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Title: Progress in the household

Author: Lucy Maynard Salmon

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PROGRESS IN THE HOUSEHOLD




  PROGRESS IN THE
  HOUSEHOLD

  BY

  LUCY MAYNARD SALMON

  [Illustration: Colophon]

  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
  HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
  The Riverside Press, Cambridge
  1906




  COPYRIGHT 1906 BY LUCY MAYNARD SALMON

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  _Published October 1906_




APOLOGIA


In 1897 the author of these sketches published a book entitled
“Domestic Service.” It was an attempt to consider certain historical
and economic aspects of a common occupation and its aim was to induce
others to investigate by scientific processes a neglected field of
inquiry. It distinctly disclaimed any and all attempts to square the
circle by proposing a plan to do away with all difficulties in the
present condition of household service.

The book was not one of “the six best sellers” of the season, it was
never duplicated by a public library, and it never secured a lodgment
at the Tabard Inn. A modest second edition, not yet exhausted,
represents its present rating in the authors’ “Bradstreet’s.”
The book was a disappointment to many housewives who had noted
its appearance because they had hoped to find in it a sovereign
remedy for all domestic ills. Instead of that they found only
rather repellant footnotes, statistical tables, appendices, and
bibliographies. “What connection,” they probably asked, “exists
between the far-away fact that there is one domestic employee to
every one hundred and fifty-six inhabitants in Oklahoma and the
near-at-hand fact that there is a dearth of good cooks in Pantopia?”
But Moses Coit Tyler, _beatissima memoria_, once instructed a class
of college seniors about to begin the study of certain works in
English literature that the initial step in all literary criticism
was to find the author’s object and to judge him by his success
in attaining that object; that an artist who intends to paint a
landscape must be judged by his success in landscape painting, and
not criticised because the landscape is not a figure piece. To the
charge therefore that a book of three hundred odd pages contained
no panacea with virtues attested by hundreds of housekeepers whose
domestic ills had been cured by its application, the apologetic
answer might be made that the writer professed to be only a seeker
after facts, not a domestic physician,--she therefore craved judgment
on the facts collected, not on the cure-all unsought and therefore
unexploited.

But the author had secretly craved a hearing from the economists,
although conscious that she was not one of the guild and therefore
might be open to the charge of trespassing on the domain of others.
She had also secretly hoped for a hearing from her fellow-workers
in the field of history, although conscious that the proportion
of history to economics in the book was in inverse ratio. Gaining
admission to the salon, however, does not prevent the work of an
amateur from being “skyed,” and “Domestic Service” was hung above the
line. To the economists whose attention may have been called to the
book, it doubtless seemed unreasonable that one who had apparently
always been connected with work in history should meddle with
economics; to the historians, it probably seemed apostasy to wander,
even for a moment, from the path of history. _Ergo mea apologia._

In September, 1887, I became associated with Vassar College with
the understanding that I was to give instruction in history and
economics. The work in history proved unexpectedly heavy and it
was therefore necessary for me to defer taking up the work in
economics until the following year. The same conditions existed
for three successive years and I then definitely abandoned all
thought of undertaking regular work in economics. But although
unable to carry out all that had been expected, it seemed possible
to make some compensation and therefore at the end of the first
year an investigation of domestic service was planned. A series of
schedules was drawn up and these were distributed to the members
of two successive classes graduating from Vassar College. The
publication of the results of the investigation was delayed in order
to incorporate with them certain returns of the United States Census
of 1890 and these were not available until late in the year, 1896.

A second explanation may be needed concerning the choice of the
subject. A residence in several communities differing somewhat
widely in geographical location and in industrial conditions had
disclosed the fact that in every place the demand for capable
household employees was greatly in excess of the supply, largely,
it was commonly believed, because in each place the conditions
were “peculiar.” These unusual and peculiar conditions were the
competition of factories, the competition of shops, the loneliness
of farm life, the loneliness of a great city, the inaccessibility
of suburbs, the heat of the Western prairies, the dampness of the
sea-shore, the life of a college town, and numerous variants of these
general principles. All of the conditions that most attract to a
place other residents and all the conditions most favorable to other
occupations seemed to be always attended with fatality in the case
of domestic employees. But as the union of the seven colors of the
rainbow forms white light, was it possible that all these peculiar
conditions could be reduced to a single fundamental cause that should
explain the discrepancy between demand and supply?

Another consideration in favor of selecting domestic service as a
reasonable subject for investigation lay in the accessibility of
the material. Every household, whether with or without domestic
employees, could add its contribution to the inquiry. Moreover, in an
age that collects everything from baggage tags and cigar ribbons to
old china and old masters, could not a zeal for collecting be turned
in the direction of collecting the hitherto untabulated experiences
of different households?

But it is true that while the material was accessible, it was
not on that account necessarily procurable, and the investigation
was undertaken with some realization of the difficulties to be
encountered. Yet if, deferring to the example of the British
“Who’s Who,” carpentry, cabinet-making, mountaineering, gardening,
spectroscopy, and animal chemistry are by some considered as
recreations while to others they would imply tasks difficult of
achievement, could not, for college women, this collection of
material be classed as recreation, although to others it might seem a
burdensome task?

It is possible that another element may more or less consciously have
been a factor in determining the choice. College education is not
even yet universally accepted as necessary and desirable for women.
If Society should in a sense expect an apology from college women for
having removed themselves from general society and passed four years
in college halls, could not that apology take the form of making
some small contribution to a domestic question even though those who
rendered the quasi-apology did not altogether recognize its necessity?

Another consideration akin to this lies in the frequent assumption
by Society that all women marry. Cold, enduring statistical tables,
as well as observation, go to show that there is an error in this
assumption, and when this fact is pointed out, Society, forgetting
that there are some who would but cannot, and others who can but will
not, attributes the discrepancy between theory and reality to college
education for women. If a few college women could add something to
our knowledge of how household affairs are conducted, would that
contribution serve to atone for both voluntary and involuntary
neglect of matrimony?

But an apology implies not only an explanation of the past but
a promise for the future,--the erring one must err no more if
absolution is to be given. The economist may pardon the poacher,
but he must poach no more. The historian may forgive the one who has
wandered from the fold, but the wanderer must in future remain within
the pale. Yet how shall the collector of experiences be diverted from
his diversion of collecting? The collector of old mahogany depletes
his bank account and turns his modest dwelling into a veritable
second-hand shop, but still his pony chaise is tied before every
farmhouse that has advertised an auction sale of household effects.
The lawyer whose country estate produces green peas that yearly
cost him five dollars a peck, cheerfully proclaims that it pays to
be a gentleman farmer. The New York merchant hunts in Montana and
charges up to profit and loss the expressage on the game secured. The
luxuries of one are the necessities of another, the recreations of
one are laborious occupations for his neighbor, a habit once formed
holds its victim in an ever-tightening grasp. If then, in spite of
apology and all that it implies, the collector of experiences still
accumulates much that to others may be of little practical benefit,
if she still indulges in what her friends deem an extravagant luxury,
if she still finds her recreation in what others may consider an
onerous pursuit, if the habit once formed of connecting with the
present the facts and experiences of the past cannot apparently be
broken off, if at times she still poaches and still wanders, she will
once more claim indulgence if perchance there be any to grant it.
It has been in anticipation of this indulgence that these sketches
are reprinted. If they seem slight, it is hoped that behind the
shadow will be found the substance of a great, and still unsettled
problem. The hope that lies still beyond is that the household may
in time to come be recognized as a legitimate field for scientific
investigation.




CONTENTS


     I. RECENT PROGRESS IN THE STUDY OF DOMESTIC SERVICE      1

    II. EDUCATION IN THE HOUSEHOLD                           35

   III. THE RELATION OF COLLEGE WOMEN TO DOMESTIC SCIENCE    51

    IV. SAIREY GAMP AND DORA COPPERFIELD                     81

     V. ECONOMICS AND ETHICS IN DOMESTIC SERVICE             93

    VI. “PUT YOURSELF IN HIS PLACE”                         121

   VII. OUR KITCHEN                                         133

  VIII. AN ILLUSTRATED EDITION                              145

    IX. THE WOMAN’S EXCHANGE                                159


  The author takes pleasure in acknowledging the courtesy of _The
  Atlantic Monthly_ for permission to print the chapter on “Recent
  Progress in the Study of Domestic Service;” of the _New England
  Magazine_ for that on “Education in the Household;” of the _Boston
  Cooking School Magazine_ for the chapter on “Sairey Gamp and Dora
  Copperfield;” of _The Chautauquan_ for that on “Economics and
  Ethics in Domestic Service;” of _The Outlook_ for that entitled
  “Put Yourself in his Place;” of the _Craftsman_ for the chapter
  on “Our Kitchen;” and of _The Forum_ for that on “The Woman’s
  Exchange.” The author also acknowledges the kind permission of The
  Macmillan Company to reprint several passages from her work on
  _Domestic Service_.




RECENT PROGRESS IN THE STUDY OF DOMESTIC SERVICE


A lady recently called at the house of a friend who answered in
person the ring at the door. With careworn expression and flurried
manner she apologized for the confusion that apparently reigned in
the house, saying:

“My parlor maid is upstairs ill,--not ill enough to go to the
hospital, too ill to work, too far from home to go there, yet needing
attention from me. My waitress is having a fit of the sulks, and I
have sent her out to do an errand and get some fresh air. The cook is
just now not on speaking terms with her husband,--the coachman,--and
is seeking a divorce, so that one or the other must go. The footman
came home drunk last night, and had to be discharged this morning. My
house is at sixes and sevens, my husband lunched downtown, my mother
has taken the children and the nursery-maid home with her, guests
arrive this evening, and I have spent the day in a vain search for
help in the house. I belong to a club studying household economics,
and have allowed it to turn a search-light on all my household
affairs in the interests of society at large. I am now ready to
call a halt, to refuse to have my domestic arrangements considered
a hunting-ground for theorists, to pronounce all such clubs vain
mockeries, snares, and delusions, inventions of the enemy for
squandering time, and showing the bitter contrast between abstract
theory and concrete reality. The only club I am interested in must
provide on tap maids who never get ill or sulky, cooks without a
temper, and coachmen and footmen of unimpeachable habits.”

It is possible that such conditions are not confined to “the
uninhabited districts west of Schenectady,” and that elsewhere
there may be despairing housekeepers ready to cry out against all
serious study of domestic questions, because such study has not yet
had an immediate and practical bearing on the management of their
individual households. It is, indeed, not improbable, for there is
in every clime the tradition of a time when household helpers were
abundant, competent, and cheap,--a golden age when harmony reigned
in the household and domestic discord was unknown. Has this peaceful
condition been rudely broken up by the meddlesome interference of
domestic busy-bodies? Has progress been hindered by the club studying
household economics, by the investigator seeking for facts, by the
theorist trying to square the ideal with the real, and by students of
social conditions anxious to explain the present by the past? Is the
only remedy for present ills the suppression of all discussion, since
discussion breeds contempt and unhappiness? Is the club to revert to
Browning, the investigator to confine himself to the comparatively
safe field of ancient history, the theorist to live in the future,
and the student of social conditions to content himself with flower
missions and soup-kitchens? If it can be shown that conditions are
worse than they have ever been before, and that discussion and
investigation are responsible for this deterioration, then assuredly
the club should change the field of its activity, and all discussion
of the household affairs should cease.

But the immediate dissolution of the club studying household
economics is not imminent. The premises on which its detractors
base their criticisms are false, and hence the conclusions deduced
from these premises are illogical and unreasonable. All literature
goes to show that an ideal condition of domestic service exists and
has existed only in the castles of Spain. And recent literature and
recent legislation do show that some little progress has been made in
the study of domestic service as an occupation, in spite of the fact
that individual housekeepers still have and always will have trials
and perplexities that at times seem almost overwhelming. The Hudson
empties its waters into the ocean, yet twice each day the mightier
force of the ocean tide turns the current back upon itself,--in
winter it bears upstream the moving mass of ice, and in summer it
makes its overbalancing power felt almost to the very source of the
great river.

The individual housekeeper feels only the force of the household
current that bears her helpless to her destination,--she forgets
the still stronger force of society that makes itself felt over and
beyond that of the individual home.

       *       *       *       *       *

In balancing the accounts of domestic service and in asking what
has been accomplished in the past ten years in the direction of
improvement, it must be frankly said at the outset that it is
probably just as difficult to-day to secure good household employees
as it was ten years ago,--perhaps even more difficult; that wages
are probably even higher than at that time; that the service
rendered is no more efficient; that recommendations are no more
reliable; that cooks still have tempers; that coachmen sometimes
drink; that maids have “followers;” that nursery girls gossip in
the parks with policemen; that new employees engaged fail to keep
the engagement; that valuable china is broken, and that household
supplies are wasted.

But if the work of these years has not borne immediate fruit, it
has not been without results that will sometime come to fruition.
These results are seen in the distinct, positive, and direct
improvement in the literature of the subject; flippancy is giving
place to seriousness in considering the relations of mistress and
maid; historical and statistical investigations of the question
have multiplied and become more thorough and elaborate; substantial
facts are supplanting sentimentality and visionary theories in the
discussions on the subject; a diagnosis of the case is being made,
and the prescription of a remedy is withheld while the examination
is progressing; humble-mindedness and willingness to learn are now
found where formerly there were absolute certainty and positiveness
of conviction in dealing with the question; in a definite way an
improvement in legislation has been made, disreputable methods of
employment agencies have been exposed, social oases have been planted
in desert places, and, in general, a concrete method of procedure has
been substituted for polite abstractions and innocuous generalities.
All this means that a long step forward has been taken within the
past decade.

The great improvement in the character of the general literature
of the subject is seen in the gradual disappearance of the
fault-finding, the sentimental, the goody-goody magazine article,
and the appearance in its place of genuine contributions to the
subject, like those recently made to the “Atlantic Monthly” by Miss
Jane Seymour Klink and Miss Frances A. Kellor. Miss Jane Addams
in “A Belated Industry”[1] has dealt most thoroughly with the
economic phases of the subject, as has Mrs. Mary Roberts Smith in
her admirable article on “Domestic Service; the Responsibility of
Employers.”[2] Mr. Bolton Hall has set forth most vigorously the
employee’s side of the case in “The Servant Class on the Farm and in
the Slums;”[3] while a symposium on the subject by a group of men has
recently discussed in an impartial manner many of the difficulties of
the situation.

Pure literature also makes its contribution, and Mrs. Mary Hartwell
Catherwood has recently given a charming picture of “A Convent
Man-Servant.”[4] Nothing could prove more effectively the change
in the attitude of the public mind toward the subject than does
the contrast presented between such a sketch, drawn with light and
sympathetic pen, and that given in the satires of Dean Swift and of
Defoe. The very absence of the figure of a domestic servant in the
modern novel, and in current popular literature in every form, is in
itself an indication of a changed attitude of the public mind toward
the question as a whole. Figaro, and even Sam Weller, are almost as
far removed from us as are the servants of Potiphar and of the Queen
of Sheba.

The attitude of the daily press toward the subject of domestic
service certainly leaves something yet to be desired,--the stock
jests on the impertinent maid and the ignorant mistress, like those
on the mother-in-law and the summer girl, die hard, but they will go
in time.

