THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
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and make of the hearth-stone, not a public campus, but a stepping-stone to Heaven. The true girl, and especially the American one, if she speaks ten languages, and thinks in four dead ones, if she paints like a Turner or sings like a nightingale, will, when love comes, forget to be artist in remembering how to be woman.
At the present time the subject of cooking is demanding more attention than it has ever before in the history of America. Hunger demands the daily use of the knife and fork; custom and fashion decree certain kinds of living, and science enables us more and more to perfect our modes of life. But until the generality of people will consent to study the subject of cookery with unprejudiced minds, it must remain a necessary evil to a few, a means to a happy end by many. Mrs. Henderson has most truly written that the reason why cooking in America is as a rule so inferior is not because American women are less able and apt than the women of France, but merely because American women seem possessed with the idea that it is not the fashion to know how to cook; that as an accomplishment the art of cooking is not as ornamental as that of needlework or piano-playing. When cooking is recognized in its proper place as a science as truly as chemistry, of which it has so much in itself, as an art more far-reaching than many others in its results, and as delightful and becoming as being able to decorate the family sideboard with hand-painted china, then American women will not alone equal their French sisters, but should, by reason of their superior advantages in education, surpass them in this as in other things. French women know how to dress because they make a study of it. They are world renowned cooks because they make a study of that also. “ It takes more brains to prepare a good dinner than it does to learn French and German or to write a good essay.”
The domestic problem is as much the question of the day to the women of this country as the labor question is to the man, and assuredly of as much moment. In the Congress of Household Economics, held only a week ago in the Art Institute, the much-disputed question of domestic service was viewed in all its phases. And the answer to the problem, given in so many forms, could always be translated a higher, a better education—the education of our girls—not alone the few who are finished in fashionable boarding-schools, nor alone the many who crowd the colleges, although this step must to a certain extent begin right there. But the hundreds of “ home ” girls should be taught as well that cooking is an accomplishment every girl should pride herself upon possessing. When the generality of women who have homes to keep understand the art of cooking so that they are not dependent upon chef, caterer or cook for daily bread; when Dame Fashion has decided that cooking is as indispensable a part of the curriculum of study in all schools as arithmetic or literature; when girls of all kinds and conditions of life realize that cooking is not lowering to one’s dignity, then, and not till then, will the Sphinx have to bestir herself to propound another riddle to womankind. When our girls as well as our boys are taught that any honest labor raises, not lowers, their dignity and standing; when they realize, as only good sense or higher education can teach them, that people make their work honored or degraded by their manner of performing it, not their occupation renders them so, then girls, instead of rushing into mills and factories, will, having studied the art of cooking, prefer the more quiet, dignified and elevating occupation of cooking. But it must first be placed in its rightful position, and this reform be from the outside, in; from the top, down. It must be made the fashion. “ Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same thought occurred to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.” If this reform be needed, it must come. If a remedy for a crying evil be found in a private opinion, let it be known. Let it become the fashion.
When you consider the wonderful mechanism of the human body, its manifold requirements, and how wonderfully Nature has ordained our being, we can well be aghast at the accepted ignorance of the art of cooking as an art, and the accepted ignorance of our cooks. What man would permit the walls of his house to be laid by