A Treatise on Domestic Economy; For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School

H. Webb, & Co., in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts. TO AMERICAN MOTHERS, whose intelligence and virtues have inspired admiration and respect, whose experience has furnished many valuable suggestions, in this work, whose approbation will be highly valued, and whose influence, in promoting the object aimed at, is respectfully solicited, this work is dedicated, by their friend and countrywoman, THE AUTHOR. PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. The author of this work was led to attempt it, by discovering, in her extensive travels, the deplorable sufferings of multitudes of young wives and mothers, from the combined influence of _poor health_, _poor domestics_, _and a defective domestic education_. The number of young women whose health is crushed, ere the first few years of married life are past, would seem incredible to one who has not investigated this subject, and it would be vain to attempt to depict the sorrow, discouragement, and distress experienced in most families where the wife and mother is a perpetual invalid. The writer became early convinced that this evil results mainly from the fact, that young girls, especially in the more wealthy classes, _are not trained for their profession_. In early life, they go through a course of school training which results in great debility of constitution, while, at the same time, their physical and domestic education is almost wholly neglected. Thus they enter on their most arduous and sacred duties so inexperienced and uninformed, and with so little muscular and nervous strength, that probably there is not _one chance in ten_, that young women of the present day, will pass through the first years of married life without such prostration of health and spirits as makes life a burden to themselves, and, it is to be feared, such as seriously interrupts the confidence and happiness of married life. The measure which, more than any other, would tend to remedy this evil, would be to place _domestic economy_ on an equality with the other sciences in female schools. This should be done because it _can_ be properly and systematically taught (not _practically_, but as