as soon as they left home, and the husband sold the products of the farm or the business for money. But the women of the household, no longer economically important as manufacturers of raw material, were not in a position to sell their services in the public market. They were still producers, but only secondary producers, so to speak, by so much as a cooked egg is better than a raw one, and a clean sheet than a dirty one; and they were in consequence reduced to a position of quasi-peonage. Just as the serf of medieval times was at the mercy of his master-employer because he could not leave the land for another and better-paid job, so mothers and daughters became dependent upon the goodwill of the master of their household.
Nor did the fact that, unlike the peon, many a woman might receive more than the value of her service, alter her economic dependence. Greedy, idle, seductive females practised the arts of their kind to wring from industrious men a luxurious living to which they were not entitled; while the majority of hard-working, devoted wives were left without recourse against their particular supporter's notion of what they had earned.
How this situation worked out occasionally is illustrated by the following story, told by a lawyer about an old farmer's wife down on Cape Cod. The farmer died without a will, and his greedy heirs, grudging her the life-use of one-third of the estate, which the law gave her, managed to prove that the farmer had imposed upon her by an illegal ceremony of marriage, and that she, therefore, was not entitled to any of the estate. The Judge, thereupon, advised the old woman to bring in a bill for her services, for if she had not been his wife, the farmer was not entitled to have her do his housework for nothing. Accordingly, she brought in a bill at the current rate of wage for a domestic servant, which the Court allowed, and it took the whole of the estate to pay it. Of course, she had been "supported" all that time, but with the discovery that she was not the man's wife, it was also discovered that her support alone was not a full equivalent for her labor.
The same principle was put in a slightly different way by Higginson, when he wrote:
"A farmer works himself to death in the hay field, and his wife works herself wholly to death in the dairy. The neighbors come in to sympathize after her demise; and during the few months' interval before his second marriage, they say approvingly: 'He always was a generous man to his folks! He was a good provider!' But where was the room for generosity any more than the member of any other firm is to be called generous, when he keeps the books, receipts the bills, and divides the money?"
The economic disintegration of the Puritan-Colonial family in the last century resulted in taking away from the housewife one of the chief incentives of any labor, i.e., definite money compensation. Marriage, though nominally a partnership, left the second partner in the position of putting in her property and her labor, and then being obliged to trust the first partner to give her as much or as little of the increase as he chose. Stripped of its sentimental aspects, such a bargain was a much greater risk for the woman than for the man, and equally unjust, whether the wife got more or less.
The reaction of an occupation pursued through a lifetime is so tremendous upon the physique and the mental and moral development of men, that its effects are easily recognized everywhere. But in a country where a man is comparatively free to choose or to drift into the occupation to which he is suited, the affinity between a man and his calling would naturally reinforce his stronger characteristics, and become an element of general social progress. Men do better that which they are fitted for, and they are apt to like what they can do well. Now, the peculiar misfortune of women has been that, while the original field of domestic production was rapidly narrowed, social convention, during at least two generations, prevented them from engaging in any substitute for it outside the home. Although their primitive sphere was constantly shrinking they were not yet freed to find another. The theory of mankind and of the Church was still: all women must be domestic, whether married or single; whether by temperament maternal or celibate; whether adapted to domestic detail or not. The vocation manacled the woman, the woman could not choose what she liked, or what she was fitted to do.
The effect of this social coercion was to suppress initiative and originality to a degree beyond imagination. For it was inevitably the women of most active minds and of largest administrative capacity who found the limitations of housekeeping most irksome. Suppose every man in the world had to be a farmer, and could never break away into law or science or art or engineering or even literature, without paying a penalty in social ostracism, and—worst of all—in the sacrifice of a family and a home; suppose that he never received any wages directly, but was just "supported," and now and then accepted what his senior partner chose to give. Indeed, we need not suppose, for this was the state of a large class of men in the Middle Ages. But the historian calls them the "dark ages," and explains carefully that under such limitations the development of great men and great ideas was not to be expected. No more was it probable that domesticated women, inheriting an environment and a tradition of smallness, would show, even when the doors of opportunity were opened a little way, a high degree of talent in untried fields. It is only by some such analogy as this that we can realize the effect of housewifery in stunting women of exceptional ability who, conscientiously pinching themselves to fit their sphere, were unhappy or ill-tempered; or, if they had the courage to break through that domestic inclosure, found themselves pariahs, doomed to isolation, if not to failure, in the unfriendly métier for which they had no preparation.
When, toward the end of the last century, women first began to organize themselves into clubs for self-culture and social activity, they were ridiculed for their lack of ability to do teamwork. Their critics seemed to have forgotten that there had never been incentive or opportunity for cooperation toward larger ends, except in the sewing-bee and the Ladies' Aid Society. Miss Tarbell has clearly shown that the Civil War was the first occasion in which any large number of women came together outside the home to work for the public good. That excessive devotion to the need of her own family which was the glory of her womanhood prevented her from taking an interest in larger affairs. Just as the lawyer instinctively measured everything by the law, so the specialized domestic woman limited her thinking within the periphery of those matters which it was necessary for a woman to know. She took the personal view, because she had to—her happiness and comfort depended not on town government and trade, not on political theories and international quarrels, but on the will of the person nearest to her. In other words, her vocation was to wait upon and please a small circle of people, and therefore her intuitions in respect to personality were extraordinarily developed.
