Stories from Everybody's Magazine Part 19

1. A course in Salting Meat in the "powdering" tub.

2. A course in Smoking Hams and Bacons.

3. A course in Pickling Pig's feet and Ears.

4. A course in Headcheese and Sausages.

LIQUOR DEPARTMENT.

1. A course in Beer. The making of wort out of barley. The making of harm out of hops. The fermenting of the two together in barrels.

(This course is not so much given now in New England, but it is an immemorial heritage of the female s.e.x. Gervayse Markham, in his standard book, "Instructions to a Good Housewife," says about beer: "It is the work and care of woman, for it is a house-work.

The man ought only to bring in the grain.")

2. A course in Light Drinks, such as Elderberry Wine.

CREAMERY DEPARTMENT.

1. A course in Making b.u.t.ter.

2. A course in Making Cheese, Curdling, breaking curds in basket, shaping in cheese press, turning and rubbing cheese on cheese ladder.

CLEANING DEPARTMENT

1. A course in Soapmaking.

2. A course in Making Brooms out of Guinea-wheat Straw.

3. A course in Starch making.

4. A course in Cleaning.

(This last course is very simple. Having manufactured the things to wash and sweep with, the mere washing and sweeping won't take long.)

FRUIT DEPARTMENT.

1. A course in Preserving--everything that can't be pickled.

BREAKFAST FOOD DEPARTMENT.

1. A course in Mush and forty kinds of Bread--Rhineinjun (sometimes called Rye and Indian), bun, bannock, jannock, rusk, etc., etc.

LIGHTING DEPARTMENT.

1. A course in Dips. The melting of tallow or bayberries. The twisting of wicks. The attaching of wicks to rods. The dipping of them into the melted ma.s.s in the kettle. Patience in keeping on dipping them.

(Pupils taking this course are required to report each morning at five o'clock.)

2. A course in Wax Candles. The use of molds.

These departments might give a girl a pretty fair education of the hand and a pretty fair acquaintance with the technique and organization of the working world; but we haven't yet mentioned the biggest and hardest department of all.

Before mentioning it, we call attention to a picture reproduced in this article from a book published in the year 1493. The book was a French translation of Boccaccio's collection of stories called "n.o.ble Women." The picture shows a woolen mill being operated in the grounds of a palace by a queen and her ladies-in-waiting. It summons back the days when even the daughters of kings and n.o.bles could not help acquiring a knowledge of the working world, because they were in it. One of the ladies in-waiting is straightening out the tangled strands of wool with carding-combs. The other has taken the combed and straightened strands and is spinning them into yarn. The queen, being the boss, has the best job. She is weaving the yarn into cloth on a loom.

The daughters of the Emperor Charlemagne, who was a very rich man, learned how to card and spin and weave. n.o.ble women had to boss all that kind of thing on their estates. They lived in the very midst of Industry, of Business.

So it was with those early New England women. And therefore, whether well-to-do or indigent, they pa.s.sed on to their sons as well as to their daughters a steady daily lesson in the world's work. The most intelligent mother in the United States to-day, let her be kindergartner and psychologist and child-study-specialist as much as she pleases, cannot give her children that broad early view of the organization of life. The only place where her children can get it now is in the school.

On the first of January of this year Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, superintendent of schools in Chicago, took algebra out of the eighth grade of the elementary schools, and, in its place, inserted a course on Chicago. Large parts of what was once the Home are now spread out through the Community. The new course will teach the life of the community, its activities and opportunities, civic, aesthetic, industrial. Such a course is nothing but Home Training for the enlarged Home.

But we must go back for a moment to that biggest and hardest department of all in the old homes of New England.

"Deceit, weeping, spinning, G.o.d hath give To women kindly that they may live,"

said Chaucer in a teasing mood.

But spinning was a very small part of the Department of Textiles.

We forbear to dilate on the courses of instruction which that department offered. We confine ourselves to observing that:

First. In the Sub-Department of Flax, after heckling that flax with combs of increasing degrees of fineness till the fibers lay pretty straight; after spinning it into yarn on her spinning-wheel; after reeling the yarn off into skeins; after "bucking" the skeins in hot lye through many changes of water; and after using shuttle and loom to weave the stuff into cloth, the home woman of those days had to accomplish some twenty subsequent processes of bucking, rinsing, possing, drying, and bleaching before the cloth was ready for use.

Second. In the Sub-Department of Wool, in addition to being carders, spinners, and weavers, women were dyers, handling all the color resources of the times, boiling poke-berries in alum to get a crimson, using sa.s.safras for a yellow or an orange, and producing a black by boiling the fabric with field-sorrel and then boiling it again with logwood and copperas.

We pa.s.s over, as trivial, the making of flax and wool stuffs into articles of actual use. We say nothing about the transformation of cloth into clothes, table-covers, napkins; nothing about the weaving of yarn on little lap looms into the narrow fabrics for hair-laces, glove-ties, belts, garters, and hat-bands; nothing about the incessant knitting of yarn into mittens and stockings; nothing about a host of other details. They were for idle moments.

Sweet domestic days, when girls stayed at home and helped their mothers and let father support the family!

It seems as if even Rip Van Winkle, in his most shiftless mood, ought to have been able to support a large number of daughters under such conditions.

Does it astonish you that they matured young? There, all about them, from babyhood, were the basic processes by which the world was sheltered, clothed, and fed. Those processes were numerous but simple. Boys and girls observed them, absorbed them, through eyes, through finger-tips, all through those early years when eyes and finger-tips are the nourishing points of the intellect.

John Winthrop, the first governor of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony, was married at seventeen. His parents were not only willing, but aiding and abetting. They considered him a man.

Mercy Otis, in Revolutionary days, in Ma.s.sachusetts, the wife of the patriot, James Warren, and Abigail Smith, the wife of the future president, John Adams, both married before twenty. A study of their lives will show that at that age they were mature.

To-day, in Boston, a woman of twenty is considered so immature that many of the hospitals will not admit her even to her preliminary training for the trade of nurse till she has added at least three years more to her mental development.

Who has thus prolonged infancy; who has thus postponed maturity?

No individual.

Science has done part of it.

By the invention of power-driven machines and by the distribution of the compact industries of the home through the scattered, innumerable business enterprises of the community, Science has given us, in place of a simple and near world, a complicated and distant one. It takes us longer to learn it.

Simultaneously, by research and also by the use of the printing-press, the locomotive, and the telegraph wire (which speed up the production as well as the dissemination of knowledge), Science has brought forth, in every field of human interest and of human value, a ma.s.s of facts and of principles so enormous and so important that the labors of our predecessors on this planet overwhelm us, and we grow to our full physical development long before we have caught up, in any degree, with the previous experience of the race. And till we have done that, to some degree, we are not mature.

With this postponement of personal maturity, there is an even greater postponement of what might be called "technical"

maturity. The real mastery of a real technique takes longer and longer. The teacher must not only go to college but must do graduate work. The young doctor, after he finishes college and medical school, is found as an interne in hospitals, as an a.s.sistant to specialists, as a traveler through European lecture-rooms. The young engineer, the young architect, the young specialist of every sort, finds his period of preparation steadily extending before him.