The historical investigations of the subject have been few in number,
but they have been of great value. Mr. Albert Matthews has placed all
students of the subject under obligation to him by his exhaustive
study, “The Terms Hired Man and Help,”[5] as Mr. James D. Butler had
previously done by his investigations on “British Convicts shipped to
American Colonies,”[6] and Dr. Karl Frederick Geiser by his work on
“Redemptioners and Indented Servants in the Colony and Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania.”[7]

The public library is always first to create as well as to satisfy
a demand for literature on subjects of general interest. It is
therefore not surprising to find that the Providence Public Library
as far back as 1893 issued a bibliography of all works and magazine
articles on domestic service, which has been followed by the still
more exhaustive reference-list published in 1898 on the general
subject of domestic science; and that the Salem Public Library
has a similar list. The New York State Library has published a
comprehensive bibliography of the whole subject of domestic economy,
and it sends out, to all parts of the state, traveling libraries
of the best volumes on the same subject,--the list of the volumes
included being in itself an excellent guide to the study of household
economics. But the greatest of all steps in advance has been made
by those libraries that have changed the classification of works
attempting to treat scientifically the subject of domestic service
from the class of Domestic Economy to that of Economics proper. The
change seems slight, but it is a recognition of the intimate relation
that exists between domestic service and other forms of industry.

The statistician, like the librarian, is also quick to create as well
as to respond to the demand for information of a serious nature, and
this has been shown in the growing recognition of the importance
of domestic service as a field for statistical research. Among the
most thorough of these statistical investigations is that carried on
by Miss Isabel Eaton,--recently fellow of the College Settlements’
Association,--in regard to negro domestic service in the seventh
ward of Philadelphia.[8] Miss Eaton has made an exhaustive study of
one phase of the subject in a limited area, considering not only the
number of negroes thus employed, but the methods of living, savings,
and expenditures, amusements and recreations, length and quality of
the service, conjugal condition, illiteracy, and health. The work has
been done in a thoroughly scientific manner, and the results form an
admirable presentation of negro service in a single ward of one city.

Similar thorough investigations of special aspects of the question
have been carried on by Miss Mary W. Dewson and Miss Edith G. Fabens
for the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, and by
Miss Gertrude Bigelow, fellow of the Association of Collegiate
Alumnæ, at the School of Housekeeping. They have collected statistics
in regard to the hours of labor in domestic service, the social
conditions of domestic service, household expenses, and the relative
cost of home-cooked and of purchased food. The results of these
investigations have been collected by the Massachusetts Bureau
of Statistics of Labor, and the reports based on them have been
commented on by the press. Scientific information in regard to the
subject has thus been widely circulated, and this must have been
effective in changing somewhat the attitude of the public mind
toward the subject as a whole. Mention must also be made of the
“Twentieth Century Expense Book,” prepared by Miss Mary W. Dewson;
its widespread use would be of service in affording opportunity for a
comparative study of household expenses.

It was early recognized that some of the most difficult factors of
the problem concerned the intelligence office, and investigations
on a somewhat limited scale were carried on in several cities;
but, largely owing to political considerations, it was not deemed
advisable to publish the results. The most thorough and systematic
investigation undertaken in this direction has been that of Miss
Frances A. Kellor, whose “Out of Work,” based on a study of more than
seven hundred agencies, has laid bare the evils of the present system
of securing new employees, as seen by employer, employee, and manager
of the agency. A body of facts has thus been made available that
must prove of the highest service in any attempt to cope with the
notorious evils attending many agencies.

The state bureaus of labor have in several instances done valiant
service to the cause through the official investigations carried
on. As far back as 1872 the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of
Labor devoted four and a half pages of its annual report to domestic
labor. But the first real investigation of the subject made by a
state bureau of labor was probably that undertaken by the Minnesota
Bureau in 1890. This has been followed by special investigations in
other states,--notably Kansas and Michigan,--and in Canada. Moreover,
it must be remembered that many bureaus, while making no special
investigation of domestic service, have incidentally considered
the subject in connection with their investigations of general
labor questions. Most of all is encouragement to be found in the
comprehensive investigation recently carried on under the direction
of the Industrial Commission.

These investigations enumerated have been of a severely scientific,
statistical nature, and have been carried on by state or national
organizations. But other studies no less important have been made
by organizations of a purely private or of a semi-public character.
Notable among these has been the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ,
several branches of which have been most active in making studies of
domestic service, both as a special field for investigation and also
in connection with the larger subjects of home economics and domestic
science. Students in colleges and universities have made special
studies in the same field, and in some instances have made distinct
contributions to the subject. This work has been of most value,
however, in the indication it has given of a desire on the part of
college-trained investigators to make domestic service a subject of
serious consideration.

Domestic service has been until very recently a field untouched by
the statistician and investigator. The studies already made show not
so much what has been done as how much yet remains to be done. But
the territory is already being occupied. Trained investigators are
mapping out the field, workers are at hand, and in a few years we
shall have a body of facts that will afford a sufficient basis for
scientific deductions in regard to the condition of domestic service
in the entire country.

Opinions may honestly differ as to whether it is advisable to
substitute in schools and colleges subjects along the line of
household affairs for other subjects more properly classed as liberal
studies. But it is interesting to note how much has been done in this
direction. Courses in household economics have been given in recent
years in the state universities of Illinois, Nebraska, Ohio, and
Wisconsin, as well as in the Leland Stanford Junior University, while
Columbia University through Teachers College has offered similar work.

In many agricultural colleges, and in seminaries and academies like
those in Auburndale, Massachusetts, and Painesville, Ohio, there are
such courses in the curricula. On the other hand, there can be no
question whatever as to the propriety and necessity of introducing,
as has already been done, courses in domestic science into the great
technical schools, such as Pratt, Drexel, and Armour institutes.

The School of Housekeeping established in Boston in 1897 under the
auspices of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union went still
further, in that it was not so much a technical school as a more
truly genuine professional school for the training of experts in
the great profession of housekeeping. The honorable record it made
while an independent institution gives reason to believe that, now
that it has been merged in Simmons College, it will go on to still
greater achievements under the new conditions. The establishment of
similar schools elsewhere has been much discussed, while in some
places there have been sporadic efforts to establish classes in
household training. Indeed, it must be said that in certain classes
of fashionable schools it is at this moment the latest fad to have
instruction in all household matters, quite is much as in art and
music.

Study and investigations have led to organization, and the first
association in the field was the National Household Economic
Association, formed in 1893, with branches in many states, some of
which did admirable work.

The Lake Placid Conference that met first in 1899 is not strictly an
organization, but an informal gathering of workers who have discussed
the subject particularly on its scientific side, since the attendance
has been largely made up of those interested in the educational and
scientific side of household economics. Its proceedings give an
admirable summary of the latest scientific discussions of the subject.

The most recent as well as the most important of all such
organizations has been that of the Inter-Municipal Research Committee
formed “for the purpose of studying existing phases of household
work, to aid in securing fair conditions for employer and employee,
and to place their relations on a sound business basis.” Much
has already been accomplished by it, especially in the direction
of investigating employment agencies, establishing a bureau of
information, and studying the conditions under which colored girls
from the South are brought to the North to enter domestic service.
Its programme for the future lays out a constantly enlarging sphere
of activities.

All these investigations and educational measures have been
undertaken in the belief that household employment has its economic
side, like other forms of industry. The widespread recognition
of this fact has been a most significant advance, since earlier
discussions of the subject had considered only the ethical factors
involved. But an interesting reversion to the more purely ethical
consideration of the question has been seen in the various efforts to
follow the injunction of Charles Reade: “Put yourself in his place.”
A number of young women have entered domestic service in disguise,
and from personal experience have narrated the life of a domestic
employee. It may well be questioned whether the actual results
reached are commensurate with the effort expended;--the experiment
has meant months of unnatural life and strained relationships, and
in the end we probably know little more in regard to the condition
of domestic employees than could be known by turning the inner light
of our own consciousness on our own households and those of our
acquaintances. But the experiment has been interesting as indicative
of a determined effort to look at the subject from every point of
view.

It is not surprising, in view of all the agitation of the question
in our own country, to find that a similar interest has been aroused
elsewhere. In Germany, that home of conservatism in all domestic
affairs, an elaborate statistical investigation has been carried on
by Dr. Oscar Stillich, and its results published in an exhaustive
work entitled “The Status of Women Domestics in Berlin.”[9] Nor again
is it surprising to find that neither official nor domestic Berlin
has taken kindly to the investigation, since bureaucracy has in it
no place for private initiative, and the _Kinder, Küchen, Kirchen_
theory of domestic life has resented what has been deemed unwarranted
interference in private affairs. But it is a matter of congratulation
that the author has been of undaunted courage, and that his work
stands as a thoroughly scientific investigation, and therefore the
most valuable contribution yet made in any country to the theory and
condition of domestic service.

Two things of special encouragement must be noted. One is the
changing attitude of domestic employees themselves toward their own
occupation, and the other is the introduction of men into a field
where it has always been held that by divine ordinance women ruled
supreme.

The number of domestics who have shown any interest in the question
is indeed, as yet, infinitesimal in comparison with the total number
in the occupation, but five righteous men shall save the city. Here
and there one is found who realizes that domestic employees must
be ready to help themselves if help is to come from others, that it
is possible for them to improve the conditions of domestic service
through their own efforts, that respect for any occupation comes,
as those connected with it command respect for it, through their
own attitude toward it. This is as yet realized by so few that no
appreciable results can be seen with the naked eye, but the leaven is
working.

A very welcome and appreciable change has come through the practical
interest in the question shown by men. They have lectured and written
on the subject, and have listened to the lectures on it given by
women. This means that the subject is being recognized by them as
worthy of study and discussion and as of importance to all--to men
and to women alike--who are interested in the welfare of society.
On its practical side also the interest of men is making itself
felt. Chafing-dish courses have been opened for men, where they
have learned the preparation of the luxuries of the table, as
the rough-and-ready experiences of camp-life in summer vacations
and in military campaigns have taught them how to prepare the
necessities of life. Young men in college and young men living in
bachelors’ apartments are proud of their attainments in afternoon
teas and chafing-dish suppers, while men trained as nurses learn the
preparation of delicacies for the sick. It is true, indeed, that
cooking-classes are but indirectly connected with domestic service,
but everything that breaks down artificial barriers, and permits
the free industrial entrance of both men and women into whatever
occupation they prefer, is a direct gain to every line of work. Any
one whose attention has been turned in the direction of securing
household employees must constantly come in contact with the fact
that there is a considerable number of men engaged in household
employments for remuneration.

Does this enumeration of the progress of the past ten years seem
indeed like an Homeric catalogue of the ships? It may, yet the ships
are bound for a definite haven, and must in time enter port.

If one lasting gain of these years has come to be an appreciation
of the necessity of diagnosing the disease before prescribing
a remedy, it must follow that the remedy prescribed fits the
disease. Has it been shown as a result of exhaustive and exhausting
investigation that the great barrier to the entrance of competent men
and women into domestic employment is the social one,--it follows
that efforts are being turned toward leveling this barrier. If we
have learned that the loneliness of the life is in sharp contrast
to the opportunity for comradeship presented in other industrial
pursuits, we have thereby learned to ward against this loneliness by
encouraging means of wholesome recreation. When scientific research
has disclosed the plague spots in the employment agency and the
intelligence office, restrictive legislation has followed. If it has
been found that the weak and the ignorant have been taken advantage
of by the strong and the knowing, efforts for moral regeneration
have been put forth. Since we have realized that in the household,
as elsewhere, it is impossible for the blind to lead the blind,
technical schools have offered instruction in household affairs to
employers of household employees.

Yet when we look over the field still to be reclaimed in the
interests of comfortable home life, more than enough causes for
discouragement remain. Housekeepers still carry on their households
in defiance of all business methods; ignorant women boast that they
“have never so much as boiled an egg in their life,” and complain
that their cooks will not stay with them; idle women spend their time
in playing bridge, and wonder why their maids are discontented; men
boast at their tables of their shrewdness in obtaining something for
nothing, and cannot understand why petty thieving goes on in their
households; society receives the once, twice, and thrice divorced,
but draws the social line at the cook and the butler; communities
tolerate by the score the places where domestic employees, as others,
can find recreation and amusement of every questionable kind, but
the communities can yet be counted on one hand where they can obtain
genuine, wholesome, attractive recreation; the church, with a few
exceptions, is prone to close its doors, except for Sunday and
midweek evening service, and to expend its efforts on fine music,
with church suppers to foot the bills,--forgetting the poverty of
interests in the lives of so many in the community.

But when all has been said, it must be felt that the balance shows
much to the credit of domestic service,--a balance due to the capital
invested in it through the study of conditions made by both men and
women. In no country are these conditions so favorable as they are
in America to-day. England has its well-trained, obsequious butler,
Germany has its police regulations of servants, France has its chef,
Italy has hopeless machines who are “really servants.” America has
none of these, but it has men and women who believe that if the
future holds for us a solution of the problem it lies, not in the
direction of reproducing on American soil the English flunkey, or in
the introduction of German governmental control, or in increasing the
number of French chefs who shall give us endless varieties of new
soups and salads, or yet in crushing all interest in life out of the
hearts and souls of those who serve us, as a pitiless fate seems to
have done in Italy; but men and women who believe that the solution
lies in the path of hard, toilsome investigation, to which students
must come without prejudice and with a fearless acceptance of the
results of such investigations.

In no country are the conditions of domestic service so hopeful as
they are to-day in America, and it is in large part due to our
theory of education which has been in practical force for more
than a generation. Men and women receive the same school, college,
and university training, and this training enables women to order
their households, on their mechanical side, in the same systematic
way that the business enterprises of men are managed. The result
of this is that matters pertaining to the household command the
respect as well as the sentimental consideration of men, and that
men and women are more and more becoming co-workers in all efforts
to secure improvement. Each year the proportion of housekeepers
with trained minds increases, and in the same proportion the number
increases of housekeepers who make intelligent demands on their
employees, who do not encourage poor service by tolerating it, who
realize their responsibility to other households, and understand
that “every irresponsible mistress makes life more difficult for
every other mistress and maid.” It is at least significant that
this progress has been made in a country where the education of men
and women is precisely the same, and that the least advance has been
made in those which arrange a special curriculum for women and which
profess to train girls and young women specially for domestic life.
America holds that education means for women, as well as for men,
intellectual training rather than the accumulation of information
without it, and that the value of this is seen, in the case of women,
in the intelligent study they are everywhere making of household
affairs.

When the vital question in Italy was that of independence from
Austria and of unity under an Italian government, Mazzini said, with
a sublime appreciation of the principle involved, “Without a country
and without liberty, we might perhaps produce some prophets of art,
but no vital art. Therefore it was best for us to consecrate our
lives to the solution of the problem, ‘Are we to have a country?’”
It is possible to have peace and contentment in individual households
along with ignorance of the economic laws that govern the household,
but there can be no radical reform in domestic service in this or
any other country that does not recognize the inseparable connection
between domestic service and all other forms of labor, and that does
not make this fact its starting-point. If the difficulties in the
present situation, which are all too evident, are to be overcome, it
can only be by devoting our energies, as did Mazzini in Italy, not so
much to temporizing in our households as rather to the slow methods
of careful, patient investigation of the conditions without. The
immediate gain to ourselves may be slight, but those who come after
us may reap the benefits.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _American Journal of Sociology_, I, 556-559, March, 1896. Cf. the
chapter entitled “Household Adjustment,” in Miss Addams’s _Democracy
and Social Ethics_, 1902.

