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Page 4
If the house must be on the lowlands, seek a sandy or gravelly soil; and
avoid those built over clay beds, or even where clay bottom is found under
the sand or loam. In the last case, if drainage is understood, pipes may
be so arranged as to secure against any standing water; but, unless this
is done, the clammy moisture on walls, and the chill in every closed room,
are sufficient indication that the conditions for disease are ripe or
ripening. The only course in such case, after seeking proper drainage, is,
first, abundant sunlight, and, second, open fires, which will act not only
as drying agents, but as ventilators and purifiers. Aim to have at least
one open fire in the house. It is not an extravagance, but an essential,
and economy may better come in at some other place.
Having settled these points as far as possible,--the question of
water-supply and ventilation being left to another chapter,--it is to be
remembered that the house is not merely a place to be made pleasant for
one's friends. They form only a small portion of the daily life; and the
first consideration should be: Is it so planned that the necessary and
inevitable work of the day can be accomplished with the least expenditure
of force? North and South, the kitchen is often the least-considered room
of the house; and, so long as the necessary meals are served up, the
difficulties that may have hedged about such serving are never counted. At
the South it is doubly so, and necessarily; old conditions having made
much consideration of convenience for servants an unthought-of thing.
With a throng of unemployed women and children, the question could only
be, how to secure some small portion of work for each one; and in such
case, the greater the inconveniences, the more chance for such employment.
Water could well be half a mile distant, when a dozen little darkies had
nothing to do but form a running line between house and spring; and so
with wood and kindling and all household necessities.
To-day, with the old service done away with once for all, and with a set
of new conditions governing every form of work, the Southern woman faces
difficulties to which her Northern or Western sister is an utter stranger;
faces them often with a patience and dignity beyond all praise, but still
with a hopelessness of better things, the necessary fruit of ignorance.
Old things are passed away, and the new order is yet too unfamiliar for
rules to have formulated and settled in any routine of action. While there
is, at the North, more intuitive and inherited sense of how things should
be done, there is on many points an almost equal ignorance, more
especially among the cultivated classes, who, more than at any period of
woman's history, are at the mercy of their servants. Every science is
learned but domestic science. The schools ignore it; and, indeed, in the
rush toward an early graduation, there is small room for it.
"She can learn at home," say the mothers. "She will take to it when her
time comes, just as a duck takes to water," add the fathers; and the
matter is thus dismissed as settled.
In the mean time the "she" referred to--the average daughter of average
parents in both city and country--neither "learns at home," nor "takes to
it naturally," save in exceptional cases; and the reason for this is
found in the love, which, like much of the love given, is really only a
higher form of selfishness. The busy mother of a family, who has fought
her own way to fairly successful administration, longs to spare her
daughters the petty cares, the anxious planning, that have helped to eat
out her own youth; and so the young girl enters married life with a vague
sense of the dinners that must be, and a general belief that somehow or
other they come of themselves. And so with all household labor. That to
perform it successfully and skillfully, demands not only training, but the
best powers one can bring to bear upon its accomplishment, seldom enters
the mind; and the student, who has ended her course of chemistry or
physiology enthusiastically, never dreams of applying either to every-day
life.
This may seem a digression; and yet, in the very outset, it is necessary
to place this work upon the right footing, and to impress with all
possible earnestness the fact, that Household Science holds every other
science in tribute, and that only that home which starts with this
admission and builds upon the best foundation the best that thought can
furnish, has any right to the name of "home." The swarms of drunkards, of
idiots, of insane, of deaf and dumb, owe their existence to an ignorance
of the laws of right living, which is simply criminal, and for which we
must be judged; and no word can be too earnest, which opens the young
girl's eyes to the fact that in her hands lie not alone her own or her
husband's future, but the future of the nation. It is hard to see beyond
one's own circle; but if light is sought for, and there is steady resolve
and patient effort to do the best for one's individual self, and those
nearest one, it will be found that the shadow passes, and that progress is
an appreciable thing.
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