George Barr McCutcheon - "Quill's Window"

Charles Reade - "It Is Never Too Late to Mend"

Henry Handel Richardson - "Maurice Guest"

G. A. Henty - "On the Pampas"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: The American Woman\'s Home

C >> Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe >> The American Woman\'s Home




Those remarkable women of old were made by circumstances. There were,
comparatively speaking, no servants to be had, and so children were
trained to habits of industry and mechanical adroitness from the cradle,
and every household process was reduced to the very minimum of labor.
Every step required in a process was counted, every movement calculated;
and she who took ten steps, when one would do, lost her reputation for
"faculty." Certainly such an early drill was of use in developing the
health and the bodily powers, as well as in giving precision to the
practical mental faculties. All household economies were arranged with
equal niceness in those thoughtful minds. A trained housekeeper knew
just how many sticks of hickory of a certain size were required to
heat her oven, and how many of each different kind of wood. She knew
by a sort of intuition just what kinds of food would yield the most
palatable nutriment with the least outlay of accessories in cooking.
She knew to a minute the time when each article must go into and be
withdrawn from her oven; and if she could only lie in her chamber and
direct, she could guide an intelligent child through the processes
with mathematical certainty.

It is impossible, however, that any thing but early training and long
experience can produce these results, and it is earnestly to be wished
that the grandmothers of New-England had written down their experiences
for our children; they would have been a mine of maxims and traditions
better than any other "traditions of the elders" which we know of.

In this country, our democratic institutions have removed the
superincumbent pressure which in the Old World confines the servants
to a regular orbit. They come here feeling that this is somehow a land
of liberty, and with very dim and confused notions of what liberty is.
They are very extensively the raw, untrained Irish peasantry, and the
wonder is, that, with all the unreasoning heats and prejudices of the
Celtic blood, all the necessary ignorance and rawness, there should
be the measure of comfort and success there is in our domestic
arrangements.

But, as long as things are so, there will be constant changes and
interruptions in every domestic establishment, and constantly recurring
interregnums when the mistress must put her own hand to the work,
whether the hand be a trained or an untrained one. As matters now are,
the young housekeeper takes life at the hardest. She has very little
strength,--no experience to teach her how to save her strength. She
knows nothing experimentally of the simplest processes necessary to
keep her family comfortably fed and clothed; and she has a way of
looking at all these things which makes them particularly hard and
distasteful to her. She does not escape being obliged to do house-work
at intervals, but she does it in a weak, blundering, confused way,
that makes it twice as hard and disagreeable as it need be.

Now, if every young woman learned to do house-work, and cultivated her
practical faculties in early life, she would, in the first place, be
much more likely to keep her servants, and, in the second place, if
she lost them temporarily, would avoid all that wear and tear of the
nervous system which comes from constant ill-success in those
departments on which family health and temper mainly depend. This is
one of the peculiarities of our American life, which require a peculiar
training. Why not face it sensibly?

Our land is now full of motorpathic institutions to which women are
sent at a great expense to have hired operators stretch and exercise
their inactive muscles. They lie for hours to have their feet twigged,
their arms flexed, and all the different muscles of the body worked
for them, because they are so flaccid and torpid that the powers of
life do not go on. Would it not be quite as cheerful, and a less
expensive process, if young girls from early life developed the muscles
in sweeping, dusting, starching, ironing, and all the multiplied
domestic processes which our grandmothers knew of? A woman who did all
these, and diversified the intervals with spinning on the great and
little wheel, did not need the gymnastics of Dio Lewis or of the Swedish
Movement Cure, which really are a necessity now. Does it not seem poor
economy to pay servants for letting our muscles grow feeble, and then
to pay operators to exercise them for us? I will venture to say that
our grandmothers in a week went over every movement that any gymnast
has invented, and went over them to some productive purpose too.