[2] _The Forum_, August, 1899.

[3] _The Arena_, September, 1898.

[4] _The Atlantic Monthly_, January, 1897.

[5] _Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts_, vol. v.

[6] _American Historical Review_, II, 12, October, 1896.

[7] New Haven, Connecticut, 1901.

[8] Isabel Eaton, “A Special Report on Domestic Service,” in _The
Philadelphia Negro_, by W. E. B. Du Bois. Publications of the
University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, 1899.

[9] _Die Lage der weiblichen Dienstboten in Berlin_, von Dr. Oscar
Stillich. Berlin. 1902.




EDUCATION IN THE HOUSEHOLD


It is reported that a distinguished foreigner was once visiting a
well-known woman’s college, and after listening to the explanation
of the work carried on there, inquired of its president, “Pardon
me, but how does this affect the chances of the young ladies?” Some
years since several persons were speaking of the recent marriage of a
college woman and the remark was made, “What a pity to have so fine
an education wasted in keeping house!” Not long ago a college woman
was discussing the education of women with a young German Ph.D., and
found that her arguments in its favor were met by her opponent with
the triumphant question, “But can these young women cook?”

These three incidents, which could be multiplied in kind
indefinitely, are illustrations of the somewhat contradictory but
current opinions regarding the mutual relations of education and
household affairs. It is apparently the common belief, first, that
educated women never marry; second, that if they do marry, their
education is wasted; third, that if such women marry and do not
consider their education wasted in the household, the education
received has at all events given evidence of nothing either useful or
practical.

It is not surprising that the mental agility involved in reaching
these somewhat diverse conclusions finds its parallel in the remedy
usually proposed for alleviating so distressing a condition. If
college women never marry, but find when they do marry that their
education is wasted because they have not learned in college how to
bake bread, then, it is argued, let us have compulsory teaching of
domestic science in the public schools and send our daughters to
private schools.

The beneficial results of the introduction of domestic science into
the public schools would undoubtedly be very great, did any one
understand very clearly what is included under the head of domestic
science, were any one at present prepared to teach it, and were it
quite evident who should study it. At present these difficulties
would seem to militate against the widespread introduction of this
subject into our educational system.

If it is asked what is meant by domestic science, there is a
temptation to make the irrelevant reply that historians, economists,
political scientists, and sociologists are still attempting to
delimit their respective fields, each claiming that its territory
includes that preëmpted by the other three. It is as difficult to
define the domain of domestic science as it is that of sociology.
Does it include the architectural construction of a house? May it
perhaps go back of the construction and include the selection of a
site? Does it even involve the principles in the choice of a suitable
residential city? Is it possible that behind this lies the question
of selecting that state of the Union that is most advantageous?
If the problem is to be worked backwards, it must also be worked
forwards, and it must be decided whether the interior decoration of a
house comes within the jurisdiction of domestic science. Would this
comprise instruction in wood-carving, pyrography, china painting,
and basketry? But it seems reasonable to pass from the house itself
to the activities carried on within it. Should these activities be
separated into different classes, such as those pertaining to the
care of the house, the preparation of food, the making of clothing,
the physical care of children, the instruction of household helpers,
the entertainment of guests, the training of husbands and wives? If
this or any other classification is made, should domestic science
consider one, all, or any combination of these classes?

But one of the tendencies of the time is toward intensive work,
and the courses in domestic science should perhaps reflect that
tendency. If so, should we not look for courses to be offered in
napkin embroidery, Hardanger work, and Mexican drawn work, in the
preparation of wheatena, toast water, and flaxseed tea, in the making
of cheese fondu, pineapple canapes, and ornamental frosting? Should
not the mysteries of thin sauces, medium sauces, and thick sauces be
elucidated? If on the other hand the opposite tendency is observable,
should we not expect courses in the formal and informal entertainment
of guests and the philosophy of a menu, even that of a bill of fare?

The difficulties of the situation are comparable only to those of the
Bellman who

      “Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,
        And that was to tingle his bell.
      He was thoughtful and grave--but the orders he gave
        Were enough to bewilder a crew.
      When he cried ‘Steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard!’
        What on earth was the helmsman to do?”

But granting that some agreement could be reached as to the content
of the term domestic science, there would still remain the question
as to how instruction in it could be given. We have learned in
nearly every other department of education the extreme difficulty of
teaching what we do not know, but we still cling to the superstition
that it is possible to teach domestic science in private and public
schools when the university has not as yet made the household the
subject of scientific or economic investigation. The one or two
notable exceptions to this statement do not invalidate its general
truth.

The reasons are manifold why the university does not as yet
investigate the household, although every other field of human
knowledge and activity has apparently been taken into its libraries,
its laboratories, and its workshops; but undoubtedly one of the
weightiest is the survival of the tradition that affairs of the
household concern only women, that women work always through instinct
and intuition, and therefore that the household is not a suitable
field for scientific investigation. But with the breaking down of
the artificial barriers between the interests of men and of women,
it is found that the affairs of the household do concern every
member of it. Modern investigations in psychology are showing that
the mental processes of women are precisely the same as those of
men. It therefore remains for the university to recognize that the
household is worthy of investigation. That there is scope for such
an inquiry would seem evident from the curriculum of an excellent
school of domestic science, selected from among hundreds of other
illustrations that might be given. Course I in Domestic Science
places in conjunction lectures on food adulteration, bacteriology,
furniture, decorations, textiles, and housekeeping in other lands--an
enumeration not saved even by alphabetical arrangement.

But not only is there difficulty in deciding what should be included
under the head of domestic science and how instruction in it should
be given, but a third difficulty lies in deciding who should be
instructed in the subject. If it is said that all young women should
receive such instruction, we are confronted by the fact that the
young woman trained for domesticity takes up stenography and occupies
a hall bedroom, or becomes a commercial traveler and spends her life
in hotels and on railway trains; the girl taught sewing and cooking
in the public school goes into the shop or the factory; the young
woman who frankly acknowledges her engagement spends the time prior
to her marriage in preparing her trousseau and in embroidering her
initials on her household linen. The young woman who has prepared
herself for the profession of law or of medicine decides to marry and
goes into business partnership with her husband. It would seem as
if all plans for teaching household economics in the college or in
the public school with reference to preparing young women for their
future careers as housekeepers must be futile until the orbit of the
matrimonial comet can be predicted.

Yet it must be recognized that college education has already done
much for the household, and presumably for that somewhat vague field
denominated “domestic science.”

The housekeeper finds herself in the same position as does the
lawyer, the physician, and the clergyman. All are educated side
by side throughout a college course. In a subsequent professional
career, the lawyer forgets his Greek, the physician his history, and
the clergyman his mathematics; but there remains with each one a
precipitate of far more value than the original compound. The lawyer
is no longer able to conjugate a verb in μι, but his Greek has given
him an accuracy and precision of thought that, other things being
equal, has placed him professionally far in advance of his untrained
associates. The physician has forgotten the various steps in the
development of cabinet government in England, but his history has
left him a ready sympathy in dealing with men and a vision into
their future that will long outlive his knowledge of the facts of
history. The clergyman can no longer demonstrate Sturm’s theorem or
Horner’s method, but his mathematics has given him a clearness of
reasoning that renders him an invincible opponent in all battles for
the right. In all these cases the residuum of facts remaining from
a college education is comparatively small. Knowledge that is not
constantly used passes out of mind, yet, like the food assimilated
by the physical body, it serves its purpose in the mental strength
and energy gained through it. Indeed, it may be said that information
becomes more and more the dross, and education the pure metal
remaining from a general school or college training.

The embryo lawyer, the physician, the clergyman, have throughout
a college course been pursuing parallel courses of training; it
has given them little that they can make of immediate use in the
office or the study, but it has laid the foundation for that special
research necessary in every profession. The professional school
builds on the training of the college, and it not only gives the
information necessary in a professional career, but it opens the door
to the vast field of investigation which it is one of the aims of
every professional man to explore.

Thus the housekeeper, forgetting her Latin, Greek, and mathematics,
her French, German, and history, her biology, astronomy and
economics, retains as the most valuable heritage of her education
a training in habits of accuracy, observation, good judgment, and
self-control that enables her to be the master of any unexpected
situation that may arise. From the beginning of school life until
the close of the college course the conditions surrounding the young
man and the young woman are similar. Each has the benefit of all the
information and the general educational training the college can
give. To each alike the three great professions of law, medicine, and
theology open their doors and invite special study and investigation.
But if the young woman, turning her back on these attractive fields
of work, desires to study the household in a similar professional
way, she finds it a _terra incognita_. She realizes that absolutely
nothing has been done in any educational institution toward
investigating its past history, its present conditions, or its future
needs. It is said in another field that every lawyer owes a debt of
gratitude to his profession which can be paid only by some personal
contribution to the sum of knowledge in his profession. One of his
aims, therefore, as is that of every professional man, is to leave
the world richer in his own field through the investigation of its
unexplored parts. Thus law, medicine, and theology grow by virtue of
the accumulated wisdom of those engaged in their pursuit. But the
housekeeper finds that housekeeping as a profession has made no
advances. It has not grown through the accumulated wisdom of past
generations as have the so-called learned professions. Whatever
advances it has made have come from impetus given it by other
occupations through their own progress. Housekeeping affairs have
been passive recipients of general progress, not active participants
in it.

If, then, domestic science is to be made a subject of serious study
and is to be accorded a permanent place in the school curriculum, if
the household is to profit by the educational progress of the day,
it can only be after the university has taken the initiative and
has made all matters pertaining to the house and home a subject of
scientific research.




THE RELATION OF COLLEGE WOMEN TO DOMESTIC SCIENCE


In a Western city, somewhat addicted to the formation of literary
clubs and reading-circles, is a company of women who meet for the
study of history, closing the afternoon’s work with a discussion of
current events. In alluding to these discussions, a member once said,
“No matter what subject is introduced, we always drift off to the
woman question.” The half-jesting remark has in it more of wisdom
than of criticism. The so-called “woman question” is not, as was once
popularly supposed, synonymous either with woman suffrage or with the
higher education of woman--it is as broad and as deep as the thoughts
and activities of woman. It was inevitable that for many years
efforts should be made to open new occupations to women, to give them
better preparation for their work, and to secure fair remuneration
for service well done. It was inevitable, because, however much some
sociologists may wish it otherwise, the fact remains that woman is
and must be to a certain extent a wage-earner. These efforts have
been reasonably successful; almost every avenue of work is open to
women, and almost every coveted opportunity for preparation is hers.
The reaction, however, has come, and the pertinent question is being
asked, “Why has so little been done to improve the work of woman
in those fields which have always without question been considered
legitimately hers?”

A glance at our periodical literature does indeed show unusual
interest in all questions affecting domestic life. Economists are
asking why the wages paid for domestic service are higher than
those paid the average woman in other occupations, and why, in
spite of this, the demand for household workers is greater than the
supply. Philanthropists are puzzled to know why girls prefer to
live in crowded tenement-houses on the merest pittance rather than
enjoy many of the comforts of home life as a household employee.
Experienced housekeepers find life a burden when it becomes necessary
to change the divinity who rules the kitchen or the nursery, and
wonder why it is so difficult to secure efficient help. Educated
women without homes who desire to learn the principles of domestic
science can find no explanation for the fact that the United
States with its hundreds of thousands of schools affords scarcely
one where this subject can be studied as a serious profession as
is law, medicine, or theology. None of these questions has been
satisfactorily answered. The editor who discourses of “half-baked
writers on political economy” settles one of them by saying that
there is no reason whatever why women should dislike domestic
service. But the autocratic assertion has not visibly increased the
number of women desiring employment as house-servants. The benevolent
individual who has not yet learned that thousands of girls have
neither mothers nor homes, blandly answers another of these questions
by saying, “Let girls learn housekeeping at home.” The world at large
cuts the gordian knot and says, “It is an unfortunate condition of
affairs, but we cannot reform all evils at once.”

Before considering the relation that college women sustain to the
general subject of domestic science, it must be noted that the
subject is one of general interest.

It is of interest to all women, because so large a proportion of them
marry and become actively engaged in housekeeping; the number of
married women who do not keep house is possibly equaled by the number
of unmarried women who do. Moreover, the majority of women whose
primary occupation is not housekeeping are at various times called
upon to spend a portion of their time in household duties. It is of
interest to all men, whether they have a full appreciation of it or
not, because all questions affecting the house and the home are so
inextricably bound up with all questions of life.

It must be assumed at the outset that there is a necessity for
improvement in the conduct of household affairs. As the household is
at present organized, the duties of the housekeeper are multifarious.
The ideal housekeeper must have a knowledge of culinary affairs.
Not only must she know how to make food palatable, but she must
understand its nutritive and its economic value. She must be able to
superintend the cutting and making of ordinary garments. She must
understand the over-sight of her household employees; the details of
marketing; the principles of laundry work; the keeping of household
accounts; the care of the sick. She must know how to care for the
house and all of its furniture, from attic to cellar. She must be
master of all these special lines of work, and know a thousand and
one things about the household not enumerated. She must not only be
the housekeeper, but the homekeeper. She must furnish her house with
taste, and often at the same time with economy. She should understand
the principles of the kindergarten, and not shrink from applying
the fundamental ideas of ethics and psychology to the training of
children. She must at all times be ready to perform her social
obligations in the circle in which she moves.

It is generally assumed that the only preparation necessary to become
proficient in these multiform tasks is found in the instinctive
love of domestic life common to all women. But this of itself does
not make a woman a successful housekeeper any more than a taste for
medicine renders a young man a skillful surgeon, or a talent for law
constitutes a learned jurist. There has been a growing recognition of
this fact, but at the same time it is said that the home training of
every girl ought to be sufficient. There are many reasons why this is
not so. If we apply the principles to the case of girls who become
household employees, it is seen to be at fault. It is from the ranks
below the so-called middle class, to use an invidious phrase, that
the great army of household employees is recruited. It is impossible
for a girl belonging to this class to go into a family whose social
advantages have been greater than her own, and become at once an
adept in the conventional forms of table service, an expert cook, or
a good general houseworker. She has had neither the means, nor the
opportunity, to gain even a knowledge of what duties will be required
of her, to say nothing of knowing how to perform them. An incompetent
mistress is unable to give the necessary instructions; a competent
one has often neither the time nor the patience to undertake such
training, and indeed it ought not to be expected of her any more than
it is supposed that a banker who desires an expert accountant will
teach the applicant the process of addition and subtraction.

If, on the other hand, it is assumed that the home training in
domestic affairs is sufficient for girls of the middle and upper
classes, there is also danger of error. It is often quite as
difficult to give regular instruction in the home in these matters
as it is in the ordinary school branches. The Law School of the
University of Michigan, after thirty years’ experience, said a few
years since in regard to the previous reading of law: “It is not
often that the student receives the needed assistance except in
law schools. The active practitioner, engrossed with the care of
business, cannot, or at least, as proved by experience, does not,
furnish the students who place themselves in his charge the attention
and assistance essential to give a correct direction to their
reading, and to teach them to apply it usefully and aptly in their
subsequent professional life.” This same principle too often applies
in regard to housework, even when the teacher is the mother. The most
competent mothers often have the most incompetent daughters--it is
far more easy to do the work than to teach another how to do it.
Sometimes it is assumed that the daughter can learn, as the mother
has learned, by the hard road of experience. It is, also, too often a
question of how the blind shall lead the blind. Again, many girls are
early left without homes, and thus deprived of the opportunity.

