Twenty-Six Hours a Day

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Twenty-Six Hours a Day

Magazine article

By: Mary Blake

Date: February 1878

Source: Blake, Mary. "Twenty-Six Hours a Day." Scribner's Monthly. 15 (1878): 554-555.

About the Author: Mary Elizabeth McGrath was born in Ireland in 1840, and emigrated to Boston with her family around 1850, where she first attended Emerson's Private School and then the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, New York. In 1865, she married John G. Blake, with whom she had eleven children. She was a prolific poet and columnist whose work was published in several newspapers and magazines, including the Boston Journal, Catholic World, and Scribner's Monthly. Blake also wrote two books of children's poetry, three travel books, and had three volumes of poems published, including Poems (1882), Verses along the Way (1890), and In the Harbour of Hope (1907), before her death in 1907. Although Mary McGrath Blake was quite popular in the late nineteenth century, her work is not well-known today.

INTRODUCTION

Mary Blake's description of desperate late nineteenth century housewives probably sounds familiar to modern mothers (and some fathers) who never seem to be able to catch up with the many household tasks associated with family life, whether they stay home with children or are employed outside the house. Blake's advice to mothers—to prioritize their work, relax some housekeeping standards, and simplify their houses and social lives in order to find some time for themselves—while keeping children's welfare paramount—is also quite recognizable. Strikingly similar suggestions are still found in twenty-first century women's magazines, and in recent self-help and organizational books aimed mainly at women, especially mothers. Although discussions of sewing and mending have been dropped from most of these recent works, the attention that mothers are urged to pay to their children's safety, education, and wellbeing has greatly increased. Other household jobs have not greatly decreased in importance or in the amount of time spent on them, despite the adoption of modern labor-saving appliances, as Cowan demonstrated in More Work for Mother in 1983, or with more recent male contributions to household work.

PRIMARY SOURCE

"Well," exclaimed tired Mrs. Motherly, "if anybody needs twenty-six hours a day, I am sure I do, and ten days a week into the bargain. The days are not half long enough, and when night comes, the thought of the things I ought to have done but couldn't, tires me more than all I have done. This very day, when I expected to do so much sewing, has slipped away, while I have trotted around after the children, washing faces, brushing tangled hair, putting on rubber boots and taking them off again in fifteen minutes, and picking up blocks and playthings, scarves and mittens over and over again. I have mended unexpected tears in jackets and dresses, put court-plaster on 'skatched finders,' settled twenty quarrels between the baby and the next older, threaded needles for 'make-believe sewings,' and all the time been trying to sew, or dust, or sweep, or make gingerbread, till I feel as if I were in a dozen pieces, and every piece trying to do something different. At night I am so tired that all I ask for is a place to crawl into and sleep if I can, and even that must be with one eye open to see that the baby doesn't get uncovered. Yet there are people so unfeeling as to say I ought to try to get time to read and all that!"

Not so fast, my little mother. It is all true, every word of it, but let us see if it isn't possible to save a little time out of even these busy, wearying days for something higher than mere physical needs.

In order to find out how to save it, let us see what we do with it. Suppose we sort over work as we do our work-baskets, and see if we cannot make a little time by saving it.

The first and most important of our duties is the care of the children, including, of course, their physical, moral and intellectual training.

Next comes the housekeeping, i.e., the literal keeping the house in order, looking after its cleanliness and general pleasantness.

Then, cooking or preparing and serving the food, including the care of the table and all that pertains to it. This is really another part of the housekeeping, and perhaps ought to be included in it, except that in some households the details are given over entirely to servants, while in others they are in greater or less degree the work of the lady of the house.

And lastly, the sewing.

As regards the care the children it is almost impossible that there can be any superfluities. To every true mother, their welfare is first and foremost. Better that cobwebs festoon our parlor wall, and dust lie inch deep on our books, than that we neglect our children for anything, no matter how good that thing in itself may be. Missionary meetings at one end of the scale, and balls and fashionable society at the other, are all blameworthy, if on account of them the children suffer. When "culture" turns them over to the tender mercies of servants, it becomes only a refined form of selfishness.

SIGNIFICANCE

Twenty-Six Hours a Day is an example of the women's advice literature (also known as prescriptive literature) that proliferated throughout the nineteenth century. Such magazine articles, newspaper columns, and books, like those described by Leavitt (2002), greatly increased in number and popularity in Europe and America in the late 1800s. It is a particularly rich source of data for research on attitudes about gender, changing gender roles, childrearing techniques, and evolving ideologies.

The growth of this literature was closely related to other changes in domestic life. Women were increasingly literate, and families were more mobile. As more Nineteenth century men became involved in the new industrial economy, women became more exclusively identified with the domestic sphere. Historian Barbara Welter first portrayed this as the "Cult of True Womanhood" (1976). Also called the "Cult of Domesticity" or "real womanhood," this ideal was characterized by pious, pure, submissive, and domestic women. Above all else, however, these women were devoted to their children. Lewis describes the construction and emotional underpinnings of self-sacrifice in her work on Mother's Love. Blake herself stresses the importance and perceived naturalness of this form of motherhood with her use of the terms "true mother" and "children's birthright," emphasizing near the end of her article that "The popular verdict is right, so far as this, that a mother's first duty is to her family, and nothing which conflicts with and forces her to neglect that, is either womanly or proper" (p. 560).

More recent researchers have added depth and complexity to Welter's work by focusing on the structure of "true womanhood" in different times and places, by exploring "how it helped to maintain class-and race-based hierarchies of power; and how it justified women's exclusion from participatory democracy" (Roberts 2002: 150), and noting how women challenged or negotiated the ideal. Interestingly, despite Blake's affirmation of the primacy of motherhood, Twenty-Six Hours a Day also displays the seeds of early feminist attitudes about women's work. Blake acknowledges the difficulty of childcare and housework, and suggests that there are ways to simplify it. Furthermore, her assertion that "Women are singularly slow to comprehend that their time is worth anything in dollars and cents" (p. 560) and her firm declaration that women need an intellectual life outside the home, were ideas that were championed more fully in the twentieth century.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Leavitt, Sarah A. From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976.