It was an eight-roomed farmstead, with no modern conveniences.  That meant, that all the water used in the kitchen and dwelling had to be fetched from a well twenty feet away; that there was no drain or sink or furnace; that stationary tubs had not been heard of, and the washing was wrung by hand.  The stalwart farmer “calculated to hire” in haying, harvesting, planting, plowing, threshing and killing times.  Whatever might have been the wife’s calculations, she toiled unaided, cooking, washing, ironing, scrubbing, sewing, churning, butter-making and “bringing up a family,” single-handed, with never a creature to lift an ounce or do a stroke for her while she could stand upon her feet.

When she was laid upon her bed—­an unusual occurrence, except when there was a fresh baby—­a neighbor looked in twice a day to lend a hand, or Mrs. Gamp was engaged for a fortnight.  It was not an unusual occurrence for the nominally convalescent mother to get dinner for six “men folks” with a three-weeks old baby upon her left arm.

Her husband was energetic and “forehanded,” and without the slightest approach to intentional cruelty, looked to his wife to “keep up her end of the log.”  He tolerated no wastefulness, and expected to be well fed and comfortable; and comfort with this Yankee mother’s son implied tidiness.  To meet his view, as well as to satisfy her own conscience, his partner became a model manager, a woman of “faculty.”

I saw her last year in the incurable ward of a madhouse.  From sunrise until dark, except when forced to take her meals, she stood at one window and polished one pane with her apron, a plait like a trench between her puckered brows, her mouth pursed into an anguished knot, her hollow eyes drearily anxious—­the saddest picture I ever beheld, most awfully sad because she was a type of a class.

Some men—­and they are not all ignorant men—­are beginning to be alarmed at the press of women into other—­I had almost said any other—­avenues of labor than that of housewifery.  Eagerness to break up housekeeping and try boarding for a while, in order “to get rested out,” is not confined to the incompetent and the indolent.  Nor is it altogether the result of the national discontent with “the greatest plague of life”—­servants.

American women, from high to low, keep house too hard because too ambitiously.

It is, furthermore, ambition without knowledge; hence, misdirected.  We have the most indifferent domestic service in the world, but we employ, as a rule, too few servants, such as they are.  It is considered altogether sensible and becoming for the mechanic’s wife to do her own housework as a bride and as a matron of years.  Unless her husband prospers rapidly she is accounted “shiftless” should she hire a washerwoman, while to “keep a girl” is extravagance, or a significant stride toward gentility.  The wife of the English joiner or mason or small farmer, if brisk, notable and healthy, may dispense with the stated service of a maid of all work, but she calls in a charwoman on certain days, and is content to live as becomes the station of a housewife who must be her own domestic staff.