There are evidences of some appreciation of these facts.
Cooking-schools spring up spasmodically, where in “ten easy lessons”
the mysteries of theoretical and practical cooking are disclosed.
Some of our fashionable boarding-schools, ever on the alert to
foresee a public demand, announce courses in domestic science.
Charity schools in our larger cities attempt to teach girls cooking
and sewing in connection with arithmetic and grammar. The great
interest in industrial education has had its influence. In some
cities cooking and sewing have been made a part of the required work
in all the public schools, not so much, however, from a desire to
teach these branches as from a belief that the hand as well as the
brain needs training. New York is the home of the kitchen-garden,
where the thought of the originator has been to teach the children of
the poorer classes how to make their own homes brighter, rather than
to train them to do housework for remuneration. In many of our large
cities schools have been established to give domestic training, but
this training, unfortunately, is often given more in name than in
reality. All these forms of activity are indications of a desire to
help lessen, wholly or in part, the widespread ignorance of domestic
work and aversion to it.

Several reasons for this ignorance have already been suggested.
Housework has always been classed in the category, not of skilled but
of unskilled labor. Nor has it in every-day business life received
that practical consideration which the ponderous volumes on the
influence of woman would lead one to expect. Popular sentiment has
not yet demanded that when a woman marries she shall possess at least
a theoretical if not a practical knowledge of household science; it
is deemed sufficient if she acquire it after marriage at an enormous
cost of time, patience, energy, sometimes even of domestic happiness.
Nor has public opinion demanded that every woman who does not marry
should have a general knowledge of domestic affairs; it is assumed
that she has no use for such knowledge, either practically or as an
accomplishment.

When popular opinion insists that every woman who marries shall have
a practical familiarity with these subjects as strongly as it insists
that every man who marries shall be able to provide a comfortable
home for a wife; when public opinion insists that every woman,
whether she marries or not, shall have an education so symmetrical
that she can fulfill any duty which as an individual she may be
called upon to perform, then will more serious efforts be made toward
lessening this ignorance.

This lack of knowledge explains to a certain extent why so many are
unwilling to perform household work. It is natural to dislike work
that brings failure, to enjoy what brings success. The average girl
who “hates to sew” and “hates to do housework” would often find
pleasure in both did she but have systematic knowledge concerning the
work. The city boarding-house, crowded with women who “can’t endure
housekeeping,” is one product of this combination of ignorance and
aversion. In New York City there are said to be but thirteen thousand
families in individual houses. The rest of the population are crowded
into tenements, rookeries, boarding-houses, flats, and hotels.

But there are other reasons besides ignorance that explain this
aversion to household work. There is a well-founded belief that the
majority of women dislike both manual labor and self-supporting
labor, and this fact applies both to housekeeper and to housemaid. We
have passed the stage when it is permitted a man to say, “The world
owes me a living.” We not only allow a woman to say this in effect,
but we sometimes praise her for her womanliness in saying it. How
often one hears the remark, “Her father has abundant means, it is
unnecessary for her to support herself.” The average woman without
family cares is self-supporting because dire necessity compels, not
because honorable work is the birthright inheritance of every human
being. Again, the mistress of the household constantly speaks of the
routine work of the house as drudgery, and the houseworker, whose
chief interest in it is one of dollars and cents, coins a still
harsher term, and calls work a curse.

This ignorance and aversion are too widespread, and have existed
too many centuries to be removed in a single generation, nor can we
expect any one remedy to prove a panacea. But we may ask how far the
efforts made have proved successful. The cooking-school is now in
vogue, and doubtless has done much to teach new ways of preparing
food, but the cooking-school has the same relation to the general
subject of household science that an evening class in arithmetic has
to a college education. The mistress learns a few things in a general
way, and the maid does not care to learn at all. It is ephemeral in
its nature, and while it attracts public attention to the need of
more thorough instruction on the subject, it is far from going to
the root of the question, even of how to teach cooking. The same may
be said in general of domestic economy in our fashionable schools.
Sewing and cooking as taught in charity schools do apparently give
practical help in teaching the children of the poor to assist in
the care of their own homes; but this work, like that done in the
public schools on the same lines, distinctly disclaims any desire
to give technical information. In the public schools the object of
instruction in sewing and cooking is purely an educational one, and
it is an incidental result scarcely to be expected when it leads
girls to look upon housework as a means of support.

It has long been a belief with many, and one that it has been most
difficult to give up, that schools for the training of domestic
servants would do more than anything else to solve the domestic
service problem, and thus indirectly provide for the overflow in
shops and factories. In all of our large cities the experiment
has apparently been faithfully tried. The theory has seemed
unexceptionable, labor and expense have not been spared to carry it
out, but the result has been, if not an utter failure, at least far
from commensurate with the effort expended. In one school personally
visited accommodations for twenty were found. When asked what was
done in case there were more than twenty applicants for membership in
the class, the superintendent replied that no such difficulty ever
arose, as their numbers were never full. The answer was at least
significant.

In one city the Women’s Guild organized cooking-classes with the
thought of domestic service in mind. In a demonstration course
where only ten cents a lesson was charged, the average attendance
was never more than fifteen or sixteen, the greatest number ever
attending being thirty-two. In a course of practical lessons in
cooking, given at equally reasonable rates, the class numbered only
four or five. One of the most efficient managers of such schools
says after twenty-five years of experience that she is forced to
believe that nothing in this line can be done. Similar testimony
comes from a gentleman of wide practical knowledge of philanthropic
work in New York City, and on the theoretical side from a lady widely
known for her writings on economic subjects. Miss Mary Rankin Hollar
has recently investigated one hundred schools and classes where
domestic training is supposed to be given. She finds that less than
ten per cent give systematic work, and only two have any maids in
their classes.[10] In the light of these and of similar facts the
conclusion must be accepted that the question cannot, certainly at
present, be settled by establishing training-schools for employees,
no matter how thoroughly equipped or how reasonable in charges these
schools may be. The conclusion seems to be that all these efforts,
from fashionable cooking-school to charity kitchen-garden, have
not been able to remove, scarcely to lessen, either ignorance or
prejudice.

The average housekeeper does not yet know the best, the easiest,
the most practical, or the most scientific way to manage her
household affairs. Her work is often monotonous and wearisome, and
must be so until its true place as a profession is acknowledged.
The inexperienced housekeeper recognizes her own likeness only too
faithfully drawn by Dickens in Bella and her struggles with “The
Complete British Housewife.” If she desires instruction, she finds
it impossible to secure it in a systematic way. Kind friends offer
suggestions, the cook-book gives hints, and the “Housekeepers’
Guide” bridges over a temporary difficulty. But this combination of
instruction in regard to isolated facts in housekeeping is much like
the attempt to learn a new language by memorizing words from the
dictionary.

It is not strange that the novice still believes that housekeeping
can be learned only by experience, nor, on the other hand, is it
any more strange that in the effort to gain this experience she too
often breaks down in health, or gives up the attempt and resorts to
boarding. The cooking-school and the class in domestic economy, when
taught in connection with a dozen other subjects, will not solve the
question for her.

While the mistress is unskilled in work, the maid will be unwilling
to work. Bridget does not suspect that she does not rise to the
social position to which she aspires because her conversation is
ungrammatical, perhaps even vulgar, her manner insolent, her spirit
rebellious, her dress untidy and devoid of taste. She attributes
her ill success to the work in which she is engaged. The facts most
obvious to her are that her mistress does not understand practical
housework, yet is socially her superior. She at once draws the
conclusion that house service is degrading. She tries to escape to
other work less remunerative but more satisfactory, and if she is
unsuccessful, returns to house-service, determined to secure every
possible privilege. She will not spend even three months’ time, or
pay a nominal sum to learn housework, as a trade or profession. The
training-school for domestic servants is a failure because they will
not attend it.

It is said that the only way to strike at the root of all these
difficulties is to dignify labor; the practical question is, how this
is to be accomplished. In the light of all that has been done to
attain this end, and the reasons for the comparative failure which
has followed, may we not say that one great difficulty has been the
fact that reform has begun at the wrong end? unless the chasm has
been bridged between kitchen and parlor we cannot dignify labor in
the kitchen alone. All true reform must begin at the top. This has
been the experience of every great movement that has looked toward
the improvement of mankind.

But what is the relation that college women bear to these problems
of the household? They cannot revolutionize society, nor would they
if they could. They cannot bring about any reform either in mistress
or in maid. It may be answered truly that they can do but little.
They are few in numbers--and they cannot assume the ability to
settle questions with which previous generations of women have not
been able to grapple. But are they justified in shielding themselves
behind these excuses and in refusing to look the question squarely
in the face? Women have proved themselves equal both mentally and
physically to a college course, but if their training does not lead
them to assist in the discussion of some of these vexed questions
pertaining to the welfare of society, it may seriously be asked
whether the higher education of women is worth all that it has cost.
A statement as to what college women are now doing may perhaps be of
help in answering what can be done.

A few years since a carefully prepared paper read before the
Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, showed that of the 2619 women
graduates of the fourteen colleges then represented in the
association, thirty-eight per cent were married, thirty-six per cent
were teaching, five per cent were engaged in other occupations and
professions, and twenty per cent were “at home,” that is engaged in
no occupation for remuneration. Those married and at home, to whom
the subject of domestic science is presumably of most interest,
form fifty-nine per cent of the whole number, while the forty-one
per cent engaged in teaching and other occupations are certainly
not indifferent to it. With trained mind and a realization that
opportunity has brought responsibility, most often in a position
where domestic affairs are those most prominently before her, the
woman who is a college graduate is especially well situated to turn
her attention to this subject.

What can she do? She can prove, as she is proving, that her college
education has not unfitted her for domestic pursuits. Before the
college door was opened to them, the education of women was largely
a matter of information and accomplishment. Within two generations
systematic training has been substituted for the acquisition of
information and the advantage of this change should be seen first
in improved methods of domestic work. The college graduate who is
married or who is at home can prove more effectually than any other
class of graduates the practical utility of college education for
women. She can prove how puerile is the assertion that the average
girl does not need a thorough course of technical study, because
her household duties will not demand a knowledge of these subjects.
The lawyer forgets his science, the business-man his classics, the
theologian his mathematics, and the physician his metaphysics, yet
each proves daily the value of these studies. So the college woman
brings into every-day life, and may bring still more, the evidences
of the advantage to her of a college course. She may go further, and
show that resources within herself enable her to rise above much of
the inevitable drudgery of household work, and thus overcome, in a
measure, the common distaste for routine duties.

The college woman can do much by way of discussion. The love of
study fostered by her college course shows itself after graduation
in the formation of clubs and societies for literary work. There
is scarcely a town that has not from one to a dozen, and there are
few college women who have not belonged to one or more. There is
a tendency, too, for college women to organize among themselves
select classes for the pursuit of favorite studies. All of these
clubs are valuable up to a certain point in giving help through
association, but in too many cases they seem examples of misdirected
effort. Their great numbers show that women have time and interest
to give to intellectual matters. Cannot college women divert a part
of this zeal from the discussion, for example, of the tulip mania
in Holland, into the channels of social and domestic science? No
company of political economists will ever work out for women “the
servant-girl problem,” or make possible for women to learn systematic
housekeeping. The college woman can do something--not everything--by
showing that these subjects deserve consideration; that their proper
place on the programme of the women’s club is not the closing
half-hour of informal conversation, but the post of honor as one
of the chief subjects of thought and study. But she need not wait
for the movements of the literary club; she can herself organize a
society whose sole purpose shall be the discussion of ways and means
to lessen the friction in the ordinary household between mistress
and maid, to remedy the scarcity of competent help, to relieve the
overburdened housewife, a society which shall attempt to understand
the “saleslady” situation, and to study the causes of the prejudice
that still clings to household service as well as the means of
removing it. She can help to show women that it is a matter of more
vital interest to themselves and to society as a whole to discuss
these topics than to seek after information that may not be worth the
acquisition.

There is another phase of the question the thoughtful consideration
of which the college woman can urge. She can at least make the
attempt--her prospects of success may seem dubious--to bring before
her sisters the subject of the wise expenditure of money. Women
have bequeathed fortunes for every object from the endowment of
theological seminaries to the establishment of a hospital for invalid
cats; they have multiplied buildings and apparatus that language and
science might be taught according to the Presbyterian, the Baptist,
or the Methodist creed. The college woman may at least suggest that
a long-felt want has been that of a polytechnic, an institution
where the college graduate can learn household science as a serious
profession, as an advocate or physician studies the principles of
law and medicine. Such an institution, requiring a college degree
for admission, and providing in a two years’ course for instruction
in sanitary science, physiology and hygiene, the care of the sick,
cooking, marketing, the care of the house, sewing, the principles of
the kindergarten, artistic house-furnishing, domestic economy, and
such other subjects as belong distinctively to the care of the house
and home, would certainly have for a few years a limited number of
students. An examination, however, of all that has been done and of
the underlying principles leads to the conclusion that more could
ultimately be done in this way than in any other to dignify that part
of labor connected with domestic occupations. It would most certainly
not do everything--no one thing could do that--but it would do much.

In a word, the relation of college women to the question of domestic
science is first of all the duty of recognizing the importance
of the subject itself, and of its special importance to them as
college women; and second, a duty of examination, of discussion, of
intelligent study, of appeal to public sentiment, of effort to secure
at no distant day the establishment of a technical school of domestic
science which shall in no sense be a substitute for collegiate and
academic training, but shall be built upon such training as its
most secure foundation. The present strain coming upon the majority
of women is too great to be much longer borne. Relief must come,
either in improved facilities for individual work, or in coöperative
enterprises. The home must be preserved, and at the same time
household work must be reduced to a minimum. College women owe it to
themselves and to society to do their part toward attaining this end.

FOOTNOTE:

[10] _Bulletin Inter-Municipal Research Committee_, Nov. 1905.




SAIREY GAMP AND DORA COPPERFIELD


A wholesome corrective for the impatience with which we are wont
to regard the lack of progress made in regard to all matters which
concern the house and home was found at a recent International
Health Exposition held in New York City. In one section was arranged
an old-time sick-room, presided over by Sairey Gamp. The clock on
the mantel pointed to the hour of midnight, and the patient was
presumably sleeping, but on a feather bed, under heavy comfortables,
with thick draperies hanging about the large high-post bedstead. On
a table by the bedside were the remedies administered,--paregoric,
salts, castor-oil, goose-grease, and other tradition-honored
medicines. Another table bore the remains of the patient’s
supper,--fried ham, bread and butter, cucumbers, and milk. Sairey
herself reposed in an armchair, flanked, on one side, by the empty
gin-bottle, and, on the other, by a pot of tea.

In a neighboring booth was found a motley collection of old-time
remedies. It comprised elderberry flowers for pleurisy, honey for
insomnia, hornet’s-nest tea for colds, baking-soda for the stomach
and for bee-stings, cold potatoes for burns, and hot potatoes for
ear-aches, cobwebs for hemorrhage, a cat’s skin for pneumonia, to
be applied while the animal was still warm, and bags of camphor and
assafœtida to be worn around the neck for protection against disease.
All of these remedies are within the recollection of most persons who
have not yet passed middle life.

