She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.
The verse pictures the capable woman rising while it is still night to furnish food for her household and to assign work to her maidens, showing diligent care and orderly management of the home. Supplying that food is part of a wife's practical domestic responsibility and requires useful knowledge such as cooking.
Her true sphere is thorough knowledge and skill in every department of domestic labor, where she presides as queen in her own domain, fully competent to guide and instruct her children and to direct her servants and, if need requires, to supply the wants of her household with her own hands. That competence includes understanding the mechanism of the human body and the principles of hygiene, of diet and dress, of labor and recreation, and of the best methods of treating disease. By it she is able to provide wholesome and palatable food, to cut, make and mend clothing, to keep the home in order, and to nurse her own children in sickness instead of leaving them to stranger nurses and physicians. Such fitness is gained by practical training in which daughters from nine or ten years of age take a regular share in household duties in kitchen and garden, are held responsible for the manner in which the work is done, and are apprenticed to the mother to learn to improve time, so that they are fitted to become wives and mothers, heads of families, and useful members of society.
The verse pictures the capable woman rising while it is still night to furnish food for her household and to assign work to her maidens, showing diligent care and orderly management of the home. Supplying that food is part of a wife's practical domestic responsibility and requires useful knowledge such as cooking.
Her true sphere is thorough knowledge and skill in every department of domestic labor, where she presides as queen in her own domain, fully competent to guide and instruct her children and to direct her servants and, if need requires, to supply the wants of her household with her own hands. That competence includes understanding the mechanism of the human body and the principles of hygiene, of diet and dress, of labor and recreation, and of the best methods of treating disease. By it she is able to provide wholesome and palatable food, to cut, make and mend clothing, to keep the home in order, and to nurse her own children in sickness instead of leaving them to stranger nurses and physicians. Such fitness is gained by practical training in which daughters from nine or ten years of age take a regular share in household duties in kitchen and garden, are held responsible for the manner in which the work is done, and are apprenticed to the mother to learn to improve time, so that they are fitted to become wives and mothers, heads of families, and useful members of society.