Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 139, 2 September 1927, Page 5

Mundane Musings

Two Centuries of Women

One grows tired, at times, of the eternal "Woman” topics in newspapers, magazines and books. “Can Women Do This?” “Should Women Do That?” “Are Women as Good as Their Grandmothers?” and so on. j But two authors have lately taken up this threadbare subject, dug deeply about its roots, and produced the most fascinating book it lias ever been my lot to read, says an English writer. Its main preoccupations range from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and what a wealth of entertainment and information is here! A LADY OF LEISURE We are inclined, nowadays, while we look at some beautiful old house, or some exquisite example of the cabinetmaker’s art, survived from the past, to bewail “the good old days," and to remark that people had leisure then; that they lived. They did —some of them. There was an Eliza Spencer. daughter of a wealthy Lord Mayor, in the early part of the seventeenth century. She married a Lord Compton, and when her father died she wrote to her husband about the apportioning of her father’s wealth, which, of course, went to him, since no married woman, in those days, could own separate estate. Money then was worth, roughly. ! about nine times its present value, and Lady Compton asked for £2,200 a

year, £2,200 in her purse, and £IO,OOO to buy jewels. Also, she “must and will have” two gentlewomen to attend her, chambermaids and washitiaids for their service and for her own. a gentleman usher, six or eight gentlemen—pages, presumably—-and for each of these members of her suite separate horses, together with coaches for her ladies and herself, and a long list of luxurious furnishings for “all my houses.” NO SERVANT PROBLEM That is one side of the picture. Here is another: “There were no scavengers or street sweepers. All rubbish was thrown into the narrow streets, and lay in heaps close to the house doors ... No water was laid on in these houses. Many people had to fetch their own supply from the Thames, which acted both as reservoir and sewer.” Servants were paid from £ 2 to £6 a year, and were beaten as a matter of course. They were practically slaves, since, if they ran away from a bad employer, they were liable to be apprehended by advertisement and brought back to a virtual imprisonment for life. The modern housewife, lamenting the “drudgery” necessary to run a four or five-roomed flat without a maid, should obtain a copy of a book “Printed by Anne Griffin, for John Harrison, at the Golden XJnicorne, in Paternoster Row,” in 1637. It is called “The English Housewife,” and claims to contain “the inward and outward Vertues which ought to be in a complete Woman. As her skill in Physic, Surgery, Cookery, Extraction of Oyles, .Banquetting Stuffe, Ordering of Great Feasts, Preserving of all sorts of wines, Conceited Secrets” —I wonder what these were—- “ Distillations, Perfumes, Ordering of Wooll, Hempe, Flax, making Cloth and Dyeing, the knowledge of Dayries, Office of Malting.” etc., etc. Really one feels that life must be a slightly more comfortable and leisured business to-day.