THE HOME-WOMAN.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 1898, 24 March 1880, Page 3

THE HOME-WOMAN.

£“ Queen.”! In these days of progress and education, we are apt to look upon woman chiefly in her relation to society and the world. We are attracted by the epithets, the charming, the fascinating, the commanding, the intellectual, when applied to her ; but the designation of “ home-woman ” brings to many associations only of the dull and the commonplace. They think of her as one whose interests are circumscribed within the limits of her kitchen and her nursery, whose mind as a receipt book, whose affections are only raised a degree above the dignity of instincts. The ailments of her children and their bodily needs absord her more than the thought of their spiritual and intellectual development. She has little ambition for them; she is seldom puzzled by the complexities and possibilities of their natures, and ignores her role of influencing as well as that of training them, which should properly be hers. The pity of it, that the name “home woman” should bring with it little to charm, to attract, and to interest. Can it be that the word “ home ” is losing its hold upon our hearts ? Is it beginning to mean less to us ? It is a word essentially English ; and languages which have no exact equivalent for it have adopted it to express all it once signified to us. The French feel the difference between the “ohez soi,” the “coin du feu,” and “lahome.” The “ohez soi ” is where we receive society and make a show, or egotistically take our ease; the “coin du feu ” brings suggestions of chats and various comforts; but “le home” is something quite different. It is a woman’s queendom, with laws, delights, interests all its own, and all emanating from and ruled over by her. Sometimes, when we read the records of old times, or listen to our grandmothers telling anecdotes of those leisurely days—when to take a journey of thirty miles was a step involving much thought and preparation, and the housewife left her home with a qualm of fear that she might never return to it again—we fear as if, with all this backwardness, that there was yet a precious element in those days, gone out of ours. The house was more distinctly the object of the woman’s thoughts than it is now. Those thrifty, methodical times, with their household calendar of the washing, the mending, the baking day, &c., when hospitality, if less profuse, had a more excellent flavor about it—when, if there was somewhat more narrowness and formality in spirit and demeanor, there was more discipline of manner and a seemlier outward bearing towards holy things —their households bore the stamp more than now of a woman’s presence. We would not imply that education is to blame for the threatened fading away of the romance of home to our womanhood, but that the role of education in women’s lives is often misunderstood. The home - woman must always be the ideal type of woman, not only of the married, but also of the unmarried. It is the fashion to lament the number of the latter, and puzzle over their position, as over a serious social problem ; yet the majority of our dear old maids must be home-women, if the word is to continue to care for its comfort and tending. The teaching of other women’s children, the nursing of the sick, the caretaking of our beloved old ones, must still belong to them, It is because the “ homewoman ” is the ideal type of woman, that all must be done to develop her nature harmoniously ; because society is an outside interest to her, she needs the cultured intellect that finds delight in reading and study in her leisure hours; because she has the growing generation to influence, she should have her sympathies attuned to nobler things and to large interests j because she would be man’s companion, and the source whence is derived the order and economy of his household, she must have her judgment developed, her reasoning powers trained, her understanding braced, her imagination chastened, by the ideals which only a liberal education can supply. We would have women educated in every detail. It has been well said, no revolution could compare in its effects with those produced by education and training on our women. But the womanly element must not be taken out of it ; woman must aim to be the poet and artist in her life, before being the poet and artist in her works. Her duties and her enthusiasms must go hand in hand ; not duty here, and enthusiasm there. The vulgarest duties of life may be poetised by the spirit in which they are interpreted ; and it is in this account that, of all women, education is most necessary to the home woman. Nothing can seem flat or insipid to one who has a grain of poetry in her heart. The love of goodness and beauty brings charm to abide in right - doing. If we look about for an example of what we consider to be the true home-woman, we find it shining forth in the pages of a journal kept by a French woman, Eugenie de Guerin, written for her brother Maurice. Every incident of the simple, stately, patriarchal life led by the little family in the Chateau du Cayla is chronicled; the household perplexities, the letters received, the visits paid—few to the rich, many to the poor —the pilgrimages to the church hard by, are all recounted. There is excellent sense in every page that records the discharge of Mademoiselle de Guerin’s household duties ; she keeps the accounts, she can cook, she supervises the farm people, she nurses the sick. She throws her heart into every detail of her life, and invests it with a charm and an interest ; and all the while finds time for thinking and writing. Her literary genius has now been reoognised_ by her country. “Her diary reveals her 'inner as well as her simple, homely outer life—her wanderings on the hillsides and in the woods, with her thoughts for companions. The life of reading, writing, and thinking is of all others the one she would prefer to lead. An extract from her journal will paint her, poetic, cultured, and still the home woman to the heart’s core. “In the stillness of a life like this my spirit is happy, and, as it were, dead to all that goes on upstairs or downstairs, in the house or out of the house. But this does not last long. * Come my poor spirit,’ I then say to myself, ‘ we must go back to the things of this world and I take my spinning, or a book, or a saucepan, or I play with Wolfe or Tribly. Such a life as this I call heaven upon earth-*