er average incarnation, she is not
only incompetent (alack, as I have argued, rather beyond her control);
she is also filled with the notion that a conscientious discharge of her
few remaining duties is, in some vague way, discreditable and degrading.
To call her a good cook, I daresay, was never anything but flattery; the
early American cuisine was probably a fearful thing, indeed. But today
the flattery turns into a sort of libel, and she resents it, or, at all
events, does not welcome it. I used to know an American literary
man, educated on the Continent, who married a woman because she had
exceptional gifts in this department. Years later, at one of her
dinners, a friend of her husband's tried to please her by mentioning
the fact, to which he had always been privy. But instead of being
complimented, as a man might have been if told that his wife had married
him because he was a good lawyer, or surgeon, or blacksmith, this
unusual housekeeper, suffering a renaissance of usualness, denounced the
guest as a liar, ordered him out of the house, and threatened to leave
her husband.

This disdain of offices that, after all, are necessary, and might as
well be faced with some show of cheerfulness, takes on the character of
a definite cult in the United States, and the stray woman who attends to
them faithfully is laughed at as a drudge and a fool, just as she is apt
to be dismissed as a "brood sow" (I quote literally, craving absolution
for the phrase: a jury of men during the late war, on very thin
patriotic grounds, jailed the author of it) if she favours her lord with
viable issue. One result is the notorious villainousness of American
cookery--a villainousness so painful to a cultured uvula that a French
hack-driver, if his wife set its masterpieces before him, would brain
her with his linoleum hat. To encounter a decent meal in an American
home of the middle class, simple, sensibly chosen and competently
cooked, becomes almost as startling as to meet a Y. M.C. A. secretary
in a bordello, and a good deal rarer. Such a thing, in most of the
large cities of the Republic, scarcely has any existence. If the average
American husband wants a sound dinner he must go to a restaurant to get
it, just as if he wants to refresh himself with the society of charming
and well-behaved children, he has to go to an orphan asylum. Only the
immigrant can take his case and invite his soul within his own house.

IV. Woman Suffrage