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Worth Woman's While
God gives to every man
The virtue, temper, understanding, taste
That lifts him into life and lets him fall
Just in the niche he was ordained to fill.
—Cowper
The First Woman’s Duties.
We have been reading of the proposal in Germany
to have the girls of the land in culinary science just
as the boys are in the military, and it appeals to
ns as the most eminently sensible thing we have
known of any nation. Standing armies are very
well, but if there were no fightings within there
would be fewer warriors without—if the health,
and temper of the people were kept intact, dissen
sions would not so often arise and the resultant
call to arms; a people with a good healthy diges
tion is not easily provoked to become the aggressor.
A discontented stomach causes an inflammable mind,
and what is true of individuals is true of bodies.
It is a long established habit for women to re
gard themselves what one young woman called the
other day, “a poor down-trodden race,” but it is
a question if they are not largely the authors of
their own undoing. Eve was called into being only
when it was found not well for Adam to be alone
—plainly because necessary to his comfort and well
being—but has she been altogether worthy of her
trust? Man is first of all, an animal, that must
be fed and nourished as such. Every other creature
knows what is good for it, and what to steer
clear of, but his instincts are not so
keen, he is preserved only by the absence
of danger; appetite and the craving of the palate
will lead him to any gratification and its conse
quences—at whose door then lies the responsibility
and the culpability but at that of his Heaven ap
pointed protector and savior, his Eve?
Fancy a wife with a dyspeptic husband giving him
batter breads and underdone hominy and overdone
beefsteak for breakfast; and for dinner, pork, may
be, followed by rich pastry;— and imagine what his
state of readiness must be for supper of hot white
biscuits and cheese and more meat and preserves!
A perfectly normal digestion will assimilate very
nearly everything for a time: hut where will you
find it? And how long will it remain so under
such treatment as this? But what is the man to do?
He doesn’t know any better than to eat what is set
before him, asking no questions for conscience
sake.
Ninety-nine per cent., perhaps, of all the ill
health of us all can be traced to imperfect diges
tion, and while worry and sleeplessness and a rush
ing habit of living may be held to account for a
certain part of it, mainly all the rundown condi
tion and liability to disease common among us is
due to an overloaded stomach and a poorly nourish
ed body—to the neglected work of woman. Neglect
lies oftenest, we all know, in the failure to be in
formed, to know how to do, but the law of the
land does not excuse ignorance, and no more does
that of health. Ignorance is like the trail of the
serpent, or the pestilence that walketh in darkness,,
or the destruction that wastetb at noonday; it is
all of them. It is disease, or engenders it, the arch
enemy of health and of life. The human being
from the cradle to the grave is its victim. We heard
the other day of a woman who gave her baby a
cucumber pickle to cut its teeth on! And it brings
tears to the eyes to see how in nearly all homes
where are old persons, with poor teeth and en
feebled digestions, so little attention is given to
the preparation of proper food for them.
We visited in a house where the favorite dish
of a four-year-old child, morning, noon and night,
was hominy with catsup poured over it, a red, chem
ical-suggesting article so hot that the grown-ups
did not care for it; and his father, a chronic dys-
The Golden Age for May 3, 1906.
By FLORENCE TUCKER
peptic, was served fried meats and the heaviest
desserts. The child was irritable, and the mother
complained that he was restless at night, and the
father continued in ill health. Nor was it entire
ignorance on this woman’s part that she fed her
family—indolent and indifferent, her walk in life
was such that she could not escape having some
knowledge forced upon her. The child liked catsup,
and the father ate what was given him, she did not
trouble herself further; how things were prepared
was for the servant to see. In some households
it really appears the cook is the most important
member—in all it is so, if we but comprehend.
It is strange, when you think of it, that women
will entrust to servants the sacred duty of the health
of the family. Endless hours and care are given
tirelessly to the outside of the body, its comfort
and adornment, but the time and labor necessary
to the preparation of what goes into it, are re
garded as so much drudgery by no means to be
undertaken if a hireling can be had to lay the
burden upon. Cooking, to be done properly, should
be done scientifically, with knowledge of the sci
ence of foods and their preparations, and the work
should be that of high duty and love as well as
skill. What conscientious woman will leave to un
trained and careless hands the preparing of the
viands that will make either for the nourishment
of her children or for their irreparable injury? A
woman of our acquaintance permitted her little tod
dling baby girl to be around the kitchen, and the
negro cook; the servant fed her underdone hominy
and the result was the child was paralyzed for life,
and her mind never grew beyond her stunted body.
