Quotation of the Day
13th January 2019
I have lingered over these details because they formed a part–a most important and honorable part–of that ancient curriculum of house-keeping which, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries, was so soon to be swept aside by the “monstrous regiment” of the emancipated; young women taught by their elders to despise the kitchen and the linen room, and to substitute the acquiring of University degrees for the more complex art of civilized living. The movement began when I was young, and now that I am old, and have watched it and noted its results, I mourn more than ever the extinction of the household arts. Cold storage, deplorable as it is, has done far less harm to the home than the Higher Education.
— Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance
Mrs. Wharton died in 1935; there is no telling what her reaction would have been to Congresswoman Occasional-Cortex, but I doubt that it would have been good.