These two booths were the text from which the silent sermon of
comparison was preached by the eighty booths containing the
educational exhibits of the training-schools for nurses and of many
modern hospitals. The old-time sick-room has given place to one not
only attractive to the eye, but furnished with every scientific
appliance for the prevention as well as for the cure of disease.
In place of Mrs. Gamp is the trained nurse of to-day, attractive
in dress, agreeable in manner, intelligent in mind, scientific in
methods of work, a friend and a companion, as well as a staff and
a dependence. The contrast could not be more world-wide. Yet the
time required to revolutionize methods of caring for the sick has
been scarcely more than thirty years. The exhibit shown of a ward in
Bellevue Hospital, in 1872, is almost as far removed from a modern
hospital ward of to-day as it is from Mrs. Gamp.

What is the explanation of the transformation of Mrs. Gamp into the
trained nurse, and of the evolution of the modern hospital and the
modern sick-chamber from the old-time crude, semi-barbarous methods
of treatment?

The secret of it all lies in the one word,--investigation.
Investigation is the product of training, of education, of an eager
and absorbing desire for knowledge, of minds open to conviction and
ready to hold the judgment in suspense until it can be based on
facts. The steps in the process of the evolution are equally clear.
Given an investigating spirit, it follows that every investigator
must work with singleness of purpose, in his search for facts, that
is, for truth; and that this truth, when found, is to be held, not
as a personal acquisition, but as a good to be shared with all. Thus
progress is made, not through the individual efforts of isolated
investigators, who are working along parallel lines, but it is made
by geometrical progression, because each investigator is able to
take, as a starting-point, the goal reached by his predecessor, and
because he knows that he is coöperating with all other investigators
to secure the same end. Everywhere to-day scientists appreciate
the fact that progress in science is conditioned on scientific
investigation. They also appreciate the fact that this progress can
be made only as each investigator shares in the results obtained by
every other investigator. Every scientific discovery made by one
scientist becomes the common property of all. In this apparently
simple fact lies the explanation of the disappearance of Sairey Gamp.

“Martin Chuzzlewit” was published six years before the first part of
“David Copperfield” was issued. But while Mrs. Gamp has become but
a name, Dora Copperfield is still with us, and he would be a rash
prophet who would venture to predict the times and the seasons that
wait upon her going.

Why does Dora Copperfield still tarry? Again the explanation is
not far to seek. The household has not yet become a field for
investigation. It resents intrusion into its domain and regards
investigators as Paul Prys. It is sensitive to criticism, and it
considers a suggestion of change as an unwarrantable interference
with its affairs, and as an attack on it by outsiders. It does not
take kindly to new ideas, and it often rejects them on _a priori_
grounds, not because experiment has proved them wrong. Clothed in a
mantle of virtue, it feels itself above criticism, because the home
is of divine origin.

Yet although intuition and instinct have so long been made to play
the part in the household that ought to be taken by scientific
investigation, it is not unreasonable to believe that a change must
in time come. It is not many years since illness was attributed to
divine interposition, which to-day is known to be the result of
impure water, defective drainage, insufficient nourishment, or lack
of ventilation. We must in time, although the specific time cannot be
predicted, come to believe that women’s minds have been given them to
use, and that nowhere can they be used more effectively than in the
organization and management of a household.

This comparison has been suggested, because the question is so often
asked: Why can we not have trained domestics as we have trained
nurses? The answer must be that, in the present condition of affairs,
the resemblance between nurses and domestics is only superficial. The
trained nurse is the product, not of the family that has suffered
from the lack of such trained service, but of the discovery by the
medical profession that its labors must be ineffectual if orders are
not carried out by those who understand the reasons why these orders
are given. The more rapid the advance in scientific investigation
made in the medical world, the more rapid the advance made in all
grades of service connected with the medical profession. Pressure is
exerted from above and works downwards. More and more the subject of
health becomes one of the prevention, rather than of the cure, of
ill health. The distance between physician and nurse and nurse and
patient grows less as each understands better the function each has
to perform in securing good health.

Some parts of the household have already been put on a scientific
basis. It is to-day protected from impure water-supply, from
defective drainage, from poisonous foods, from contagious diseases,
but not through the efforts of the household itself. These benefits
it has reaped through the labors of scientific experts who, through
unwearied investigation, have discovered the means of preventing
certain large classes of diseases. Sanitary engineering and sanitary
chemistry have become professions through the work of scientific
investigators. When housekeepers, through scientific investigation,
have made a profession of housekeeping, then, and not till then, will
trained service in the household be possible.

It is very easy to see why progress in the household has up to this
time been so slow, and why it has, for the most part, been made
through forces exerted from without rather than from within. But the
Chinese wall that has so long surrounded it is giving way, and the
signs of the times point to another international exposition, when,
side by side with Mrs. Gamp and the trained nurse, will be found Dora
Copperfield and the new home,--the product of the trained minds of
scientific investigators.




ECONOMICS AND ETHICS IN DOMESTIC SERVICE


The cynic observed yesterday that the interests of womankind were
confined to the three D’s--Dress, Disease, and Domestics. To-day the
bicycle has become a formidable competitor of dress and promises to
do its part toward settling some of the disputed questions in regard
to the rival it has partially supplanted. Biology is wrestling with
disease, and bids fair to be the victor. Domestics still hold the
field, but if business methods are introduced into the household, as
it seems inevitable will be the case, the interests of women will
have passed on and upward from the three D’s to the three B’s, and
the cynic will be forced to turn his attention from woman to a more
fruitful field.

It is not indeed strange that the old conception of household service
should have yielded so slowly its place in the thoughts of women.
The whole subject of economic theory of which it is but a part is
itself a recent comer in the field of discussion; it was scarcely
more than a century and a quarter ago that Adam Smith wrote his
“Wealth of Nations” and gave a new direction to economic thought.

As a result of these economic studies of the present century
something has already been done to improve industrial conditions
outside of the household. They have led to improved factory
legislation, to better relations between employer and employee, to
wide discussion of the principles on which business is conducted, but
what has been accomplished has been brought about through an unrest
and an agitation that have often brought disaster in their train.

From this general economic discussion the household has been in the
main cut off, largely because it has been considered as belonging
to the domain of sentiment rather than of business, because the
household has shrunk from all agitation and discussion of the
questions with which it is immediately concerned, because it has
refused to see that progress is conditioned on this agitation and
discussion, because it has cried “Peace, peace, when there was
no peace.” It is this very aloofness that constitutes to-day the
most serious obstacle in the way of any improvement in domestic
service--the failure on the part of men and women everywhere to
recognize that the occupation is governed by economic law, that
it is bound up inextricably with every other phase of the labor
question, and that the initial step toward improvement must be
the recognition of this fact. Housekeepers everywhere resent what
they deem interference with their personal affairs; they betray an
ill-concealed irritation when the economic side of the question is
presented to them, and they believe, if their own household machinery
runs smoothly, that no friction exists anywhere and that their own
responsibility has ceased. Nothing to-day is so characteristic of
women as a class as their inability to assume an impersonal attitude
toward any subject under discussion, while in methods of work they
are prone to work from day to day and seldom plan for results to be
reached years after a project has been set on foot.

This means that before any improvement in household affairs can come,
the attitude of mind with which they are approached must undergo a
radical change; both men and women must recognize the analogy between
domestic service and other forms of labor, and must work, not for
more competent cooks and parlor-maids in their individual households,
not for any specific change for the better to-morrow, but for
improvements in the system--improvements, the benefits of which will
be reaped not by this but by subsequent generations. It is a fact
from which we cannot escape that domestic service has been affected
by historical and economic development, that it is to-day affected by
economic conditions, that it must in the future be in like manner
affected by them. That we do not all see these facts does not in the
least alter their existence. Nothing is so inexorable as law. Law
works itself out whether recognized or not. If we accept the workings
of the law and aid in its natural development, peace and harmony
result; if we resist the action of law and struggle against it, we do
not stay its progress but we injure ourselves as the bird that beats
its wings against prison-bars. “Delhi is far,” said the old king of
Delhi when told that an enemy had crossed his border. “Delhi is far,”
he answered when told that the enemy was in sight. “Delhi is far,”
he repeated when the enemy was at the gate. “Delhi is far,” he still
repeated when the sword of the enemy was at his throat.

Yet certainly we may hope that another view is coming to prevail, and
that housekeepers will not shrink from the storm and stress period
that is the inevitable accompaniment of discussion of household
affairs, but will bring the courage of their convictions to bear on
the discussion of the problem. It is indeed encouraging to find so
many of them beginning their studies of household affairs, not with a
proposal of remedies that may chance to meet the disease, but with a
recognition of the existence of a great question to be investigated,
with a determination to understand the problem.

What is the problem that is presented to the housekeeper? To have
a healthy, happy, virtuous and useful household. What are some of
the external conditions necessary to such a household? Palatable,
nourishing food, regularity of meals, prompt and efficient service.
With what tools has the young housekeeper heretofore been expected
to grapple with the problem in her own home? Instinct, intuition,
love of home, the cardinal virtues, especially meekness and humility,
orthodox views in regard to the relation of the housekeeper to her
home, and a belief that personal experience, however restricted, is
an infallible guide.

What has been the result? Often disastrous failure, sometimes a
measurable degree of success, always an unnecessary expenditure of
time, money, and mental, physical, and spiritual energy. That most
pathetic story in “Pratt Portraits,” “A New England Quack,” has had
more than one counterpart in the household. The results of innocent
quackery there may not always be so consciously pathetic, the
effects may be more subtile, but they are none the less fatal. Dora
Copperfield has been, unhappily for the race, no mere picture of the
imagination.

The problem should not in itself be an insoluble one; a happy,
well-ordered household ought to be the normal condition of every
home. But to expect to secure this end with the means given a young
housekeeper is often to expect the impossible. Behind the housekeeper
is not only personal ignorance but all the force of tradition; she
must face difficulties so deep-seated as to seem almost inherent and
ineradicable.

One of the greatest of these difficulties is the belief that the
subject is not worthy of consideration and that time and strength are
wasted in discussing it. This attitude of mind is well illustrated by
Lord Orrery’s “Remarks on the Life and Writings of Swift,” apropos
of Swift’s “General Instructions to Servants.”[11] Lord Orrery may
not indeed have been altogether free from malice and jealousy in
penning these words, and he certainly showed himself deficient in a
sense of humor, but whatever his motive, his comments on Swift’s work
illustrate fairly well a belief still prevalent. “How much time,”
Lord Orrery comments, “must have been employed in putting together
such a work! What an intenseness of thought must have been bestowed
upon the lowest and most slavish scenes of life!... A man of Swift’s
genius ought constantly to have soared into higher regions. He ought
to have looked upon persons of inferior abilities as children, whom
nature had appointed him to instruct, encourage, and improve.
Superior talents seem to have been intended by Providence as public
benefits; and the person who possesses such blessings is certainly
answerable to heaven for those endowments which he enjoys above the
rest of mankind. Let him jest with dignity, and let him be ironical
upon useful subjects; leaving poor slaves to heat their porridge,
or drink their small beer, in such vessels as they shall find
proper.”[12]

Another great difficulty is the persistent refusal to consider
domestic service as a question of general interest and a part of
the labor question of the day. “What is needed,” an English critic
remarks, “is an infallible recipe for securing a good £16 girl and
for keeping her when secured.” But alas, who shall give an infallible
recipe for accomplishing the impossible? Who shall lay down the
principle that will make coal-miners contented with low wages and
long hours, that will make the employers of masons satisfied with
bungling work that threatens life and limb, that will lull into
ease a conscience aroused by the iniquities of the sweating system?
Nothing can be more chimerical than to expect a perfect automatic
adjustment of the household machinery while other parts of the
industrial world are not in harmonious relation to each other.

A third obstacle is the persistent belief that nothing can be done
until this magic recipe has been discovered. If it is suggested that
one measure of alleviation is to take a part of the work out of the
household it is answered that it is useless to propose it because all
work cannot be taken out of the household, because the plan would
not work in the rural districts, because it would not meet the case
in England, because it is expensive. Certainly all these are valid
objections to considering the plan a sovereign remedy. But to refuse
to try a remedy that may prove of benefit in some households because
it will not work in all is quite the same as to refuse to administer
a medicine in case of fever because it will not also cure consumption.

The preceding is illustrative of another difficulty that is implied
in it--a fundamental ignorance on the part of many housekeepers of
the processes of reasoning. This is illustrated by the reasoning that
many go through with in discussing the question:

“Public laundries are in the hands of men whose standard of
perfection in laundry-work is a smooth shirt-front and a stiff collar
and cuff. This standard of perfection cannot be applied to the
laundering of linen and children’s clothing. Therefore, table-linen
and children’s clothing must be laundered in the house.”

“My mother’s cook received a part of her wages in lodging and board.
My cook receives a part of her wages in lodging and board. Therefore,
my daughter’s cook will receive a part of her wages in lodging and
board.”

“Negro employees lodge out of the house at the South. White employees
do not lodge out of the house in England. Therefore employees cannot
lodge out of the house at the North.”

“Employees should be treated with consideration. My employees are
treated with consideration. Therefore all employees are treated with
consideration.”

“Some employees are incompetent. Good results cannot be secured with
incompetent employees. Therefore good service is impossible.”

The only way of meeting this difficulty is found in the slow process
of careful, systematic education. What many housekeepers need is not
so much instruction in cooking or domestic sanitation as training in
calculus and quaternions, Herodotus and Livy, logic and geology.

Still another hindrance is the tone of certainty and finality that
characterizes all discussions concerning the household. It is a part
of the religious belief of many persons that every woman has been
foreordained by Providence to be a wife, mother, and housekeeper,
and that any deviation from this fundamental law is an infringement
on the designs of Providence. But some of us remember that scarcely
more than fifty years ago Daniel Webster said in the United States
Senate that slavery had been excluded from California and New Mexico
by the law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation
of the earth, and that he would not through the Wilmot Proviso take
pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of nature or to reënact
the will of God. Many apparently believe, through the same specious
reasoning, that to provide instruction in household affairs would be
in a similar way to reaffirm an ordinance of nature.

Not only does this tone of finality characterize the household
when it is assumed that because the majority of women will always
choose to be housekeepers, therefore all women must be housekeepers,
but the same tone of finality also characterizes methods in the
household. It is interesting to read to-day the objections raised
fifty years ago to the use of anesthetics in surgery; it was argued
that since pain was sent by heaven, it was sacrilegious to use any
means of alleviating it. It may be of equal interest fifty years
hence to read the protests of our contemporaries against the present
effort to combat instinct with science.

Another difficulty is the inherent proneness of Americans to look for
results before establishing the conditions on which alone results are
to be based. The nervous haste that characterizes us physically as a
nation also characterizes us mentally. We seize eagerly suggestions
and scorn the slow processes through which alone suggestions can
be made realities; then comes the inevitable reaction and we drift
into the fatalistic tendency to put up with evils rather than fight
against them.

