are we dealing with
the incorrigible disposition of man to glorify the past? To the majority
of people their youth was an era of stronger, braver men, more
wholesome, beautiful women. People were better, times were more natural,
and there is a grim satisfaction in predicting that the "world is going
to the dogs." "The good old days" has been the cry of man from the very
earliest times.

Yet read what a contemporary of the housewife of three quarters of a
century ago says,--the wisest, wittiest, sanest doctor of the day,
Oliver Wendell Holmes. The genial autocrat of the breakfast table
observes: "Talk about military duty! What is that to the warfare of a
married maid of all work, with the title of mistress and an American
female constitution which collapses just in the middle third of life,
comes out vulcanized India rubber, if it happens to live through the
period when health and strength are most wanted?"

And then, if one looks in the advertisements of half a century ago, one
finds the nostrum dealer loudly proclaiming his capacity to cure what
is evidently the Nervous Housewife. In America at least she has always
existed, perhaps in lesser numbers than at present. And one remembers in
a dim sort of way that the married woman of olden days was altogether
faded at thirty-five, that she entered on middle life at a time when at
least many of our women of to-day still think themselves young.

It becomes interesting and necessary at this point to trace the
evolution of the home, because this is to trace the evolution of our
housewife. We are apt to think of the home as originating in a sort of
cave, where the little unit--the Man, the Woman, and the Children--dwelt
in isolation, ever on the watch against marauders, either animal or
human. In this cave the woman was the chattel of man; he had seized her
by force and ruled by force.

Perhaps there was such a stage, but much more likely the home was a
communal residence, where the man-herd, the group, the clan, the Family
in the larger sense dwelt. Only a large group would be safe, and the
strong social instinct, the herd feeling, was the basis of the home.
Here the men and women dwelt in a promiscuity that through the ages
went through an evolution which finally became the father-controlled
monogamy of to-day. Here the women lived; here they span, sewed, built;
here they started the arts, the handicrafts, and the religions. And from
here the men went forth to fish and hu