Infants and children are so perfectly at the mercy
of the mother’s carelessness.
The mother instinct that in sickness hovers over
the child for its preservation, faithful as the very
love of Heaven, will yet through ignorance, let the
parent, even while nursing and tending through
years of helplessness, give to the child the very
thing that keeps it ailing. A little one with a deli
cate stomach is permitted continued gratification of
a morbid appetite, and what avail then the care
and devotion? What good the application of all
means of healing and comfort ? Except actual neg
lect and cruelty there is nothing unkinder, nothing
more pitiful than improper and over feeding of the
tiny human beings who are not even as protected
as the young of animals. Nothing unless it is to see
an old person having to eat of the general provis
ion whatever its kind; for the old suffer the con
sciousness that the food is not suited to them and
with it the pain of submissive silence—for some
reason it is not their privilege to speak or assert
themselves.
Another responsibility the housewife bears, and
the usages of society make it heavy upon her, is that
of the safety of her guest. Who has not sat down
to the board of a friend and inwardly groaned at
the choice allowed him of certain disaster to him
self if be partake or offense to his hostess if he did
not? The requirements of accepted hospitality will
not permit him to refuse, and so he is hopelessly in
tbe toils of his inconsiderate entertainer. It is
more than inconsiderate, it is unkind and unfair
to invite one to food inconvenient for him. The
truly hospitable woman wishes only the welfare
and good of friend or stranger who sups with her,
and would have him go his way refreshed and nour
ished, yet how is that to be unless she consider his
possible weakness and provide for it—provide such
wholesome dishes as the reasonably healthy may
partake of with impunity?
And how is she to be able to prepare such with
out knowledge and experience?
We do not fail to recognize we are in the sad mi
nority, but none the less stoutly do we maintain our
ground that woman’s first and hishest duty is the
care of the physical lives, the bodies, of those en-
trusted to her; souls that must struggle for devel
opment in ill-nourished and stunted and enfeebled
bodies have not the show for this life or the next,
they would have had in well-builded and well-kept
temples—“your body,” says St. Paul, “is the
temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you,” that is,
of the soul. How carefully, then, should the tem
ple be guarded and tended, protected from foes
within which are more to be dreaded than without.
All praise, say we, to that wise German man, and
may he have the willing and devoted co-operation
of his countrymen! Cooking schools in our own
land are coming more and more into favor, and
with Germany taking the lead, we may look forward
to a day, far distant, perhaps, when part of every
girl’s education will be the training for the proper
feeding and nourishing of a household.
It is said that the manly kiss James A. Garfield
gave his aged mother before the assembled multi
tudes on the day of his inauguration, endeared
him to the people more than any other one act of
his.
When Mr. Longworth wedded with Alice Roose
velt be won a wife who not only could speak sev
eral languages, and shoot, swim, row and drive,
but could bake, sew and keep house. The president
having a profound appreciation for the domestic
side of life, and the things that contributed to the
making of the home, has always required that his
children shall neglect no useful art appertaining
thereto.
There is nothing noble in being superior to some
other men. The true nobility is in being superior
to your previous self.—Hindu Sayings.
A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; a
beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form;
it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures;
it is the finest of the fine arts. A man is but a
little thing in the objects of nature, yet, by the mor
al quality radiating from his countenance, he may
abolish all considerations of magnitude, and in his
manners equal the majesty of the world.
—Emerson.
Half-Way Town.
An easy road runs smoothly down
To Half-Way Town.
For everything that’s but begun,
And everything that’s never done,
Goes into Half-Way Town.
Half-finished walls are tumbling down
In Half-Way Town.
Half-finished streets are always lined
With half-done work of every kind;
And all the world just lags behind
In dreary Half-Way Town.
Keep straight along, and don’t look down
Toward Half-Way Town.
They say, if every one should try
To keep on moving, brisk and spry,
We should discover, by and by,
There’d be no Half-Way Town.
—Frank Walcott Hutt.
Mount Capulin, an extinct volcano situated eight
miles from Folsom, N. M., is said to be emitting
smoke and heat from a fissure broken in its side
by two distinct earthquake shocks. The mountain
is 10,000 feet high, and trees grow to the mouth of
the crater. It has not been in eruption for years.
No serious damage was done.