Everybody must have remarked the extraordinary multiplying powers belonging to keys. There is a glamour about them; in vain do you from time to time make inquisitorial inspections and expurgate your keyrings and key-boxes.
The essay titled simply “Keys” offers an excellent illumination of the manner in which Webster pursues ideas and topics throughout the myriad topics addressed in each individual entry in this collection. The essay commences from a point of literal connection to the title with an extensive commentary about the commonplace habit of findings keys that do not seem to open anything in one’s possession, the resistance to dispose of them in case their use rematerializes and their habit of going missing. From there, the essays expands outward to ever more metaphorical associations with keys and the metaphorical problems associated with losing them or being unable to figure out what to open with them. From the opening line quoted above, the essay moves with a precision of logic toward a story of pure symbolism about a woman who could speak four different languages, but think in none.
If all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, Jack must sometimes be allowed to play; and if he plays he must have some playthings and the playthings must be to play with, for, if they are to work with, Jack is at work and not play.
The opening paragraph of the essay titled “Children’s Toys and Games” is itself a game of sorts. A word game in which the author first situates her premise that a toy, by definition, should be a plaything. From there she builds a case against the very concept of trying to make toys and games educational since education is the work of children and if the toy is designed as part of their work, it cannot, by definition, also be a plaything. Which, after all, a toy should be.
Women, as a class, will be the better by all the educating and nerving influence of the suffrage and its stamp of equal rights and responsibilities, and the men, as a class, will be none the worse.
A committed and tireless supporter and activist for women’s suffrage throughout her life, Webster died decades before women were extended voting rights in England. Despite this, she was actually twice elected to the London School Board, becoming, in the process, one of the first women to ever hold an elected position in any modern democracy. Her argument in favor of extending the vote to women outlined here is so simple it almost defies belief that it could be opposed.
In their time women, in whatever class of life, when they fairly knew and practiced, according to the lights of their day, the duties of home work or home supervision were called good housewives; next such women were called good housekeepers; now they will be called good domestic economicians.
The reference here to “domestic economicians” is directly inspired by the second yearly congress Domestic Economy and Elementary Education which gives the essay its title: “The Domestic Economy Congress, 1878.” The topic of this congress that Webster takes as her subject is the viability of teaching the practices of housekeeping in an academic setting with a curricula designed for domestic economy. It is a sign of Webster’s approach throughout these essays to engage irony for the purpose of creating dramatic tension with subjects that she approaches this idea from the perspective of language and semantics rather than economics or domesticity.
