Ideal Housewives.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXIII, Issue IV, 23 July 1904, Page 64

Ideal Housewives.

Dorothea von Schlegel, the clever wife of a great husband, and the daughter of a great man. was often urged to lay down her knitting needle and take up her pen. She replied: “There are far too many books in the world and far too few’ stockings.” Mrs. Louise J. Miln,

iii “Wailings and Weddings of Many Climes,” says that this remark illustrates the point of view of many German womenWith m st German women housekeeping is both a science and an art. The woman who is daily and hourly engaged in science and art is not a woman of stagnant mentality. Her kitchen is her laboratory; l.er linen-room is her studio. The average German housewife does as much work as any, but she makes far less fuss about it than most. She does no dirty work. There is never any dirty work for her to do, for dirt is only matter out of place. The good German housekeeper never displaces anything, never allows anything to displace itself. It is a fine lesson in good breeding to see a German woman make a cake or brew a cup.

In the early seventies I knew’ a German family. From the breaking of their bread to tin* seeing of their bread baked, from the dining-room to the kitchen was an easy step for the child-stranger within those simple German gates. And 1 had my first and greatest lesson in eleg nee and the grand manner when I watched Frau von Ritter pickle peaches. It was a sermon on high thinking and right living- She was so cool, so dainty, so unilushed, so self-possessed, so cheery, but so dignified, so everything that 1 had supposed it impossible to be in a 1 itchen. Although I was only a little girl, I realised that this simple German housewife had in both her mind and her manner many fine and high traits, which were often sadly lacking in the

mothers of others of my playmates. Most of them were women of lavish wealth, but not one of them could ever hope to wear her diamonds with half the distinction with which this German woi'.r.'.n wore her spotless cooking-apron.