The first business of a housekeeper in America is that of a teacher.
She can have a good table only by having practical knowledge, and tact
in imparting it. If she understands her business practically and
experimentally, her eye detects at once the weak spot; it requires
only a little tact, some patience, some clearness in giving directions,
and all comes right.

If we carry a watch to a watchmaker, and undertake to show him how to
regulate the machinery, he laughs and goes on his own way; but if a
brother-machinist makes suggestions, he listens respectfully. So, when
a woman who knows nothing of woman's work undertakes to instruct one
who knows more than she does, she makes no impression; but a woman who
has been trained experimentally, and shows she understands the matter
thoroughly, is listened to with respect.

Let a woman make her own bread for one month, and, simple as the process
seems, it will take as long as that to get a thorough knowledge of all
the possibilities in the case; but after that, she will be able to
command good bread by the aid of all sorts of servants; in other words,
will be a thoroughly prepared teacher.

Although bread-making seems a simple process, it yet requires delicate
care and watchfulness. There are fifty ways to spoil good bread; There
are a hundred little things to be considered and allowed for, that
require accurate observation and experience. The same process that
will raise good bread in cold weather will make sour bread in the heat
of summer; different qualities of flour require variations in treatment
as also different sorts and conditions of yeast; and when all is done,
the baking presents another series of possibilities which require exact
attention.

A well-trained mind, accustomed to reflect, analyze, and generalize,
has an advantage over uncultured minds even of double experience. Poor
as your cook is, she now knows more of her business than you do. After
a very brief period of attention and experiment, you will not only
know more than she does, but you will convince her that you do, which
is quite as much to the purpose.

In the same manner, lessons must be given on the washing of silver and
the making of beds. Good servants do not often come to us; they must
be _made_ by patience and training; and if a girl has a good disposition
and a reasonable degree of handiness, and the housekeeper understands
her profession, a good servant may be made out of an indifferent one.
Some of the best girls have been those who came directly from the ship,
with no preparation but docility and some natural quickness. The hardest
cases to be managed are not of those who have been taught nothing, but
of those who have been taught wrongly--who come self-opinionated, with
ways which are distasteful, and contrary to the genius of one's
housekeeping. Such require that their mistress shall understand at least
so much of the actual conduct of affairs as to prove to the servant that
there are better ways than those in which she has been trained.

So much has been said of the higher sphere of woman, and so much has
been done to find some better work for her that, insensibly, almost
every body begins to feel that it is rather degrading for a woman in
good society to be much tied down to family affairs; especially since
in these Woman's Rights Conventions there is so much dissatisfaction
expressed at those who would confine her ideas to the kitchen and
nursery.

Yet these Woman's Rights Conventions are a protest against many former
absurd, unreasonable ideas--the mere physical and culinary idea of
womanhood as connected only with puddings and shirt-buttons, the
unjust and unequal burdens which the laws of harsher ages had cast
upon the sex. Many of the women connected with these movements are as
superior in every thing properly womanly as they are in exceptional
talent and culture. There is no manner of doubt that the sphere of
woman is properly to be enlarged. Every woman has rights as a human
being which belong to no sex, and ought to be as freely conceded to
her as if she were a man,--and first and foremost, the great right of
doing any thing which God and nature evidently have fitted her to excel
in. If she be made a natural orator, like Miss Dickinson, or an
astronomer, like Mrs. Somerville, or a singer, like Grisi, let not the
technical rules of womanhood be thrown in the way of her free use of
her powers.

Still, _per contra_, there has been a great deal of crude, disagreeable
talk in these conventions, and too great tendency of the age to make the
education of woman anti-domestic. It seems as if the world never could
advance, except like ships under a head-wind, tacking and going too far,
now in this direction, and now in the opposite. Our common-school system
now rejects sewing from the education of girls, which very properly used
to occupy many hours daily in school a generation ago. The daughters of
laborers and artisans are put through algebra, geometry, trigonometry,
and the higher mathematics, to the entire neglect of that learning which
belongs distinctively to woman. A girl of ten can not keep pace with her
class, if she gives any time to domestic matters; and accordingly she is
excused from them all during the whole term of her education. The boy of
a family, at an early age, is put to a trade, or the labors of a farm;
the father becomes impatient of his support, and requires of him to take
care for himself. Hence an interrupted education--learning coming by
snatches in the winter months or in the intervals of work.

