PIONEER HOME LIFE
MARRIAGE AND HOUSEKEEPING THEN AND NOW
Some strenuous efforts have been made by feather- headed philosophers
to establish a free-love system—a sort of fast and loose plan of
playing at honeymoon— but the consequences and complications which
naturally followed soon brought it into disrepute, for such a system
was no better than that of the common barbarians. The solemn vows of
marriage, that are of God's ordering, will never be improved by
philosophers nor legislatures. Under certain circumstances they who
marry do well, and they who marry not do better. "Let every man have
his own wife and let every woman have
her own husband," and let them strive earnestly and honestly to make
their homes and their home associations things to be more desired than
"palaces and pleasures through which we may roam," for amusement only.
But as we started out to write how people married and made homes and
"got on" in the world fifty or sixty years ago, we will stop
moralizing. After four or five years of settlement the conditions
favoring marriage were much better than they are to-day. The common
wants of life, which fully satisfied common people, were ready for the
hands of the industrious, wise, and prudent. The luxuries of life were
yet far out of sight, and the magnificent was not even dreamed of. No
false fads were then rattling in the brains of housekeepers. There was
no dissatisfaction with the imperative duties of home life. Indeed home
was as a general rule altogether the best place to be. People were
generally contented with such things as they had or could readily
obtain. There was much less class distinction than to-day and a pure
democracy shed its benign influence over all.
These conditions made it easy for young married folks to begin
housekeeping at once. The girl wife didn't demand or expect the boy
husband to be in possession, or even in sight of his thousand dollar
salary, before marriage. It was said in these days that they "married
for love and worked for riches." That may have been, because love was
much more plentiful than riches. It is better to grow lovely, than to
grow rich; for they that will be rich fall into divers temptations.
Anyway, they were so deeply in love in those backwoods, and so
blissfully ignorant of what was to come, that they never thought of
that much coveted thing denominated a dollar, which, nowadays, is
continually ringing in some people's thoughts, especially when
"matchmaking."
True the fathers and mothers wished to be assured that the prospective
son-in-law would be able to care for his family, in an honest and manly
manner; for they would rather bestow a daughter on a man without money,
than on money without a man. If we say here that the happiness,
well-being, and home life enjoyment of a half-hundred years ago, was as
good or better than to-day, the answer may be: "You were an optimist
then,—you are a pessimist now." Old folks always think they did "beat
all the world" when they were young, and that the world is going to the
bad, as sure as they are going to their "setting sun." We plead not
guilty to this soft impeachment. We are still optimistic, and believe
that goodness must prevail; and that the world is slowly coming to know
what is best worth knowing, and when it gets properly educated, it will
do what is best worth doing; and that is to make and maintain
reasonably good homes, — lovely homes, "Sweet homes," where books,
birds, and joyful little folks do most congregate; and where souls are
filled with the "milk of human kindness," and character building is
founded on the "Rock of Ages." However, just now there is a class that
has voted home a "bore," housekeeping a nuisance, and servants a fraud.
They get married, get disappointed, get discouraged, get "broke up,"
get mad, get divorced, and get "walloped" all through life, because
they don't know how to get married and how to stay so. Society is
somewhat to
blame for this state of affairs. Many young people of to-day wish to
marry; they love perhaps as ardently as young folks ever loved, but
their affection is diluted with society fads. Married people of
moderate means can no more meet the demands of modern society,
especially in our towns and cities, with its balls, card parties,
receptions, theaters, Saratogas, Long Branches, and Hot Springs, and at
the same time give such attention to the affairs of home life as will
assure reasonable success, than a Christian can serve God and Mammon.
Self-sacrifice is the wellspring of sweet home. They who will brook no
self-denial had better keep their necks out of the marriage halter. A
family cannot be at home attending strictly to domestic affairs, and
attend to fourteen society calls per week. But there are other causes
which are helping to trouble the matrimonial sea that were unknown to
the old hoosieroon or his children.
Few or none of those obstacles stood in the way of the lads and lasses
of "ye olden time." They married young, sixteen or seventeen for the
girls, nineteen to twenty-one for the boys. Shakespeare says, "They are
married best who die married young." Shakespeare was a very intelligent
man, but got tangled in love, of the theatrical "persuasion," which
warped his judgment. True the boys and girls, especially the girls,
used to sing at play parties: "I am too young, I am not fit, I cannot
leave my mamma yet."
But surely they did not believe it, for some of these selfsame singers
married at fourteen and fifteen, and clung to their husbands as
faithful and true as Ruth clung to Boaz. They went to housekeeping in
earnest. Everything was plain, and many things very unhandy compared
with our modern equipments for housework; for instance: one log house,
ten by twenty, chinked and daubed with mud, roofed with clapboards and
weight poles, puncheon floor, no carpets or rugs, stick and clay
chimney, lug pole and pot tramble; no cook- stove or range, safe, or
refrigerator; one bed, by and by a trundle bed for the "little after
whiles," a set of chairs, no rocker, one chest or trunk, a corner
cupboard, some pots, pans and delftware, a piggin and gourd, a bucket
and sugar kettle, a cow, sow and pigs, eleven hens, and one rooster.
This constituted a first-class "set up" in our boyhood days in the
county of Morgan, State of Indiana. Into this rude home the bride and
groom went, in good faith, to work like beavers, believing in their
ability to succeed. Providence willing, which they most generally did.
They had neither clock nor watch, nor friction matches. If they let the
fire go out at any time, they must trot to a near neighbor and borrow,
or strike fire with flint and steel. They had no washing machines or
wringers, clothespins or clotheslines. They hung the clothes on a
peeled pole, where they often became the sport of frolicsome winds.
There were no sewing machines in those days. If they had a well, they
drew the water with the house bucket tied to the end of a grapevine
attached to the well- sweep, and not with the "moss-covered bucket that
hung in the well." In short, they had nothing a modern housewife would
respect, except the live stock and poultry. As to modes of amusement,
there were few. There were no pianos or organs, guitars or mandolins,
neither melodeons nor accordions. The home music choir sang the
doxology in soprano. The boys usually went whistling to the plow, and
the girls sang merrily at their work.
According to statistics, it's a wonder that half the wives did not go
crazy, for it is asserted that more farmers' wives go insane than those
of any other class, all because they are so hard worked, poorly paid,
and little amused. Be that as it may, we cannot call to mind a
half-dozen such cases in twenty years after the first settlement of the
county, and surely no equal number of wives have been more isolated,
lonely, harder worked, or less amused, than those of whom we have been
writing, and their mothers before them. The enterprising men and women
were sustained in their arduous task by the perpetual hope of seeing
the day when they would be as well, or better, "fixed up" than the old
folks at home in Kentucky or Ohio. And so they took joyfully the
knotting of their hands and the soiling of their complexions, which was
indispensable in order to gain the result sought. From them,
principally, have sprung the people who have dotted the country all
over with churches, schools, villages, towns, and cities, and threaded
it with railroads, gravel roads, electric lines, telegraph and
telephone lines. Yet the great working classes are not as contented, as
happy, as they were in the days when our fathers and mothers ate their
frugal meals off of slab tables and slept "the sleep of the just" upon
a "continental" bed
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