One other general difficulty is the assumption that any improvement
in domestic service must mean putting the domestic employee on a
plane of absolute equality with the employer. Yet nothing could be
farther from the truth than this. It is doubtful whether equality
ever meant either in America or in France what the rhetorical
phrases of the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of
the Rights of Man would on the surface seem to imply. Certainly
to-day we interpret equality to mean that all persons should have
the opportunity of making of themselves all that is possible;
to jump at the conclusion that reform in domestic service means
subscription to the literal interpretation of the preamble of the
Declaration of Independence is to make an unwarranted assumption.
If, however, we were to accept the doctrine of equality, it would
be with an appreciation of what it involves. The establishment of
social equality would sometimes mean the elevation of the employer to
the natural social and moral position of the employee. Our present
social status is well characterized by the late Lawrence Oliphant in
“The Tender Recollections of Irene Macgillicuddy,” where the heroine
describes her mother, suddenly elevated in the social scale, as being
very democratic toward all those who were socially above her and very
aristocratic toward all those who were socially below her. It is
specious, not genuine, democracy that to-day blocks the progress of
improvement in domestic service.

These are general conditions that confront any and all attempts to
put the household on a more reasonable basis. Not less serious are
the specific economic conditions existing in the household. One of
these is the truck system of wages.

In every other occupation the truck system has disappeared; formerly
the teacher boarded around, the minister received an annual donation
party, and the tailor and the carpenter shared the home of the
master workman. The more recent attempt to pay employees in part
in orders for household supplies on an establishment kept by the
head of a factory or a mill has met with the most bitter protest.
The truck system of payment in general industry is antiquated and
disadvantageous to both parties of the labor contract. But in the
household it is accepted as one of the foreordained provisions of the
household, and meets with neither protest nor objection.

That the difficulties in the way of substituting another method of
payment are very great must be accepted by all, but to say that it
is impossible to bring about a change before any attempt has been
made is idle. Wherever negroes are employed the custom is almost
universal for them to live in their own homes. In many families the
experiment among white employees has been made successfully. It has
been made on a somewhat extensive scale at the hotel at Saranac
Inn, New York, where the employees lodge in a large house fitted up
attractively with a dining-room that is used for dancing, while a
billiard-room and smoking-room are provided for the married men who
board in the house with their wives. So far these experiments are
only variations of the truck system; the negro employees sleep at
home, but have their meals in the families of their employers; in
Saranac Inn the boarding-house for employees is owned and managed by
the proprietor of the hotel. But they are illustrations of the fact
that in limited areas it has been found possible to take the employee
out of the house of the employer as far as lodging is concerned. To
accomplish this must be the first step toward any modification of
the truck system. Fifty years ago the teacher who “boarded ’round”
probably looked on the truck system as an inevitable accompaniment
of the occupation. Teaching is being raised from an occupation to a
profession and one of the elements in the change is the fact that
wages have been put on a different plane.

Another economic difficulty that some persons have found lies in the
fact that, as has been said, the substitution of contract for status
is at once the object and the method of modern civilization, and that
domestic service owes nearly all of its difficulties to the fact that
it is based on status. The reason why it has not been transferred
to contract is because it is part of family life and no one has as
yet shown how the family can be preserved as an institution if its
members rest their relations on contract and not on status.

This may be true if the domestic employee is to be considered a part
of the family. Yet just here is the anomaly and the fallacy of the
objection. The domestic employee is not, and cannot be, a part of the
family; she never in all her history has had more than a semblance
of such a relationship and even that semblance has long since
disappeared. The presence of the domestic employee in the family is
not essential to the existence of the family; the domestic employee
comes and goes, but the family remains. More than this, it must be
said that the presence of the domestic employee does something to
destroy the integrity of the family life. Family life presupposes
the existence of congenial tastes and sympathetic relationships. It
argues nothing against domestic service as an occupation that those
engaged in it are rarely those who would be chosen as life companions
or even as temporary companions by those with whom the accident of
occupation has thrown them.

Yet more than this must be said. The statement that family life
cannot be preserved if its members rest their relations on contract
ignores the fact that the tendency in family life is precisely in
this direction. The wife has her allowance, sons and daughters are
given their allowances, financial dealings between members of the
same family are becoming more definite and even legal in their
character, and the result is not the disintegration of the family
as it passes from status to contract, but a greater freedom of
the individual members and therefore a more complex and perfect
organization of the family relationships.

Another economic difficulty lies in the fact that so much of the
service is largely personal in character, and that, therefore,
payments are regulated by personal feelings and not by a recognized
standard of payment. The result of this is the obnoxious system of
fees--a system difficult to be done away with as long as employees
expect to receive them. Fees could be abolished by the action of
the employers, but as long as they prefer to have their employees
paid by other persons--a practice that would be tolerated by no
other class of employers--the initiative will not come from them.
Fees could be abolished by the action of the individuals disposed
to give them, but so long as men selfishly believe that money ought
to purchase privileges that are not rights, the initiative will not
come from them. Fees could be abolished by the concerted action of
employees, but so long as they are ignorant of economic principles
and indifferent to the social results of the system, the initiative
will not come from them. But one of the hopeful signs of the times is
the recent statement that in Paris waiters are coming to appreciate
the fact that fees ultimately must mean smaller wages, since
employers not only refuse to pay their employees but demand a certain
percentage of the fees received. The movement among the waiters to
refuse fees and to insist on wages paid by employers is full of
promise.

What, then, are the conditions under which improvement in domestic
service is possible?

First of all must come that attitude of mind that is willing
to recognize not only the impossibility of separating domestic
service from other parts of the household life, but still more the
impossibility of separating the economic conditions within the
household from the economic conditions without, a willingness to
give up _a priori_ reasoning in regard to domestic employments and
to study the historical and economic development of the household.
All superficial treatment of the question must fail of securing the
desired results, and all treatment must be superficial that does not
rest on the solid basis of economic history and theory.

Granted, then, the existence of economic conditions in the household,
the method of procedure is the same as in all other fields of action.
In medicine the first step is to diagnose the case; in law, to take
evidence; in mathematics, to state the problem; in science, to
marshal the facts. No set of _a priori_ principles can be assumed in
the household with the expectation that the household will conform
to them. Investigation to-day stands at the door of every entrance
into a new field and bars the way to any attempt to force a passage
without its aid. The household has been slow to accept the inexorable
fact that it must demolish its Chinese wall of exclusion and throw
open its facts to investigation, but this is the inevitable end.

Next to the household, the most conservative element in society
is the school. Yet the school is already yielding to the spirit
of the times. It has been pointed out in a recent number of the
“Atlantic Monthly”[13] that the profession of teaching, starting
with a definite and final code of principles of education, has
clung tenaciously to it, and it is but to-day that the occupation
is realizing that it can make progress only as progress is made in
other fields, and that is through scientific investigation; only
to-day is it coming to appreciate that all conclusions to be valid
must be based on facts. Every occupation has passed through the same
experience and the law of progress that governs all development
will work itself out in the household. Minds open to conviction and
trained to scientific investigation are the prerequisites for an
improved condition in domestic service.

Is it said that this discussion of the subject has dealt only with
its economic phases and has ignored the ethical side? Alas, life is
everywhere one long protest against a varying standard of ethics.
Shall we separate the ethics of household service from the ethics of
the shop, the ethics of the factory, the ethics of the professions?
Shall we be governed by one code in the family, by another code in
the church, by a third code in the school, and a fourth code in
the state? Is the subject of ethics to be divided and pigeon-holed
in compartments labeled “ethics for domestic service,” “ethics for
skilled labor,” “ethics for unskilled labor,” “ethics for employers,”
and “ethics for employees?” Who shall separate any question in
economics, nay more, any question in life from its ethical phases?
Who shall declare that the ethical code for one is not the ethical
code for all?

It is said that every book is but the elaboration of a single idea.
In a similar way all discussion of domestic service must have its
beginning and its end with the idea that no improvement is possible
that is not inaugurated by that class in society that sees most
clearly the economic as well as the ethical elements involved in it,
and that work by the slow methods of careful, patient investigation
is the only way by which its difficulties, all too evident, may be
lessened, not for ourselves but for those who shall come after us.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] _Works of Swift_, XI, 365-441.

[12] Cited from _Remarks on the Life and Writings of Swift_, p. 179,
in _Works of Swift_, XI, 365.

[13] Frederic Burk, _The Training of Teachers_, October, 1897.




“PUT YOURSELF IN HIS PLACE”


To seek wisdom through a _questionnaire_ is a time-honored expedient,
while to give wisdom through questions has classic authority. It is
therefore immaterial whether it is Experience or Inexperience that
may be either seeking wisdom or that may have wisdom to bestow in
this interlocution concerning a domestic problem that has already
been involved to the _n^{th}_ power.

_What are the causes of our household troubles?_

The causes are in part economic--a household system governed by the
same economic laws that govern other industries, but resisting the
action of these laws; in part social--the attempt to form a chemical
compound of public and political democracy with private and social
aristocracy; in part educational--the tradition that marriage acts as
a solvent to change every ignorant, inexperienced young woman into
an accomplished housekeeper, and that, therefore, mental training is
for her a work of supererogation; in part religious--the persistent
maintenance of the belief that from the primeval chaos every woman
has been foreordained to be a housekeeper, united with the rejection
of the parallel belief that every man has been foreordained to be a
tiller of the soil.

_But the situation in regard to household help has never been so
critical as it is at the present time._

This statement has been found in one form or another in all
literature, sacred and profane, from the times of Abraham and
Achilles to the story of the last college graduate who has entered
domestic service in disguise.

_Other countries do not have the same difficulty._

On the contrary, the difficulty is universal. It may vary somewhat in
degree, but fundamentally the problem is the same the world over.
Moreover, in no country is there so intelligent an understanding of
all its factors as in America, for in no other country is found so
great a mass of material for a comprehensive study of the subject.
Statistical investigations have been carried on through national,
state, and private initiative, and the information asked for has,
for the most part, been cheerfully given because of the widespread
desire among household employers to coöperate in every way with
those undertaking these investigations. Material of every kind,
ranging from the scientific accumulations of bureaus of labor to the
hysterical deductions of sentimental observers, is all at hand. In
Berlin a young man who recently carried on a statistical inquiry in
regard to domestic service was nearly mobbed for his presumption--so
considered--in attempting to gather information that German
housekeepers had guarded as sacredly as Tibet holds the Grand Lama.

_When will our present household difficulty end?_

The difficulty will end when every man is reasonable, when every
woman is omniscient, when every child is obedient, when we discover
the philosopher’s stone, when we drink of the Pierian spring, when we
dig the treasure at the end of the rainbow, when we enter upon our
inheritance in Spain, when the east meets the west.

_Meantime?_

Dismiss the cook from your attention for a moment and study the
kitchen. Is the baking-table on the opposite side of the room from
the baking-utensils, while the baking-materials are kept in the
pantry? Does an inventory of the cooking-implements show one article
for toasting and broiling, two battered saucepans for preparing a
five-course dinner, and a soup-kettle with a cover that does not fit?
Is the pump on the left-hand side of the sink? Is the sink three
inches too low and in a dark corner where a blank wall is all that
meets the eye of the one who works before it? Does the waste-pipe
from the ice-chest lead into a pan that must be emptied daily? Must
the ashes from the range be carried out of doors every day? Is
the range-coal too large and is the kindling-wood green? Does the
oven-door refuse to shut tight and has the tea-kettle sprung a leak?
Do the unprotected water-pipes freeze with zero weather? Does the
chimney fail to draw? The results of these investigations may be the
discovery that the household engineer has been expected to run his
engine with insufficient fuel. _What if the skillful engineer has
made the same discovery?_

Occupy for a week in winter the room of the cook. Does the
temperature hover near the freezing-point, while the rest of the
house is warm? Is the mattress of husks and are the pillows of hen’s
feathers? Does a row of hooks take the place of a closet? Try the
room for a week in midsummer. Is the temperature stifling hot? Do
flies and mosquitoes find joy in the screenless windows? Are the
facilities for bathing a small bowl and a pitcher without a handle
on the top of a triangular wash-stand? The two weeks’ vacation in an
unknown part of your own home may lead to the traditional _mauvais
quart d’heure_. _What if the employee has spent a year under the
protecting shelter of your roof?_

Watch for a week the table conversation of your family and its
guests. Count the number of times you hear the word “servant,” and
remarks in regard to “household drudgery,” “menial service,” “knowing
one’s place,” and “superiority to housework.” _What if the household
employee has also kept count?_

Imagine that you can accept ten cents from a friend for doing an
errand, half a dollar from a guest as he leaves the house and a
dollar from another, and can flatter an unwelcome cousin in the hope
of getting two dollars at his departure. Criticise mercilessly all of
your friends after you have invited them to afternoon tea. Repeat
at table all the gossip retailed by officious busy-bodies. Your own
self-respect will be lowered. _What if moral deterioration takes
place in the kitchen under the same conditions?_

_But what can I do?_

Try putting all the laundry-work out of the house; take up the
carpets, paint the floors, put down rugs and send these out of the
house to be cleaned, or clean house with a vacuum cleaning-machine;
reduce useless work and incidentally add to the attractiveness of
your house by taking down portières and paying storage on half of the
bric-à-brac; buy ice-cream and cake and all “extras” at the woman’s
exchange. These additional expenses will materially reduce your
subscriptions to half-orphan asylums and to vacation funds for the
indigent. _What if this course saves you from hotel existence and
enables others to keep their homes intact and to pay for their own
vacations?_

Substitute praise for constant censure and the principle of
coöperation for that of “giving orders;” see that the daily paper is
on the kitchen-table before it is a week old and that the magazines
are promptly supplied; encourage the singing-class, the flower-bed,
basket-making, bead-work, in-door evening games, and out-of-doors
recreation; at least make the effort to give in some form a new and
wholesome interest to lives that may have been repressed and mentally
starved. Friends may smile and call the plan quixotic. _What if it
encourages self-respect in the employee and therefore respect for his
work?_

Consider the kitchen with its accompanying rooms in the light of an
economic plant. Give the same careful attention to its arrangement
and equipment that the owner of a manufacturing establishment gives
to the fitting-up of a new factory with all the latest labor-saving
contrivances and facilities for work; study the plumbing and
the water-supply with the zest of a scientific investigator and
select the cooking- and baking-utensils with the interest of an
artist. This course may curtail expenditures for the “den” and the
relinquishment of the “cosy corner.” _What if thereby your house and
home gain in unity for employer as well as for employee?_

Abandon the attempt to maintain a Waldorf-Astoria style of living on
a fifteen-hundred-dollar salary; abandon it, if you have the income
to maintain it, if in maintaining it you are putting temptation
in the path of a weaker friend and neighbor. This may reduce your
calling-list by two hundred names. _What if you gain thereby peace of
mind and a contented household?_

Establish household settlements among the cottagers at Newport,
in the vicinity of Central Park, on Riverside Drive, Commonwealth
Avenue, Euclid Avenue, and the North Shore Drive. _What if successful
settlement work in these localities should enable the families of
millionaires to bridge the impassable chasm that now separates the
dining-room from the butler’s pantry and the reception-room from the
linen-closet?_

       *       *       *       *       *

_Will these temporary devices remove all friction in the running of
my household machinery?_

No, they will probably not even lessen it. But these and similar
expedients may be of benefit to you, inasmuch as they may help you
to carry out the commendable advice of Charles Reade, “Put yourself
in his place.” They may also be of benefit to your granddaughter in
enabling her to be a member of that ideal trades-union--that between
employer and employee.




