Educating Girls | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 28, 1874

Educating Girls.

EDUCATING girls for household duties ought to be considered as necessary as instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and quite as universal. We are in our houses more than half of our existence, and it is the household surroundings which affect most largely the happiness or misery of domestic life. If the wife knows how to “keep house,” if she has learned how things ought to be cooked, how beds should be made, how carpets should be swept, how furniture should be dusted, how the clothes should be repaired and turned, and altered, and renovated; if she knows how purchases can be made to the best advantage, and understands the laying in of provisions; how to make them go the farthest and last the longest; if she appreciates the importance of system, order, tidiness, and the quiet management of children and servants, then she knows how to make a heaven of home: how to win her children from the street; how to keep her husband from the club-house, the gaming table and wine cup. Such a family will be trained to social respectability, to business success, and to efficiency and usefulness in whatever position may be allotted to them.

It may be safe to say that not one girl in ten, in our large towns and cities, enters into married life who has learned to bake a loaf of bread, to purchase a roast, to dust a painting, to sweep a carpet, or to cut, fit, and make, her own dress. It would be an immeasurable advantage to make a beginning by attaching a kitchen to every girl’s school in the nation.—Hall’s Journal.