Many of the minor characteristics set down as peculiarly feminine are, in fact, the product of the universal domestic employment of women in past times; as, for instance, the proficiency in the observation and memory of details. Women remember certain personal details of indoor life for the same reason that the ornithologist sees and remembers the markings of every bird. This same man, however, would probably not remember the pattern of the wallpaper in his bed-chamber, nor be capable of choosing a tasteful necktie; while his equally capable wife could not tell a robin from a peewee, and yet could describe accurately the dress of all her guests at a tea party.
Women are precisely like men in that they follow the line of least resistance, and of greatest apparent self-interest. Since successful domesticity required the mastery of an immense number of petty details inside the house, and the attainment of order, cleanliness, and comfort therein, the mind of the homekeeping woman dwelt incessantly not alone upon these affairs, but also upon the persons whom they concerned. Formerly women could recall the marriage relationship of the whole family connection, and the number of the children; while many a man could not tell how old his wife was, nor whether the first baby was born in the old house or the new one. It is, indeed, no more masculine for men to be oblivious of domestic details than it is feminine to be master of them—it is merely human to be what one has to be in the station to which one was born and reared.
It is a natural corollary to this principle that the purely domestic woman of the end of the nineteenth century should have been quite as "eager in the pursuit of trifles" as the lady of leisure whom Mercy Warren complained of a hundred years earlier. Given a vocation which demanded incessant attention to a thousand small matters, even when the number of those affairs was diminished so as to greatly release the housewife, the average woman would still inevitably pursue trifles until there was both a chance and an incentive to follow larger things. Only a very exceptional girl would make a new path for herself because the cost of any departure from the sanctified conventions of women's lives was so tremendous. It cost a man something to refuse to treat other men to liquor in a country where that was the universal custom, but it did not make him a by-word or prevent him from marrying and having a home. And it is not exaggeration to say that nothing less than this was the penalty for any woman who broke through the appointed sphere and offered opinions on those larger questions relegated to men.
There were thus both negative and positive reasons for woman to become small-minded. On the one hand, the sole occupation of her life consisted of exacting, repetitious, and ephemeral things; on the other, until there was an imperative call to other vocations outside, she could not develop the larger mind and become convinced of the futility of the conventional methods of house-keeping. The more conscientious the housewife was, the more petty she surely became, devoting herself to the elaboration of food, clothes, decoration, and needlework in the effort to be the perfectly correct feminine creature.
Curiously enough, it was not purely domestic women who revolutionized domestic science in the last quarter of the century and relieved it of its terrible drudgery and picayune monotony, but rather thinking, educated women who, having escaped into a larger world of scientific, sanitary, and economic progress, looked back and, out of pity, began to rescue their sisters from the bog of household tradition. One woman, Ellen H. Richards, devoting herself to chemistry and hygiene, did more to make the home a livable place than a thousand other conscientious, devoted homekeepers, who remained imprisoned in the woman's sphere of her generation, and that without the sacrifice of any truly feminine quality. The "model domestic woman" is now generally the one whose methods are belated; who cannot keep her servants, and does not yet dream that this is the day of employés; who does her tasks in the old-fashioned way; who still thinks it shiftless to leave any of the laundry unironed; who balks at a patent dishwasher and a fireless cooker; and who has not yet found out that there is a whole library of household science with which she might educate herself and mitigate the endless pettiness of living.
It was inevitable, as soon as women in any numbers undertook work outside the home for wages, that they should begin to compare domesticity disadvantageously with other vocations. The first effect of this was that the American girl would no longer work out as a servant, and, when she married, would have as her social ambition the employment of some immigrant to do the more laborious and tedious things. The next and logical result was that a good many young women declined to keep house even for their husbands, and went to boarding; and that indulgent husbands, who preferred good-temper and dainty, agreeable companionship in a wife, encouraged wives to rid themselves of every form of drudgery. Whenever the wife had earned money before marriage she could not help measuring her wifehood in financial terms—whether she did any household labor or not—for she had been brought up on the theory that because of her potential motherhood she was "entitled to support." At the beginning of the present century not a few such women have become intelligent enough to question the tradition of economic dependence, and cannot keep their self-respect unless they give a full return for what they receive.
The "strictly domestic" woman is a rapidly vanishing type, eliminated by world-changes in social and industrial conditions, but it will be several generations probably before the effects of domesticity upon the character and mentality of women will disappear. Women of the more belated kind will continue to be petty, devoted to unnecessary details of dress and household affairs, timid, and unoriginal—the sport of hereditary and conventional forces which they do not comprehend. Of necessity, being out of touch both with the old and the new order, they will be discontented and will make the homes of which they are the mistresses as unsatisfactory as themselves. But in proportion as domesticity is remodeled and made tolerable by scientific administration, women, even domestic women, will cease to be petty, gossipy, unthinking servants of the household. There will be as great a revolution in the characteristics of the homemaking woman as there has been in the qualities of the farmer since the spread of agricultural science. It is significant that, as the traditional household labors are modified or vanish altogether from the home, wifehood and motherhood are seen to have no essential connection with sewing, cooking, or laundry-work under the conditions of modern life, and stand out as true vocational functions in themselves.