Florida Pier : writings and about / jmcvey.net
Women and Their Furniture
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (March 2, 1912) : 24
Purdue copy/scan (hathitrust) : link
There has long been a feeling that woman’s vaunted love of home and family was an inadequate, inaccurate statement of the case. She seemed to love something connected with her home and family, but was it exactly them? She disliked leaving her home, she invariably came back before her family expected her, but was it the family that drew her? Her eyes were always turned toward her home and family, but not always with a look of intense love for them. The focus of her gaze was puzzling. It was as though she looked through her family to the furniture on which they sat and only saw them when they in some way endangered it....
Furniture she must have, so she takes a husband. Furniture comes more quickly that way than any other. The focus of her gaze was puzzling. It was as though she looked through her family to the furniture on which they sat and only saw them when they in some way endangered it. Then quite suddenly and with a dreadful clearness it was seen that that to which woman clings most passionately is her household gods. The other parts of her home she endures because they are necessary drawbacks to the possession of furniture. Furniture she must have, so she takes a husband. Furniture comes more quickly that way than any other.
Children are very troublesome because they mark furniture when young and daughters rearrange it when older. On the other hand, the more children one has the more furniture one has to buy and the more play one has for those exquisite feminine emotions of acquisition and arrangement.
If this discovery should not meet with the astonished approval it deserves a perfect wealth of proof is at hand as to its truth. If women are visited by grief they get consolation by busying themselves with their furniture. There are contented millions of women in the world who every day, year in and year out, do nothing but tend furniture. Their families may vex them, but their furniture never does. If it is a question of their furniture discommoding their families they exhibit an adamantness of feeling that does not surprise us on the part of tender-hearted women only because we are accustomed to it and expect it. They will calmly see an inanimate and ugly piece of perverted woodwork sticking its multiple corners into every member of the family who passes that way and experience never a qualm of conscience; but if any one suggests that the woodwork, being obviously useless and inconvenient, should be destroyed its female owner displays the outraged feelings of a tigress about to be despoiled of her young.
A mother expects her sons to leave home and weathers the ordeal, but she will not let her furniture be torn from her. She will take a house seven times too large for her needs and busy herself in it beyond her strength, because otherwise what would she do with her furniture? To store it causes her pain. She frets about it with the sympathy and tenderness due an incarcerated child and returns from Europe that she may liberate it and love it. The reason that it is frequently found difficult for two adult women to live together in the same house is because they cannot agree about the furniture. Not about matters of life and death, but about the furniture. Each wants complete control of the chairs and tables, and, though woman is supposed to be a monument of patience, her endurance comes to an end when another woman arranges some of her inanimate possession.
You may criticize a woman’s children and she will tell them what you said, but say a single derogatory word about her household furniture and a chill vibrates through her that freezes forever your intercourse.
When a woman returns home a week earlier than she intended it is not because she could not remain longer away from her family, but because she was afraid the cleaning would not be conducted properly during her absence. She could not trust her family to care for her furniture and it spoiled her trip, and when she could bear it no longer she rushed back to succor and guard it.
Women will respect your opinion on abstruse subjects or on matters concerning their financial and physical welfare; but they will permit no one to make suggestions as to the proper way to hang curtains because there is but one proper way and that is their way. They are frequently capable of complete detachment from their children, of regarding them as ungrateful strangers who upset their preconceived notion of things, but their furniture is part of themselves. It has taken on all the sentiment and associations of their lives which might reasonably have been expected to cling to their human attachments. They understand their furniture. It does not change. Children change and become both puzzling and independent. Furniture never does. It needs them more and more instead of less and less. It has taken on all the sentiment and associations of their lives which might reasonably have been expected to cling to their human attachments. They understand their furniture. It does not change. Children change and become both puzzling and independent. Furniture never does. It needs them more and more instead of less and less. The older it grows and the more there is of it the more it augments their feeling of importance, while with children it is just the opposite.
In extreme cases a woman’s furniture becomes her husband, children, and family connections. A mahogany sewing-table is not so much an heirloom descending from Aunt Harriet as it is Aunt Harriet herself . The same veneration is due it. By a like process of transposition the love of home becomes the love of house, and the good ladies work off their executive ability on their furniture because their children will not have it expended on them, and to vent it in those regions beyond the outskirts of the home would be contrary to their training.
When one’s children instead of being an expression, an extension of oneself, are capricious contradictions of all one feels to be natural and proper, and women are in danger of feeling the firm ground of definite right rocking under their feet, they turn to their furniture and find great solace. Its concreteness, amenability, assessable value, and general satisfying thereness is balm to their spirits. It typifies their idea of what the world should be — manageable and unchangeable, respectable and useful and pretty, dependent on one’s bustling care of it, yet staunchly supporting in one’s moments of sweet weakness, concealing nothing, wholly tangible, and slightly inferior to oneself. In a word, combining the most desirable qualities of husbands and children without any of those accompanying traits which sometimes make the best of husbands and the nicest of children no better than trials sent to discipline one’s character.
8 August 2026