seriously in some one department, as for a life-long vocation, so that whatever she undertook to superintend and provide for, she would understand in an exhaustive and masterful manner,—a study which might require from one to three years.[1]
The rich and prosperous everywhere will probably be a long time coming into co-operation, since they have very great comfort now, and will be loth to try experiments which might at first entail some sacrifice of it.
In country villages, where grocers and mercers are always from the "first families" and among the "solid men" of the place, their wives would not for long dream of supplanting them.
In our largest cities, where neighbours are strangers to each other, and acquaintances are often widely scattered, where, too, the retail trade is of gigantic dimensions, and in fact the basis of relation between large classes of the population, co-operative housekeeping could perhaps make but very slow headway.
A generation, then, is the least time that can be allowed for co-operative housekeeping to become general,[2] but even this, in our country of easily and constantly shifting business relations, would give ample time to our shopkeepers to find other avenues for their energies, and, in particular, some occupation more suited to their sex than the effeminate surroundings of a dry-goods store.
Men are very fond of twitting us women with desiring to leave our own "sphere" in order to lord it over theirs in a high-handed manner. I believe that nothing would induce the majority among us to enter their dusty, noisy, blood-stained precincts; but we should be exceedingly obliged if they would just step out of ours. Back, sirs,
- ↑ Gouffé, the great chef of the Paris Jockey Club, has lately published a magnificent cookery book, of which the soups alone number two hundred! How many soups does any ordinary housekeeper who reads these pages understand? Four, or perhaps six.
- ↑ Judging from the little impression that the co-operative store movement—begun twenty-five years ago—has made upon society, it will take indefinitely longer.