As the result, the young women in some of our country towns are, in
mental culture, much in advance of the males of the same household;
but with this comes a physical delicacy, the result of an exclusive
use of the brain and a neglect of the muscular system, with great
inefficiency in practical domestic duties. The race of strong, hardy,
cheerful girls, that used to grow up in country places, and made the
bright, neat, New-England kitchens of old times--the girls that could
wash, iron, brew, bake, harness a horse and drive him, no less than
braid straw, embroider, draw, paint, and read innumerable books--this
race of women, pride of olden time, is daily lessening; and in their
stead come the fragile, easily-fatigued, languid girls of a modern
age, drilled in book-learning, ignorant of common things. The great
danger of all this, and of the evils that come from it, is, that
society, by and by, will turn as blindly against female intellectual
culture as it now advocates it, and having worked disproportionately
one way, will work disproportionately in the opposite direction.

Domestic service is the great problem of life herein America; the
happiness of families, their thrift, well-being, and comfort, are more
affected by this than by any one thing else. The modern girls, as they
have been brought up, can not perform the labor of their own families
as in those simpler, old-fashioned days; and what is worse, they have
no practical skill with which to instruct servants, who come to us,
as a class, raw and untrained. In the present state of prices, the
board of a domestic costs double her wages, and the waste she makes
is a more serious matter still.

Many of the domestic evils in America originate, in the fact that,
while society here is professedly based on new principles which ought
to make social life in every respect different from the life of the
Old World, yet these principles have never been so thought out and
applied as to give consistency and harmony to our daily relations.
America starts with a political organization based oh a declaration
of the primitive freedom and equality of all men. Every human being,
according to this principle, stands on the same natural level with
every other, and has the same chance to rise according to the degree
of power or capacity given by the Creator. All our civil institutions
are designed to preserve this equality, as far as possible, from
generation to generation: there is no entailed property, there are no
hereditary titles, no monopolies, no privileged classes--all are to
be as free to rise and fall as the waves of the sea.

The condition of domestic service, however, still retains about it
something of the influences from feudal times, and from the near
presence of slavery in neighboring States. All English literature of
the world describes domestic service in the old feudal spirit and with
the old feudal language, which regarded the master as belonging to a
privileged class and the servant to an inferior one. There is not a
play, not a poem, not a novel, not a history, that does not present
this view. The master's rights, like the rights of kings, were supposed
to rest in his being born in a superior rank. The good servant was one
who, from childhood, had learned "to order himself lowly and reverently
to all his betters." When New-England brought to these shores the
theory of democracy, she brought, in the persons of the first pilgrims,
the habits of thought and of action formed in aristocratic communities.
Winthrop's Journal, and all the old records of the earlier colonists,
show households where masters and mistresses stood on the "right divine"
of the privileged classes, howsoever they might have risen up against
authorities themselves.

The first consequence of this state of things was a universal rejection
of domestic service in all classes of American-born society. For a
generation or two there was, indeed, a sort of interchange of family
strength,--sons and daughters engaging in the service of neighboring
families, in default of a sufficient working-force of their own, but
always on conditions of strict equality. The assistant was to share
the table, the family sitting-room, and every honor and attention that
might be claimed by son or daughter. When families increased in
refinement and education so as to make these conditions of close
intimacy with more uncultured neighbors disagreeable, they had to
choose between such intimacies and the performance of their own domestic
toil. No wages could induce a son or daughter of New-England to take
the condition of a servant on terms which they thought applicable to
that of a slave. The slightest hint of a separate table was resented
as an insult; not to enter the front door, and not to sit in the front
parlor on state occasions, was bitterly commented on as a personal
indignity.

