The Mother in Her Family (1838)

AUTHOR: Alcott, William Andrus

KEYWORDS: motherhood, education, domesticity, nutrition, diet

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

The preface characterizes the book as “a series of practical lessons, for the domestic circle, on physical, intellectual and moral education, especially the latter” (3). It is designed as a guide for mothers on how to educate their children. For this purpose, Alcott creates the fictional Mrs. Kingsley, “truly the educator, not merely the housekeeper” of her family, to dramatize “the character of a mother, not as it now is, but as it should be” (5). The book thus focuses on the ideal mother and her educational role in relation to the study of the Bible, appropriate dress, charity, schooling, story telling, care taking, and family economy. Questions of diet and nutrition feature centrally. Alcott advocates for a plain plant diet. No “hot food,” only “a few dishes at the same meal,” and a breakfast “without any animal food” (30) are some of Alcott's recommendations in this regard. According to Alcott, “brown bread toasted, with a little milk,” “boiled corn, […] potatoes, or rice, or beans, or pease” (30), along with fruit, are particularly suitable for breakfast. A simple or plain diet always includes abstention from tea, coffee, alcohol, and similarly detrimental substances.

In a particularly stark, early passage, Alcott showcases the dangers of overindulgence in such substances as well as meat-eating: Mr. Kingsley, the father of the family whom Alcott portrays as “eating the most highly seasoned meats, and quaffing his cigar,” and as someone who “drank strong coffee, and light wines, beer and cider” (11) is ordered to adhere to a diet of “plain water gruel” (12) to remedy the symptoms of “dyspepsia, headache, liver complaint, and slow fever” (11) that have resulted from his poor dietary habits. Unfortunately, “after two or three meals of water gruel, and finding some abatement of his distressing symptoms, Mr K. renounced, at once, his course of diet, and sat down to a supper of chicken pie, plum pudding, &c., followed by wines; and in five hours after was a corpse” (13). The family subsequently adopts a vegan diet: “While Mr K. was alive they had flesh or fish at dinner; but after his death, partly from necessity and partly from economy, it was gradually laid aside; and for some two or three years, none of it has been used in the family. I should have mentioned before now, that butter and all oily food, and gravies and sauces for puddings, &c. were entirely omitted” (33).

Regarding dress and clothing, Alcott portrays Mrs. Kingsley as an adherent of dress reform (after some initial shortcomings in this respect) and “remarkably clean and neat in her person and dress. The latter was extremely simple, and with some of our fashionable people, would have passed for coarse” (4). “[C]omfort and not ornament” is the principle according to which the family dresses. With respect to this principle, Mrs. Kingsley “acted as a conscientious christian [sic] ought to have acted, and only carried her reform to the proper point. […] She continued to adhere to neatness and decency, and only laid aside what, in her view, appeared to conflict with health and true economy” (51).

Alcott emphasizes the ethical importance and intersection of all health-related reforms in a passage where he goes so far as to prophesy the advent of a time “when true physicians, like the Great Physician of Souls, in his advent to Palestine, will literally go about doing good […]. [T]hey will instruct us in the philosophy of dress, warming our rooms, eating, drinking, &c.; and point out to us the numerous errors in connection with all these subjects” (54).

Last updated on May 2nd, 2024

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