OUR KITCHEN


Our kitchen is not that of a millionaire; it has not a tiled floor,
enameled brick walls or glass shelves; it is not fitted with
appliances for cooking by electricity or with automatic arrangements
for bringing up coal and sending down ashes. It is a plain, ordinary
kitchen, built new six years ago, and attached to an old house to
take the place of the former basement kitchen. It was planned by
the landlord and the carpenter for unknown tenants, and the general
arrangement had to conform to the plan of a house built many years
before. If, then, it has been possible, with these usual, every-day
conditions to develop a kitchen that possesses convenience of
arrangement and unity of purpose, it would seem that similar ends
might be obtained in any kitchen, anywhere, by any person, through
use of the same means,--careful thought.

We are busy women who have learned, in other lines of work outside
the household, the value of order and system, and when we began
housekeeping we saw no reason why the application to the kitchen
of the same principles that were used in arranging a study or a
library should not produce the same ease and joy in the work of the
household. If a library, to be of service to those who work in it,
must have its books classified according to some clearly recognized
principle, would not a kitchen gain in usefulness if some principles
of classifying its utensils were employed? If a study-table demands
every convenience for work, ought not a kitchen-table to be equally
well equipped? If the student can work more effectively in a cool
room than in one that is stifling hot, will not a cook produce better
results if working in a well-ventilated room? If the librarian needs
special equipment, does not the butler need appliances adapted for
his work? If the instructor needs the materials for investigation
if his work is not to perish of dry rot, should not the houseworker
have at hand all the materials needed if her work is to represent
progress? If the parlor gains in attractiveness if its colors
are harmonious, will not the kitchen gain if thought is given to
appropriate decoration?

It was the affirmative answer to these and similar questions that led
to the evolution of our kitchen from a state of unadorned newness to
its present condition. An indulgent landlord provided a model range,
a copper boiler, a porcelain-lined sink, and a double shelf; we have
added the gas-stove, the instantaneous water-heater, the electric
fan, two double shelves and all the utensils. Thus equipped, what
does our kitchen represent?

To answer this question it is necessary to consider its general
arrangement. The north side is filled by a window, the range, and
the outside door. This with the adjacent east side, we call “the
cooking side.” Here are arranged boilers, sauce-pans, broilers, and
all implements large or small needed for cooking.

The south side is filled by the door leading into the
refrigerator-closet, the baking-table, and the door leading into
the butler’s pantry. This we call the “baking side,” for here is
the baking-table with its bins for flour and meal, its drawers for
baking-spoons, knives and forks, and sliding shelves for baking and
for bread-cutting. Above it are various small utensils needed in
baking, together with spices, essences, and various condiments. A
“kitchen indicator” showing articles needed from the grocer’s hangs
at the left of the shelf, a peg at the end holds the household bills,
and pegs at the right are for shears, scissors, a pin-cushion, and a
cushion for needles used in preparing roasts.

The west side is the “cleaning side.” This side is our special
pride and delight, for here on a corner shelf is our electric fan,
the drop-leaf table for drying dishes, the porcelain sink with
its shining brass faucets, the nickel instantaneous water-heater,
and our fine forty-gallon copper boiler. Here above the sink are
collected the cleaning-brushes of various kinds, ammonia, borax,
scouring-sand, and all cleaning preparations. The sink is set about
three inches too low for comfortable use, a fault in sinks almost
universal, and to remedy this defect a rack was evolved from four
nickel towel-bars joined by connecting metal plates. Lack of wall
space required that the shelf on this side of the room should be
shared equally between the preparations for cleaning and the kitchen
library, while the basket for newspapers and magazines occupies the
end of the cleaning-table. But does not cleanliness of mind accompany
cleanliness of material equipment?

The outside entry to the kitchen serves, in default of other place, as
a cleaning-closet. Here are kept brooms, dusters, scrubbing-brushes,
polishing-brushes, dusting-mops and cleaning-mops. Here also, easy of
access, is kept the garbage-pail,--three times each week emptied by
the city garbage collector and three times each week scrubbed with hot
soap-suds.

This is our kitchen as regards its ground plan and its exterior
aspect. But the student of history always looks behind the external
surface and studies the record; hence our kitchen records a belief in
a few principles that seem fundamental in a household.

The first principle is that a kitchen should be absolutely sanitary
in all its appointments. This means not only filtered cistern
water, a still for distilling water, a porcelain-lined sink, and
an abundance of hot water, but it means an absence of cubby-holes
and cupboards where articles may be tucked away and accumulate
dirt. Everything is in the open, every part of the kitchen is kept
spotlessly clean, and we have never seen a rat or a water-bug about
the house.

A second belief recorded by our kitchen is that of unity of plan.
If the artist places before all else in importance the composition
of his picture, if the author believes that his book should be the
elaboration of a single idea, if the engineer knows that every part
of his engine fits by design into every other part, it would seem
clear that the application of the same principle is essential in the
household. If the kitchen is to sustain an organic relationship to
the other parts of the house it must represent in the arrangement
of all its details the same idea of unity of composition that is
expressed in a painting, of unity of development that gives life to a
book, of unity of design that makes the perfect engine.

A third idea represented in our kitchen is that it must be equipped
with every labor-saving device and with every convenience for work,
if satisfactory results are to be secured. The first thought of the
manufacturer is for the equipment of his manufacturing plant with
every modern appliance. Can a perfect product come from imperfect,
inadequate means of work in the household? The application of this
principle has of necessity involved many experiments,--inventions
will not work, or good ones are superseded by better ones, or a
new need arises and must be met. Every week sees some article
discarded because an improvement on it has been found. In the city
of twenty-two thousand inhabitants in which we live automobiles
have been used six years and approximately three hundred are now
owned there and in the vicinity, but not one can be found of a
pattern prior to that of three years ago. If an automobile must be
disposed of because it is not of the most recent model, does it seem
unreasonable to cast aside a twenty-five cent eggbeater that chafes
the hands, a pineapple-snipper that wastes the fruit, an unsightly
broken sauce-pan, and a patent water-cooler that will not cool the
water?

But man does not live by bread alone, and a kitchen may be sanitary
in all its arrangements, it may represent unity of plan, it may
have every modern convenience, and yet it may lack the essential of
attractiveness. The arts and crafts movement has not yet reached the
kitchen, and it is thus almost impossible to secure cooking-utensils
of good artistic design and color. But the second-hand store will
often furnish a piece of good pottery, brass, or copper that may be
utilized in the kitchen and serve the added purpose of increasing its
attractiveness.

Yet a kitchen may illustrate all of these principles and still lack
those subtle features that establish, unconsciously, some connection
between it and its predecessors in other times and in other places.
If the theory of evolution has taught us not only in science but in
art and in politics and in everything connected with our daily life
to look behind the surface and to seek the origins of things, if it
has taught us ever to look for the relationship between the present
and the past, surely the kitchen must not be excluded from this
process of thought. Apparently the work performed there each day has
neither connection with the past nor outlook into the future, yet
this is but a superficial aspect of the situation. The kitchen of
to-day with gas-range and instantaneous water-heater is the direct
heir of the kitchen of yesterday with coal-range and copper boiler,
and of that of the day-before-yesterday, with open fire and cauldron.
An attempt to maintain this connection with the past is sought
through the photographs on the walls. Two views of early colonial
kitchens give historic continuity with the past, a photograph of the
interior of a Dutch kitchen gives a touch of that cosmopolitanism
that makes the whole world akin, while that of a famous hotel in New
York City places us by prophetic fiction in the class of millionaires.

Such is our kitchen. “Does it pay?” It has paid us.




AN ILLUSTRATED EDITION


It is the day of the illustrated edition, and even more the day of
the illustrator. Happy is the author to whom is accorded the honor of
an illustrated edition of his latest book. Still happier is he whose
facile, practiced pen is called into requisition to illustrate the
works of the great artists found in our monthly magazines. Unhappy is
the one whose book _no_ artist, even if gifted with imagination, can
illustrate, and whose name no publishing house has ever entered on
its card catalogue of pen illustrators of artistic sketches. But more
fortunate times may await the unillustratable and non-illustrating
author. A changing phraseology reflects a new _rapprochement_ between
author and artist and a breaking-down of the barriers that once
confined each within definite limits. There are even indications
that the present positions of author and artist may be reversed and
that the non-illustrating author may become quite independent of
the previously necessary artist. “Pen pictures,” “sketches in black
and white,” “pastels in prose,” all indicate the possibilities open
to the author of combining with his own vocation that of the artist
whose existence thus becomes unnecessary to his own. Nay more, the
unillustratable author may take heart, for as the skillful acrobat
learns the feat of walking on his hands, so the literary trickster
may achieve the paradox of illustrating works that cannot be
illustrated.

This theory has been the result of contemplating on the one hand the
impossibility of illustrating a modest book dealing with statistics
and equally prosaic facts and of noting on the other hand the popular
demand that every book shall be illustrated. How shall man attain
unto the unattainable?

A reminiscent mood led the author to blow the dust from the top of
her last book, written ten years ago and not yet, unhappily, out of
its second edition, and to turn over its half-forgotten pages. She
found a passing interest in recalling her conclusions as they were
laid bare on the pages of the book, but undreamed-of pleasures took
form and shape as she remembered the circumstances under which each
page had been written. Nay more, there opened out the vision of the
unattainable illustrated edition. A series of pictures passed before
her, far more interesting than the book they illustrated, and thus a
prosaic work attained a place in that desirable class in which are
found all books whose text seems only as a pretext for the artist’s
brush.

The first picture was that of the receipt of a letter written in
reply to a humble request for information in regard to the number of
maids employed in the household, the length of time they had been
employed, and similar facts obvious to one’s friends and neighbors.
The letter was written on Tiffany’s finest stationery, it bore a
crest and a coat of arms so undecipherable as to be a guarantee of
its high aristocratic lineage, and its perfume was that of Araby
the Blest. But the letter was written in the third person and the
information it conveyed was not that which had been sought but the
unexpected statement that the inquiry was impertinent and under no
consideration whatever could be answered. Alas, the questioner had
known that her questions would demand time and thought, but what
artist, save the author, could depict the abyss into which the
questioner was hurled by the epithet “impertinent?”

The second picture also had a letter in the foreground. The quest for
information had led to an appeal to the only authority known to the
questioner, but it was to an authority of world-wide reputation, and
the unknown questioner hesitated long. Would the great man heed the
appeal, even if the questioner could justify herself in making it?
But the die was cast and the result was a long, kindly, painstaking
letter not only giving in detail all the information sought but also
suggesting similar by-paths to be explored. “Of such is the Kingdom
of Heaven.”

The third picture was that of a woman’s club. The writer had never
belonged to a woman’s club, save for a brief period of nominal
connection with one, and it had been with much trepidation that
she had accepted an invitation to read a paper before one of these
organizations. But she wrote an article in which she attempted to
show by means of all the facts and arguments at her command that the
establishment of training-schools for domestic employees would not
and could not remedy household ills. She valiantly read the paper and
at the close of the hour one of the company thanked her heartily “for
advocating the establishment of training-schools for servants.” Was
it the woman, or the club?

The fourth picture is of a large corner room, with low ceiling,
facing south and west. Its long table is covered with papers,
reports, schedules, and census publications, and here, from early
morning until late at night, during the hottest weeks of the early
summer, the occupant of the room attempted to work out some of the
economic laws governing domestic service. Her fellow occupants of the
large building were the numerous maids engaged in cleaning it. Their
work also was difficult, but morning tea tided over the time between
breakfast and dinner, and work for the day closed at four o’clock.
How would an artist portray the question that came each night--what
would be the effect of an eight-hour day on economic investigation?

The fifth picture is one of a small room opening on an air-shaft,
in a New York hotel. The occupant had arrived late, the hotel
was crowded, and no other room was available. But it was not
the smallness of the room, or the single window opening on the
air-shaft that gave the occupant a chill on a July night,--it was
the folding-bed. Her traveling-bag contained a new work on economic
history, having a chapter on domestic service, and turning on all
the electric lights, she read until daylight, never since quite sure
whether it was devotion to history or craven fear of the deadly
folding-bed.

The sixth picture is one of a railway carriage in provincial France.
The American traveler, in search of information, had attempted to
learn from her chance companion in the carriage somewhat of domestic
service in France. Much valuable information was politely given, and
then the tables were turned. But the interest of the French lady was
centred, not in the status of domestic service in America, but in
the personal status of her new acquaintance. That she was traveling
alone might be accepted, though certainly to be deprecated. But what
artist shall show forth the amazement on the face of the French lady
when she heard the affirmative answer to her question, “But surely it
is not possible that Madame will find no one at the station to meet
her?”

The seventh picture is a series of dissolving views that suggest
the portrait of a lady standing with her back to the onlooker and
gazing at her own face reflected in a mirror opposite. A few months
after the book was published, its author, attracted by the title of
an article, purchased a new review to while away a railway journey.
She read the article--and pondered. It seemed strangely familiar and
soon she realized that it was in effect one of the chapters in her
own book. It had not even suffered “a sea-change into something rich
and strange,” for the illustrations used were the same that the first
author had collected from the experiences of her personal friends,
and to every one she could have attached a name, as presumably the
second author could not do. The second in the series of dissolving
views is of a correspondence with a gentleman who had given a course
of lectures on domestic service in a remote city. The author of the
book had expressed a desire to sit at the feet of Gamaliel and at
length secured the loan of the manuscript from which the lectures
were given. Probably a sea-change was not to be looked for in an
interior city, and the author of the book rejoiced to find so much
community of interest with the author of the lectures. The third in
the series of dissolving views was of a certain bibliography. It had
appeared in the first number of a new report on household affairs
and the author was interested in it as a probable illustration of
thought transference. Here was the title of a book she had consulted
in the Bibliothèque Nationale and that presumably was not to be found
in American libraries. Here was the title of a curious book she had
picked up when “bouquinering” on the Quai Voltaire and had added
to her private library. This was the title of another curious book
found in a great university library,--interesting, but of little
value. This was the line-long title of a collection of technical
German laws found in Saxony. Here was the title of an old book that
had been valued as a family heritage, but of no special importance
to any one else. The compiler of the so-called “books of reference”
had overlooked the sub-title in the book--“full titles of works
referred to in the text”--and had not realized that the use of the
word “bibliography” had been demanded by the exigencies of type. To
recommend for use as a working bibliography a list of “full titles of
works referred to in the text,”--was it perhaps donning an evening
dress when starting for the golf-links?

The dissolving views have given the author the greatest pleasure
of all the illustrations of the book. There is a favorite jest
concerning books that have been read only by the author and the
proof-reader. It is indeed true that for the most part an author
writes a book to please himself, not to gain readers. But there is
a secret joy if two birds can be brought down with the same stone
and a reader, other than the proof-reader, be found. The purchase
of a book does not necessarily imply that the book is read,--public
libraries add the latest new books, private libraries are interested
in first editions, and authors buy presentation copies for their
friends. But none of these purchasers guarantee that the book
purchased will be read. Was it not a cause for open rejoicing that
not only one but three readers had been found, and more than that,
that these three readers had not only been non-combatants, but had
agreed so entirely with the views of the author?

