Meanwhile, as an immediate measure of relief, suppose a dozen or twenty mothers in each town should agree to adopt a simple yet tasteful style of dress for themselves and their little girls. This would lighten, at once, their heavy burden of work, give them "time to read," and would be a benefit to those little girls in many ways.
Another way of immediate escape is by making the present race of husbands aware that their wives are being killed, or crazed, with hard work and care, especially husbands in the small towns and villages, and more especially farmers. In regard to these last, it is no exaggeration to say that their wives in many cases work like slaves. Indeed, this falls short of the truth, for slaves have not the added burden of responsibility. As things are now, the woman who marries a farmer often goes, as one may say, into a workhouse, sentenced to hard labor for life.
When these husbands permit their wives to "overwork," it is not from indifference, but from sheer ignorance. They don't know, they don't begin to conceive, of the labor there is in "woman's work." It is true that neither are merchant-princes aware of what it costs their wives to superintend the complicated arrangements of their establishments; to see that all the wheels, and the wheels within wheels, revolve smoothly, and that comfort and style go hand in hand; but let us consider now the farmers' wives, toiling on, and on, and on, in country towns, East, West, and all the way between. Their husbands, in not a few cases, are able to hire at least the drudgery done, and would if they only knew. A young woman from a New Hampshire village, herself an invalid from hard work, speaking to me of her mother, said, "She suffers every thing with her back. When she stoops down to the oven to attend to the pies, she has to hold on to her back, hard, to get up again." I said, "Why, I shouldn't think your father would let her make them."--"Oh," said she, "father don't understand. He's hard." One day I was sitting in the house of a young woman,--a fragile, delicate creature, scarcely able to lift the baby she was holding,--when her husband came in. He was a working man, tall and robust looking. He walked toward the pantry. "You mustn't cut a pie," the little wife called out laughing. Then turning to me, she said, with a sort of appealing, piteous glance, "He don't understand how hard it is for me to make pies." I know a young woman, not a strong woman, who, with a family of very little children, does her own work, and makes from one to two dozen pies at a common baking, "'cause hubby loves 'em." I know another, similarly situated, who gives her husband pies at breakfast as well as at other meals, because "he was brought up to them at home." Now, all these "hubbies" are loving "hubbies," but--they do not know. A friend of mine, an elderly woman lately deceased, came to her death (so her neighbors said) by hard work. "Killed with work," was the exact expression they used. She was a dear good woman; a person of natural refinement, of strict integrity, of a forgiving spirit, intelligent, sweet-tempered, gentle-mannered; everybody loved her. Her husband is a well-to-do farmer. He inherited money and lands, and has them still. His wife, who was every thing to him, whom he could not bear out of his sight, and for whom, if he had known, he would have sacrificed money and lands, is gone. But--he did not know. "Mother" never complained. "Mother" did the cooking, did the washing, scrubbed the floors. They had "company forever," the neighbors said. "Mother" received, with smiling hospitality, all who came. Help was hard to procure; still help might and would have been procured had the husband known the case to be, as it certainly was, a case of life or death. But--he did not know: so "mother" died of work and care.