The well-taught, self-respecting daughters of farmers, the class most
valuable in domestic service, gradually retired from it. They preferred
any other employment, however laborious. Beyond all doubt, the labors
of a well-regulated family are more healthy, more cheerful, more,
interesting, because less monotonous, than the mechanical toils of a
factory; yet the girls of New-England, with one consent, preferred the
factory, and left the whole business of domestic service to a foreign
population; and they did it mainly because they would not take positions
in families as an inferior laboring-class by the side of others of
their own age who assumed as their prerogative to live without labor.

"I can't let you have one of my daughters," said an energetic matron
to her neighbor from the city, who was seeking for a servant in her
summer vacation; "if you hadn't daughters of your own, may be I would;
but my girls are not going to work so that your girls may live in
idleness."

It was vain to offer money. "We don't need your money, ma'am; we can
support ourselves in other ways; my girls can braid straw, and bind
shoes, but they are not going to be slaves to any body."

In the Irish and German servants who took the place of Americans in
families, there was, to begin with, the tradition of education in favor
of a higher class; but even the foreign population became more or less
infected with the spirit of democracy. They came to this country with
vague notions of freedom and equality, and in ignorant and uncultivated
people such ideas are often more unreasonable for being vague. They
did not, indeed, claim a seat at the table and in the parlor, but they
repudiated many of those habits of respect and courtesy which belonged
to their former condition, and asserted their own will and way in the
round, unvarnished phrase which they supposed to be their right as
republican citizens. Life became a sort of domestic wrangle and struggle
between the employers, who secretly confessed their weakness, but
endeavored openly to assume the air and bearing of authority, and the
employed, who knew their power and insisted on their privileges.

From this cause domestic service in America has had less of mutual
kindliness titan in old countries. Its terms have been so ill-
understood and defined that both parties have assumed the defensive;
and a common topic of conversation in American female society has often
been the general servile war which in one form or another was going
on in their different families--a war as interminable as would be a
struggle between aristocracy and common people, undefined by any bill
of rights or constitution, and therefore opening fields for endless
disputes.

In England, the class who go to service _are_ a class, and service
is a profession; the distance between them and their employers is so
marked and defined, and all the customs and requirements of the position
are so perfectly understood, that the master or mistress has no fear
of being compromised by condescension, and no need of the external
voice or air of authority. The higher up in the social scale one goes,
the more courteous seems to become the intercourse of master and
servant; the more perfect and real the power, the more is it veiled
in outward expression--commands are phrased as requests, and gentleness
of voice and manner covers an authority which no one would think of
offending without trembling.

But in America all is undefined. In the first place, there is no class
who mean to make domestic service a profession to live and die in. It
is universally an expedient, a stepping-stone to something higher;
your best servants always have some thing else in view as soon as they
have laid by a little money; some form of independence which shall
give them a home of their own is constantly in mind. Families look
forward to the buying of landed homesteads, and the scattered brothers
and sisters work awhile in domestic service to gain, the common fund
for the purpose; your seamstress intends to become a dressmaker, and
take in work at her own house; your cook is pondering a marriage with
the baker, which shall transfer her toils from your cooking-stove to
her own.

Young women are eagerly rushing into every other employment, till
feminine trades and callings are all over-stocked. We are continually
harrowed with tales of the sufferings of distressed needle-women, of
the exactions, and extortions practiced on the frail sex in the many
branches of labor and trade at which they try their hands; and yet
women will encounter all these chances of ruin and starvation rather
than make up their minds to permanent domestic service.

Now, what is the matter with domestic service? One would think, on the
face of it, that a calling which gives a settled home, a comfortable
room, rent-free, with fire and lights, good board and lodging, and
steady, well-paid wages, would certainly offer more attractions than
the making of shirts for tenpence, with all the risks of providing
one's own sustenance and shelter.

