Juniata sentinel and Republican. [volume] (Mifflintown, Juniata County, Pa.) 1873-1955, 1889-07-17
Our Home-Makers.

4 large number OF our house-keeperS
through their love and their conscience
and their ambition, take great deal
more upon themselves than they are
able to carry out without eventual ruin.
We have heard that in some portions
of the country, where nice house-keep-
ing is a proverb, the insane asylums
are filed with women Just at the mid
die of life, and almost always the wives
of men of limited means. 1t is evident,
If only from this, that these wives had
been enduring a strain they could not
bear, and the only strain that could be
so common a circumstance with them,
with SO universal a result, must be that
of the housekeeping. They were doubt
less every one busy IN the attempt not
only to make bricks without straw, to
keep up the same appearance as that
which was easy to their weather neigh
bors, and to obey the whims of those
about them, but also to satisfy their
own consciences and belief in duty to
the ancestral and traditional point of
instruction which has been handed
down from grandmother to grand
daughter among them for generations.
But none of these good house-keepers
took sufficiently into view that the con-
ditions of life are changed very mater
tally now from those which once pre-
vailed, that life is much more compli-
Gated and extended in its relations, and
immense wealth so frequent fact that
1t Is impossible TO compete with its eff
fects, and therefore a different view of
the worth ofthose effects must be taken.
1t Is really becoming necessary TO sim
plify the 'nduct of life, or else, if
these house-keepers do not, life will
abandon them altogether. When one
cannot have the ten servants of the
wealthy neighbor, one must not desire,
to the pitch of striving to attain them,
those effects wrought by ten servants,
in the house that has but one or that
has none; one must make up ones mind
that such effects are trivial and of no
real and permanent value, and then
make other things than these and their
like the symbols of value. II, on the
other hand, another neighbor, whether
Of larger or of smaller income than
ones own, insists upon giving her whole
body and being to the scrubbing, scour-
ing, setting to rights; to the darni g,
plecing, pinching, and procuring; to
the Ornamenting and furnishing; to the
studying and preparation of recipes for
the table; up early in the morning, late
at night to bed, hard at work all day,
absorbed IN body and soul-let the
error of those ways be observed, and
let 1t be understood that 1t is not good
housekeeping to wear out ones own
existence to the point of death or in
sanity in the pursuit of II. Something,
as We have said, is due to the house
keeper; she also has a body, she also
has a soul; and having a soul, it has
something the same right to be fed that
the bodies of the others have. But lit
tie food can that soul or intelligence
have when its owners thoughts and ac-
tions are bound up in a patch, n pep
per-box, a duster.
Moreover. The family deserve some
what more at the hCuse-mother' hand
than the material comfort of luxurious
cleanliness and clothes, and the devils
ing and elaboration of new and tooth
some dainties They deserve some
thing of her mental as well as of her
physical life, but they cannot have it if
she has no mental life. They are
wronSed in not having such life and
sustenance given to them; and in this
light also 1t is her duty to make the
household life simple enough to allow
her time to read and look about her
and see the world, and to have some in
tellectual and spiritual honey for them,
a. well rs that food which might be call
ed more heterogeneous, and which tends
to develop the animal IN them at the
expense OF the loftier being.-Bazdr.