Is the average man’s impression the correct one?  Or are we dealing with the incorrigible disposition of man to glorify the past?  To the majority of people their youth was an era of stronger, braver men, more wholesome, beautiful women.  People were better, times were more natural, and there is a grim satisfaction in predicting that the “world is going to the dogs.”  “The good old days” has been the cry of man from the very earliest times.

Yet read what a contemporary of the housewife of three quarters of a century ago says,—­the wisest, wittiest, sanest doctor of the day, Oliver Wendell Holmes.  The genial autocrat of the breakfast table observes:  “Talk about military duty!  What is that to the warfare of a married maid of all work, with the title of mistress and an American female constitution which collapses just in the middle third of life, comes out vulcanized India rubber, if it happens to live through the period when health and strength are most wanted?”

And then, if one looks in the advertisements of half a century ago, one finds the nostrum dealer loudly proclaiming his capacity to cure what is evidently the Nervous Housewife.  In America at least she has always existed, perhaps in lesser numbers than at present.  And one remembers in a dim sort of way that the married woman of olden days was altogether faded at thirty-five, that she entered on middle life at a time when at least many of our women of to-day still think themselves young.

It becomes interesting and necessary at this point to trace the evolution of the home, because this is to trace the evolution of our housewife.  We are apt to think of the home as originating in a sort of cave, where the little unit—­the Man, the Woman, and the Children—­dwelt in isolation, ever on the watch against marauders, either animal or human.  In this cave the woman was the chattel of man; he had seized her by force and ruled by force.

Perhaps there was such a stage, but much more likely the home was a communal residence, where the man-herd, the group, the clan, the Family in the larger sense dwelt.  Only a large group would be safe, and the strong social instinct, the herd feeling, was the basis of the home.  Here the men and women dwelt in a promiscuity that through the ages went through an evolution which finally became the father-controlled monogamy of to-day.  Here the women lived; here they span, sewed, built; here they started the arts, the handicrafts, and the religions.  And from here the men went forth to fish and hunt and fight, grim males to whom a maiden was a thing to court and a wife a thing to enslave.

Just how the home became more and more segregated and the family life more individualized is not in the province of this book to detail.  This is certain:  that the home was not only a place where man and woman mated, where their children were born and reared, where food was prepared and cooked, and where shelter from the elements was obtained; it was also the first great workshop, where all the manifold industries had their inception and early development.  The housewife was then not only mother, wife, cook, and nurse; she was the spinner, the weaver, the tanner, the dyer, the brewer, the druggist.