Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 September 1884 — Literary Women and Cooking. [ARTICLE]

Literary Women and Cooking.

In a majority of the girls’ seminaries to-day the curriculum Includes demonstration lessons in cookery, dressmaking, millinery, and mending—a practice quite as absurd as it would be for Harvard or Yale to insist upon their students learning to shoe a horse, or make a pair of boots, or learn the tailor’s trade, and the secret of manufacturing straw hats. If there are good why an educated and intelligent young woman should learn dressmaking, then the same reasons apply to prove that the intelligent young man should learn tailoring. There’s no knowing what may happen, and he mnv some time have his bank robbed, or hfs ship may be wrecked and his cargo lost, or he may lose his clerkship and need to earn his living in some other way. Besides, a man should know how to make all his apparel, any way. If he never needs to do it the knowledge will not hurt him. If he does need to, it will be well that he learned in his youth. Ergo, every father should see to it that his son learns the tailor’s trade. This is a fair sample of the stuff and nonsense that is poured out about a girl’s education. Now there will never be any very general or leading improvement in the intellectual condition of women, nor will there tfver be evolved the ideal home, until society in general accepts the advanced position of Mr. Savage. A home should imply something more than merely a place to put into for repairs. One can get food and service from his hotel. His home should mean to him something more. Mrs. Stowe discovered long since that the barrier to high life of women in America was their mania for doing the impossible. It is a natural result, indeed an inevitable result, from the current state of public opinion. No woman who has a spark of delicate feeling, or of sensibility, fancies the role of exceptionability, and as being considered,' m some vague way, as not quite womanly, because she chances to prefer painting to pickles. No, not she, and she will do the pickles also, though she die in the attempt, rather than put herself out of the pale of the truly feminine. In her heart she may be unable to divine why puddings should be considered more womanly than poetry, but all the same she defers to popular tradition, and lives a fragmentary, spasmodic lise, with a constant and bewildering sense of its incompleteness. If social opinion had supported her in living for poetry alone, or whatever •other special endowment God had given her, she could have afforded to employ a champion maker of preseives, pickles, and .puddings. —Lilian Whiting, in Inter Ocean.