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I.

In my childhood, even before my education had been begun, I was allowed to take part in the elaborate ritual which, in those days, marked the making of a fruitcake at Christmas time. Although I was blind, deaf, and speechless, the thrill of the occasion communicated itself to me. There were all sorts of pungent and fragrant ingredients to collect and prepare — orange and lemon peel, citron, nuts (which had to be cracked), apples, currants, raisins (which had to be seeded), and a host of other things. The family encouraged me to assist in these preparations, for they discovered that this was one means of keeping me, at least temporarily, out of mischief; and I, for my part, was just as eager to help, because I was always permitted to claim my wages in raisins.

All in all, this concoction of a fruitcake was a long and complicated task. If there had been some oversight in the preliminary planning and an important ingredient was missing, someone had to make a trip to town to fetch it. While the mixing process was being carefully attended to, a roaring fire was built in the stove. At last, when everything was ready and the fire was giving off just the right degree of heat, the great pan was placed reverently in the oven. The climax of the ritual was now at hand. The temperature had to be maintained for several hours with the utmost precision, and everybody had to walk about on tiptoe lest some unguarded step shake the floor and cause the precious batter, swelling with the heat, to fall. In the end, if all went well, we were rewarded with a very miracle of a fruitcake, without which Christmas would not have been Christmas.

To-day this ritual, so delightful to children, so exacting to the mothers who superintended it, is fast becoming a lost art. The modern housewife has only to go to her compact kitchen cabinet to assemble the ready-prepared ingredients, even to shelled nuts. If one should be lacking, she telephones to the corner grocery. The cake almost bakes itself in an automatically regulated gas stove, while the lady of the house goes about her other duties. Or perhaps she achieves her fruitcake by buying it in a tin container at her grocer’s. Whether she bakes it or buys it, her labor in either case is simple and quick compared to what it was even a few years ago.

The same thing may be said of almost every other phase of household work. Our grandmothers had to perform a tremendous amount of dreary drudgery in managing their homes. They were kept busy from morning till night, for those were the days when a woman’s work was never done. Since then, however, the machine age has come upon us, transforming the home no less surely than the factory. The housewife of to-day finds that many heavy responsibilities which she would have had to assume in any other age, such as the baking of bread and the weaving of cloth) have been lifted from her, and scores of other tasks which still remain in her province have been so simplified that they can now be performed with a great saving of time and effort. Electricity and gas and innumerable mechanical devices have reduced household labor to a fraction of its former burden. In consequence, the modern woman enjoys a degree of leisure which her grandmother could hardly have dared to dream of.

Whether women are using their newfound leisure to its full advantage is a debatable question, and one which I shall not attempt to discuss here.