The “Worth While” Sense
By Housekeeper
The housekeeper, especially one who does the work of her house unaided, needs a sense for discriminating between what must be done, and what she would like to do if she had time and strength. False ideals of what good housekeeping consists in are a snare to many. One can not tell the good housekeeper by her cellar, nor by burnished brasses, or shining front windows, or a well-blacked stove. She is to be known rather by her sense of the “worth while” as it applies to housework, and her ability of adapting means to ends. She needs to take the large view of the thing to be accomplished; namely, the well-being of the home. It is never for the well-being of the home for the wife and mother to be “tired to death.” Very often the woman who breaks down with work before she is forty is she who strives for some artificial effect in her way of living. She wants the interior of her home to be as spotless as Mrs. So-and-so’s; her children must be smartly dressed because they play with Mrs. Newrich’s. She doesn’t consider that Mrs. So-and-so has a grown daughter to help, and that Mrs. Newrich keeps two maids and a laundress, but sets herself the hopeless task of competing for the hollow distinction of being up to date. At the beginning of one’s career as a housekeeper the young woman may be able to carry on her work with clock-like regularity, and attain well-nigh artistic perfection. The perfectly kept house is a source of delight when resources are nicely balanced with expenditures, and efforts with results. But as cares multiply, and work becomes doubled and trebled, it is manifestly impossible for a single pair of hands to keep up the quality of the work. Now is the time to cultivate the housekeeper’s special sense of separating the necessary work from the less urgent and unnecessary, and slighting both the latter classes. The aim of such a one should be to have no piling up of work to be done in that “some day” that never comes.—Housekeeper.