30. The Emancipated Housewife
WHAT HAS GONE on
in the United States during the past two generations is full of
lessons and warnings for the rest of the world. The American
housewife of an earlier day was famous for her unremitting
diligence. She not only cooked, washed and ironed; she also made
shift to master such more complex arts as spinning, baking and
brewing. Her expertness, perhaps, never reached a high level, but
at all events she made a gallant effort. But that was long, long
ago, before the new enlightenment rescued her. Today, in her
average incarnation, she is not only incompetent (a lack, 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 ease and
invite his soul within his own house.
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"In Defense Of Women" by H. L. Mencken, 1922