Is it not mainly from the want of a definite idea of the true position
of a servant under our democratic institutions that domestic service
is so shunned and avoided in America, and that it is the very last
thing which an intelligent young woman will look to for a living? It
is more the want of personal respect toward, those in that position
than the labor incident to it which repels our people from it. Many
would be willing to perform these labors, but they are not willing to
place themselves in a situation where their self-respect is hourly
wounded by the implication of a degree of inferiority, _which does
not follow any kind of labor or service in this country but that of
the family_.

There exists in the minds of employers an unsuspected spirit of
superiority, which is stimulated into an active form by the resistance
which democracy inspires in the working-class. Many families think of
servants only as a necessary evil, their wages as exactions, and all
that is allowed them as so much taken from the family; and they seek
in every way to get from them as much and to give them as little as
possible. Their rooms are the neglected, ill-furnished, incommodious
ones--and the kitchen is the most cheerless and comfortless place in
the house.

Other families, more good-natured and liberal, provide their domestics
with more suitable accommodations, and are more indulgent; but there
is still a latent spirit of something like contempt for the position.
That they treat their servants with so much consideration seems to
them a merit entitling them to the most prostrate gratitude; and they
are constantly disappointed and shocked at that want of sense of
inferiority on the part of these people which leads them to appropriate
pleasant rooms, good furniture, and good living as mere matters of
common justice.

It seems to be a constant surprise to some employers that servants
should insist on having the same human wants as themselves. Ladles who
yawn in their elegantly furnished parlors, among books and pictures,
if they have not company, parties, or opera to diversify the evening,
seem astonished and half indignant that cook and chambermaid are more
disposed to go out for an evening gossip than to sit on hard chairs
in the kitchen where they have been toiling all day. The pretty
chambermaid's anxieties about her dress, the minutes she spends at her
small and not very clear mirror, are sneeringly noticed by those whose
toilet-cares take up serious hours; and the question has never
apparently occurred to them why a serving-maid should not want to look
pretty as well as her mistress. She is a woman as well as they, with,
all a woman's wants and weaknesses; and her dress is as much to her
as theirs to them.

A vast deal of trouble among servants arises; from impertinent
interferences and petty tyrannical enactions on the part of employers.
Now, the authority of the master and mistress of a house in regard to
their domestics extends simply to the things they have contracted to
do and the hours during which they have contracted to serve; otherwise
than this, they have no more right to interfere with them in the
disposal of their time than with any mechanic whom they employ. They
have, indeed, a right to regulate the hours of their own household,
and servants can choose between conformity to these hours and the loss
of their situation; but, within reasonable limits, their right to come
and go at their own discretion, in their own time, should be
unquestioned.

If employers are troubled by the fondness of their servants for dancing,
evening company, and late hours, the proper mode of proceeding is to
make these matters a subject of distinct contract in hiring. The more
strictly and perfectly the business matters of the first engagement
of domestics are conducted, the more likelihood there is of mutual
quiet and satisfaction in the relation. It is quite competent to every
housekeeper to say what practices are or are not consistent with the
rules of her family, and what will be inconsistent with the service
for which she agrees to pay. It is much better to regulate such affairs
by cool contract in the outset than by warm altercations and protracted
domestic battles.

As to the terms of social intercourse, it seems somehow to be settled
in the minds of many employers that their servants owe them and their
family more respect than they and the family owe to the servants. But
do they? What is the relation of servant to employer in a democratic
country? Precisely that of a person who for money performs any kind
of service for you. The carpenter comes into your house to put up a
set of shelves--the cook comes into your kitchen to cook your dinner.
You never think that the carpenter owes you any more respect than you
owe to him because he is in your house doing your behests; he is your
fellow-citizen, you treat him with respect, you expect to be treated
with respect by him. You have a claim on him that he shall do your
work according to your directions--no more.