and virtue, and food and health,
and food and thought. Indeed, many things are called crimes that are
not as bad as the savagery of an Irish cook or the messes of a
fourth-rate confectioner.

It must be noted that this revolt of certain women against housekeeping
is not a revolt against their husbands; it is simply a revolt
against their duties. They consider housework hard and monotonous and
inferior, and confess with a cynical frankness that they prefer to
engross paper, or dabble in art, or embroider pillow-shams, or sell
goods, or in some way make money to pay servants who will cook their
husband's dinner and nurse their babies for them. And they believe that
in this way they show themselves to have superior minds, and ask credit
for a deed which ought to cover them with shame. For actions speak
louder than words, and what does such action say? In the first place,
it asserts that any stranger--even a young uneducated peasant girl
hired for a few dollars a month--is able to perform the duties of
the house-mistress and the mother. In the second place, it substitutes
a poor ambition for love, and hand service for heart service. In the
third place, it is a visible abasement of the loftiest duties of
womanhood to the capacity of the lowest-paid service. A wife and
mother cannot thus absolve her own soul; she simply disgraces and
traduces her holiest work.

Suppose even that housekeeping is hard and monotonous, it is not more
so than men's work in the city. The first lesson a business man has to
learn is to do pleasantly what he does not like to do. All regular,
useful work must be monotonous, but love ought to make it easy; and at
any rate the tedium of housework is not any greater than the tedium of
office work. As for housekeeping being degrading, that is the veriest
nonsense. Home is a little royalty; and if the housewife and mother be
of elements finely mixed and loftily educated, all the more she will
regard the cold-mutton question of importance, and consider the
quality of the soup, and the quantity of chutnee in the curry, as
requiring her best attention. It is only the weakest, silliest women
who cannot lift their work to the level of their thoughts, and so
ennoble both.

There are other types of the discontented wife, with whom we are all
too familiar: for instance, the wife who is stunned and miserable
because she discovers that marriage is not a lasting picnic; who
cannot realize that the husband must be