‘Early rising,” wrote Isabella Beeton, “is one of the most essential qualities which enter into good Household Management, as it is not only the parent of health, but of innumerable other advantages. Indeed, when a mistress is an early riser, it is almost certain that her house will be orderly and well managed.”
It is indicative, surely, of the sorry decline in housekeeping standards since 1861 that identical advice should still need dispensing, in a new book by a US life coach, Samantha Ettus. Ms Ettus has been extolling, to women who have forgotten – if they have not sluggishly denied it – the transformative potential of early rising.
“Take advantage of what I call the ‘Magic Hour’,” she urges them in her motivational manual, The Pie Life: A Guilt-Free Recipe for Success and Satisfaction.
“This is the blissful hour in the morning before your kids’ alarms go off – when you can get yourself showered, dressed and ready for the day at a pace that is human.” The result, you gather, will be a housewife on the guilt-free lines set out in the Bible, and quoted by Beeton, herself a professional journalist. “She looketh well to the ways of her household; and eateth not the bread of idleness. Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.”
In Ms Ettus’s case, the rewards for getting up early and telling the world about it have been yet more blissful: a lucrative career as a life coach and speaker and, as of last week, as an acknowledged authority, in this country too, on appropriate female conduct. Indeed, such was the awe and interest in Ettus/Beeton’s whole early rising concept, when it was reintroduced to British women last week, that while welcoming its revival, you wondered how many other basic tenets of good housekeeping were forgotten, during the long years when women’s self-help manuals focused more on not loving too much or on running with wolves. An assumption had taken hold, courtesy of various slatternly feminists, that self realisation was probably incompatible with top-notch housekeeping.
Ms Ettus seems to have also factored in a sharp falling off in female intelligence, for, like Mrs Beeton, specifying a “cold or tepid” bath every morning, she prefers to court accusations of condescension than to leave less competent women in the dark over, for instance, how often to have sex. Keep a calendar, she advises – too late, alas, for those of us who have never come across this brilliant alternative to tying knots in a hanky – chop onions at the weekend, stock up on birthday cards, find a good plumber, make lists. Is there any hint so contemptuous of her readers’ intelligence that Ettus will not include it? There is not. Do things near your home, she suggests – as opposed to driving, willynilly, to a distant part of the country – “you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it”. “Use the school run as an opportunity to fit in tasks such as shopping.” Save time by not straightening your hair. Or simply: “hire a personal assistant”.
Admittedly, the book includes some evidence that a career as a famous life coach may involve more than readiness to state the numbingly obvious, in terms that conjure up wartime information broadcasts. Never before have I seen her “genius tip”: wear a protective plastic cape until ready to leave the house, like a mass murderer. And it’s rare, at least outside the pages of Viz, to find hints on extracting measurable value from friendships. True, Mrs Beeton explained why “friendships should not be hastily formed”, to ensure companions who “reprehend vice”. But to Ettus, these relationships, if carefully regulated, add up to a precious “favour bank”.
Another of her hints, never to entirely give up work, has been described as controversial, even though it is framed entirely as an argument about fulfilment, as opposed to independence or equality, and informed by Ettus’s obvious belief that a zero-hours warehouse job is just as fabulous as a career telling women to get up early. For someone in the top tips trade, it probably makes complete sense.
Pippa Middleton recently acknowledged there might have been something amiss with her widely ridiculed domestic advice, for instance to remember “to remove the price tag from the gift”. But to compare Pippa’s hints with Samantha’s is to marvel much more at the latter’s uncompromising commitment to female servitude. Moreover, though it relied entirely on her princess connections, there is little as Marie Antoinetteish, in Middleton’s Celebrate as Ettus’s instruction to stay-at-home mothers: “work part time, run a home-based business, consult”.
Nor, where insulting the reader’s intelligence is concerned, can Middleton compete with a number of affluent, alpha women whose books and websites now counsel followers on everything from throwing stuff away and drawer-tidying, to food-chewing, steam-douching, small talk and how to “assemble the perfect cheese plate”, in the manner recommended long ago by Milton, in Paradise Lost. “Nothing lovelier can be found in Woman, than to study household good.” Actually, given the ongoing purge of potentially troublesome women speakers, these experts on fulfilled living could be the very influencers our universities need for their safe spaces. When did Germaine Greer, for instance, ever have anything useful to share with women about colour-grouping their closets?
Not that the discipline is conflict-free: in advocating early rising, Ettus now finds herself, though in agreement with Beeton, in open defiance of the no less learned Arianna Huffington, who made sleep the focus of Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Happier Life”. “Sleep is a fundamental and non-negotiable human need,” writes Huffington, who appears, however, to agree with Ettus, and probably a vast number of men, that what women should now prioritise is not old-fashioned assaults on the status quo, but even older-fashioned hints on how to make the best of it, by way of phone-free nights and speedy dressing. “I purposefully wear the same dresses over and over again,” Huffington confides. “It saves so much time and energy that you can use getting other things done.”
Presumably millions of women have, indeed, been dressing incompetently all their lives or Arianna Huffington would not risk infantilising the ones who figured out, for themselves, how best to complete this operation, just as they had concluded, before she advised them, that there’s nothing like a good night’s sleep, even in a bedroom that is not (like hers) “an oasis: a beautiful escape from the day”.
If there is, indeed, a need for this level of advice you can’t but notice that men are still waiting, in vain, for male Huffingtons, Paltrows, Kondos and Ettuses to come along and explain how to throw things out, get up early and, after steaming their bottoms clean, create the Danish hygge mood with candlelight. Then again, with so many achieving women to remind the world that not much has changed, domestically, since 1861, what would be the point?
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