Woman a Slave in Her Own House (1858)

AUTHOR: Alcott, William Andrus

KEYWORDS: domestic labor, food and diet, health

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

In this article, Alcott metaphorically relates women's domestic labor, in particular fancy and complex cookery based on “foreign substances,” to slavery. He advocates for a plain and simple diet, arguing against mixing too many kinds of food, and discourages the use of butter as well as “[s]ugar, molasses, lard, saleratus, eggs, and many more things which might be named.” Alcott mentions that not too long ago, nothing but “yeast or leven” was used in the preparation of bread, “not even common salt” (30). He regrets that now, in some places, “a small quantity of flesh meat, finely chopped” is added in the process. Bread now often contains “an admixture of no less than seven ingredients, in order to the formation of what was once, and ever ought to have remained, a simple loaf of bread.” Some mince pies, Alcott complains, contain up to “eighteen ingredients,” many of which happen to be, unfortunately, of “foreign” origin. The problem is not only that too many ingredients are being used, but also too much of each of them. That condiments, sugar, and salt are detrimental to health, separately and particularly in combination, is obvious to Alcott.

He approaches this lamentable situation from the perspective of women's domestic labor: “is it reasonable,” he asks, “that woman should be condemned, for life, to a slavery to custom which demands of her that she should expend so much of her 'sacred fire' in mixing natural, healthful and – to every unperverted palate – agreeable food with a multitude of foreign substances? For who does not know that it consumes a vast deal of time over and beyond what is needed in the preparation of the plainer viands?” This is but wasted time, for not only is there no added “gustatory enjoyment,” but the food actually becomes less nutritious, and all this at the cost of women's “vexation and fatigue” (31). Given that these new customs also come at the expense of women's 'sacred fire,' for Alcott they are thus also morally damaging.