o modern conveniences. That
meant, that all the water used in the kitchen and dwelling had to be
fetched from a well twenty feet away; that there was no drain or sink
or furnace; that stationary tubs had not been heard of, and the
washing was wrung by hand. The stalwart farmer "calculated to hire" in
haying, harvesting, planting, plowing, threshing and killing times.
Whatever might have been the wife's calculations, she toiled unaided,
cooking, washing, ironing, scrubbing, sewing, churning, butter-making
and "bringing up a family," single-handed, with never a creature to
lift an ounce or do a stroke for her while she could stand upon her
feet.

When she was laid upon her bed--an unusual occurrence, except when
there was a fresh baby--a neighbor looked in twice a day to lend a
hand, or Mrs. Gamp was engaged for a fortnight. It was not an unusual
occurrence for the nominally convalescent mother to get dinner for six
"men folks" with a three-weeks old baby upon her left arm.

Her husband was energetic and "forehanded," and without the slightest
approach to intentional cruelty, looked to his wife to "keep up her
end of the log." He tolerated no wastefulness, and expected to be well
fed and comfortable; and comfort with this Yankee mother's son implied
tidiness. To meet his view, as well as to satisfy her own conscience,
his partner became a model manager, a woman of "faculty."

I saw her last year in the incurable ward of a madhouse. From sunrise
until dark, except when forced to take her meals, she stood at one
window and polished one pane with her apron, a plait like a trench
between her puckered brows, her mouth pursed into an anguished knot,
her hollow eyes drearily anxious--the saddest picture I ever beheld,
most awfully sad because she was a type of a class.

Some men--and they are not all ignorant men--are beginning to be
alarmed at the press of women into other--I had almost said any
other--avenues of labor than that of housewifery. Eagerness to break
up housekeeping and try boarding for a while, in order "to get rested
out," is not confined to the incompetent and the indolent. Nor is it
altogether the result of the national discontent with "the greatest
plague of life"--servants.

American women, from high to low, keep house too hard because too
ambitiously.

It is, furthermore, ambition without knowledge; hence, misdirected. We
have the most indifferent domestic service in the world, but we
employ, as a ru