The pleasures of a visit to Europe are often as is the square of
the distance from the time of the visit. With the passage of the
years, oblivion overtakes the moments when we agonized over the
question whether the fee expected by the guide was a shilling or
a pound, and the hours when we gazed at the fireless grate; but
with each recurring year the realities stand out with greater and
growing vividness. Does not the flight of time bring to us all the
realization that the real work of our hand is not the one that can be
bought at the counter, but the unpurchasable illustrated edition?




THE WOMAN’S EXCHANGE[14]


Few persons whose attention is attracted by the modest sign of the
Woman’s Exchange, now found in nearly all our large cities, realize
that a new competitor has appeared in the industrial market. Few
even of those who have assisted in organizing and carrying on such
exchanges know that they have been instrumental in introducing a new
factor into economic problems. Yet in spite of unpretentious rooms
and unconcern as to economic questions, the Woman’s Exchange has
already had an appreciable effect on economic conditions, and must in
future play a still more important part.

The history of these organizations belongs, however, to a history
of philanthropic work rather than to that of economics. The
first Woman’s Exchange, the “Ladies’ Depository Association” of
Philadelphia, established in 1833, was founded by persons “who
labored earnestly to arouse in the community an interest in the hard
and often bitter struggle to which educated, refined women are so
frequently exposed when financial reverses compel them to rely upon
their own exertions for a support.”[15] In its foundation and its
management it was controlled entirely by philanthropic motives; it
was to enable women “who had seen better days,” and suffered more
from the prejudices of society in regard to woman’s work than from
actual poverty, “to dispose of their work without being exposed to
the often rough handling of shopkeepers, or to the then mortifying
admission of their fancied humiliating condition.” The second
exchange, the “New Brunswick, New Jersey, Ladies’ Depository,”
founded in 1856, also was purely charitable in its motives, and
it restricted its privileges to those who had been in affluent
circumstances but were suddenly forced to become self-supporting.
The first two exchanges were the product of a generation in which
charities of every kind were largely regulated by sympathy alone,
and it was twenty years before similar organizations were formed
elsewhere. In 1878 the “New York Woman’s Exchange” was begun, and it
added a new idea. Its aim was “beneficence, rather than charity,” and
it undertook “to train women unaccustomed to work to compete with
skilled laborers and those already trained, and to sell the result
of their industries.”[16] It came at a time when the organization
of charities was first being attempted, and the principle was being
slowly evolved that the best way to help an individual is to help him
to help himself. Its aim and its management show the influence of
the present generation in its study of philanthropy as a social and
economic question.

Since 1878, the year which may be taken as the beginning of the
period of the Woman’s Exchange, nearly one hundred exchanges have
been organized, all, with scarcely an exception, growing out of
philanthropic motives, but philanthropy governed by the principles
of the present day. The statement of the object of the exchange
presented in their constitutions and annual reports will make this
clear:

  “The object of this Association shall be to aid women by helping
  them to help themselves; and in furtherance of this design, to
  maintain a depot for a reception and sale of woman’s work, or of
  articles in her possession, of which she may wish to dispose,
  subject to the approval of an examining committee.” Cincinnati,
  Ohio.

  “As a means of providing a way for industrious and needy women to
  help themselves without neglecting their homes and families, it is
  indeed a charity that cannot be too highly estimated and is worthy
  of substantial support.” President’s Report, Decatur, Illinois,
  1890.

  “The prime object of the Woman’s Industrial Exchange of
  Minneapolis is: First--To assist women who must maintain
  themselves. Second--To assist girls or women to pursue a course of
  study as a means of support.” Fourth Annual Report, Minneapolis,
  Minnesota, 1888.

  “There are few charities that appeal more strongly to public
  sympathy than those whose aim is amelioration of the sufferings of
  women, for whom the struggle of life is beset by a thousand almost
  insurmountable difficulties.” San Francisco, California.

  “The object of this Association shall be to maintain in the city
  of Little Rock, Arkansas, a place for the reception, exhibition,
  and sale of articles, the product and manufacture of industrious
  women, and to assist by such means as may be found efficient to
  that end said women to turn to personal profit their talent and
  industry for earning an honest livelihood; to facilitate a sale
  of such articles as the women aforesaid may have or desire to
  dispose of; also generally to assist women in their efforts to earn
  an honest maintenance by their own industry, by and through such
  instrumentalities as the society may find conducive to that end.”
  Little Rock, Arkansas.

  “In addition to the attainment of the chief object of the exchange,
  namely, assisting a needy woman to turn to personal profit whatever
  useful talent she may possess, it is also of some moment to have
  demonstrated the practicability and possibility of the work in
  other directions.” New Orleans, Louisiana, 1888.

  “The exchange has, during the past year, been mainly supported by
  the exertions and untiring energy of the board of managers. The
  ladies in that way have demonstrated the Christian charity that
  fills the good woman’s heart when she is able to assist her sister
  woman.” President’s Report, Augusta, Georgia, 1891.

  “The object of this society is to furnish a depository for the
  reception, exhibition, and sale of articles made by ladies
  attempting to support themselves.” Stamford, Connecticut.

  “The Philadelphia Exchange for Woman’s Work is an institution
  formed by a number of women of Philadelphia for the purpose of
  helping women to help themselves.” Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
  Circular of 1890.

  “Among the number of charities which seem to be constantly
  increasing in our large city, we must again bring to the notice of
  its friends the Woman’s Work Exchange and Decorative Art Society of
  Brooklyn.” Annual Report, 1889.

The object of the Woman’s Exchange is thus seen to be charity, not
charity pure and simple, but charity having a double end in view.
The first and most important aim is the direction into remunerative
channels of the work of “gentlewomen suddenly reduced to abject
penury,” with the secondary aim of encouraging “the principle of
self-help in the minds of girls and women, who in the future, if
necessary, will be helpful and not helpless when misfortune comes.”
In carrying out its object, the exchange receives under specified
conditions all articles coming under the three general classes of
domestic work, needle-work, and art-work.

The domestic department includes all forms of food that can be
prepared by the consigners in their own homes and sold through
the exchange. These articles form a dozen different classes and
comprise more than two hundred and fifty varieties. They include
every form of bread, pastry, cake, small cakes, cookies, cold meats,
salads, soups, special and fancy desserts, preserves, jellies, jams,
pickles, sauces, and delicacies for the sick.[17] In the department
of needle-work nearly a hundred different articles are enumerated
by the different exchanges, and the number is practically without
limit, since it includes every form of plain and fancy sewing.
The art department is for the special encouragement of decorative
art, and its possibilities as well as actual achievements are very
great. These three departments are found in all the exchanges, but
each exchange, according to its locality and the consequent needs
of the community, adds its own special line of work. A few receive
scientific and literary work, others arrange for cleaning and mending
lace, re-covering furniture, the care of fine bric-à-brac, writing
and copying, the preparation of lunches for travelers and picnic
parties, and a few take orders for shopping. All the exchanges have
connected with them an order department, which is considered an
especially satisfactory and remunerative part of their work.

In fulfilling its aim, the exchange thus enters as a competitor into
the industrial field, though without consideration on its own part of
this side of its work; and it is as an economic factor, rather than
as a charitable organization, that it is considered in this chapter.
The place it has already won in this field is shown by the fact that
there are now in operation about seventy-five exchanges, a few in
small places in thinly settled localities having been abandoned, and
these are scattered through twenty-three states and the District of
Columbia. A few of them are carried on by private enterprise, and
make no public report, and several organizations have as yet made no
statement of their financial condition. Sixty-six of them, however,
receive work from nearly sixteen thousand consigners, to whom they
paid last year, according to their last annual reports, a total
amount of more than $400,000. The following table shows the amount
paid consigners by the ten largest Exchanges:

  New York Exchange for Woman’s Work,                 $51,000
  Boston Women’s Educational and Industrial Union,     34,510
  Cincinnati Woman’s Exchange,                         26,992
  San Francisco Woman’s Exchange,                      23,372
  Baltimore Woman’s Industrial Exchange,               15,500
  Philadelphia Exchange for Woman’s Work,              14,562
  Columbus Woman’s Exchange,                           13,000
  Minneapolis Woman’s Industrial Exchange,             12,791
  Topeka Ladies’ Exchange,                             10,000
  Milwaukee Woman’s Industrial Exchange,                9,824

It is of interest also to note the total amount paid to consigners by
different exchanges since their organization.

The following table will show this:

  New York Exchange for Woman’s Work (12 years),                 $417,435
  Cincinnati Women’s Exchange (8 years),                          175,130
  New Orleans Christian Woman’s Exchange (10 years),              173,223
  Boston Woman’s Educational and Industrial Union (6 years),      148,588
  St. Louis Woman’s Exchange (8 years),                            55,000
  San Francisco Woman’s Exchange (5 years),                        50,000
  Rhode Island (Providence) Exchange for Woman’s Work (10 years),  48,469
  Richmond (Va.) Exchange for Woman’s Work (7 years),              27,324
  St. Joseph (Mo.) Exchange for Woman’s Work (6 years),            19,233

The Woman’s Exchange regarded as an economic factor must be
considered in three aspects: (1) As a business enterprise; (2) from
the point of view of the producer; (3) from the standpoint of the
consumer.

Viewed purely as a business enterprise, the exchange is a failure.
Having charity to a particular class as its object pure and
simple, no other result could be expected. Aside from the few
private exchanges that have been started as business ventures, but
two or three are self-supporting. That at New Orleans has been
self-supporting from its organization, and it has been one of the
best organized and most successful of all the associations. Some of
the organizations go so far as to say that self-support has never
been an object with them.[18] In the great majority of the exchanges
a commission of ten per cent is charged on all goods sold, but this
sum is inadequate to meet current expenses. The exchange, therefore,
relies for its support upon private contributions and the ordinary
means adopted by other benevolent organizations for increasing their
revenues.

The treasurers’ reports show that part of the funds at command
have been derived from charity balls, calico balls, rose shows,
chrysanthemum shows, flower festivals, baseball benefits, picnics,
excursions, concerts, bazars, lectures, readings, Valentine’s Day
cotillon suppers, concert suppers, club entertainments, carnivals,
kermesses, sale of cook-books, flower-seeds, and Jenness-Miller
goods, and in some instances from raffles.

This fact alone separates the exchange from other business
enterprises. Having no capital to invest, it must pursue a
hand-to-mouth policy, and employ means for increasing its resources
which would never be considered by other business houses. In a few
cases where exchanges own their buildings and sublet parts of them,
or where they are able to maintain a profitable lunch department,
it is possible more nearly to make both ends meet. Under other
circumstances the exchange becomes poorer as its business increases,
and there is a fresh demand for subscriptions and entertainments to
meet current expenses. It is true that the exchange does not wish
to be considered a business enterprise and be judged by ordinary
business rules, but the fact that it enters the business field as
a competitor with other enterprises makes it inevitable that it be
judged as a business house, and not as a charitable organization. The
persistence with which different exchanges iterate and reiterate the
statement that their object is charity “to needy gentlewomen,” and
not financial return, is evidence of a consciousness of their present
ambiguous position. As long as the exchange undertakes business
activities, it cannot escape judgment by business principles.

The exchange has from the first hampered itself with many hard
and pernicious conditions. The requirement is universal that all
consignments shall be made by women. Valuable industrial competition
is thus shut out, and the exclusion of men from the exchange is as
unreasonable as the exclusion of women from competition in other
occupations. There are many household articles, the product of
inventive and artistic talent, which are the handiwork of men and
should find place in the exchange.

The second restriction found in the majority of exchanges is that
no consignments shall be received except from women who state that
they are dependent for entire or partial support on the sale of the
articles offered. Some of the early exchanges made at first the
additional requirement that the work offered should be by women
who had formerly been in affluent circumstances but were rendered
self-supporting by changes of circumstances. The latter requirement
has now been abolished, and in a few of the more recently organized
exchanges, especially in the exchange departments of the Woman’s
Educational and Industrial Unions, the requirement of the necessity
of self-support has been abandoned. Some exchanges also modify this
condition so far as to state that all the proceeds of sales made
for those not dependent on their own exertions for support must
be appropriated to charitable purposes, and at least one exchange
apologizes for accepting articles from young girls who had the
necessaries, though not the luxuries, of life, on the ground that
since these girls give the results of their work to charity, the
exchange is teaching them a valuable lesson.

The principle is a pernicious one, and is never recognized in other
enterprises. Just as long as society asks concerning any article
“Does the maker need money?” and not “Is it the best that can be made
for the price?” just so long a premium is put on mediocre work. It is
a question never asked in other kinds of business; the best article
is sought, regardless of personal considerations, and it is at least
an open question whether in the end the interests of the individuals
to be benefited by employment are not thus best served. If the same
principle were applied to the legal and medical professions, society
would be deprived of the services of many whose help is necessary for
the preservation of its best interests. The application of the same
principle elsewhere would cause every producer to withdraw from the
industrial field as soon as he had gained a competence. The result
would often be that as soon as an individual had reached great skill
in producing an article, he would be forced to step aside and yield
his place to others.

Moreover, society has a right to demand the best that every
individual can give it; and just as long as the exchange persistently
denies itself and its patrons the benefit of the best work wherever
it is found, regardless of money considerations, just so long it
will fail to secure the best economic results. It does not indeed
concern itself with these results, but it cannot thereby escape them.

But aside from the injurious economic effects in thus limiting
production, it places the whole idea of work on a wrong basis. It
assumes that work for women is a misfortune, not the birthright
inheritance of every individual, and that therefore they are to
work for remuneration only when compelled by dire necessity.
Moreover, every individual has the same right to work that he has
to life itself, and to shut out the rich and the well-to-do from
the privilege is as unfair to the individual as it is to society.
Indeed, it may be assumed that the members of this class are, as a
rule, better qualified for work than are other classes, since wealth
has brought opportunities in the direction of education and special
training, and society loses in the same proportion as it deprives
itself of their services. It is true also that the higher the
standard set in any department of work, the greater the improvement
in the work of all workers in the same field.

But not only does the exchange deprive itself of positive good in
thus refusing to accept the best wherever it is found, regardless
of money considerations--it puts upon itself the positive burden of
enforcing a questionable condition. “Necessity for self-support”
is a relative term; and when the responsibility of the decision is
put on the consigner, the danger is incurred on the one side of
shutting out from the privilege of the exchange many who are unduly
conscientious, and on the other side of encouraging deceit in regard
to their necessities on the part of the less scrupulous. The exchange
must be ever on the alert to guard against imposition and fraud; and
however much it may disclaim the idea, it must to a certain extent
make itself the judge of its consigners’ necessities. When this
alternative is forced upon it, it must perform a task difficult in
proportion to its delicacy, and one that would be resented in the
business world as an unwarranted intrusion into private affairs.[19]
The exchange by the use of these methods prejudices itself in a
business way in the eyes of many who would be valuable consigners.

A third restriction that has fettered the exchange has been the
geographical limitation imposed by many organizations. Many receive
no consignments from outside the state, some New England exchanges
limit consignments to that section, a few restrict consignments
to residents of the city, and others, while having consigners in
all parts of the country, congratulate themselves, as does one
association, that “two thirds of the proportion of money paid out
goes to the ladies of this city.” Still another exchange, on the
Pacific coast, complains bitterly of the fact that articles have been
sent to it by persons outside the state, and not dependent on their
own labors for support, “but who would speculate upon the charitable
spirit of the public,” and its president’s report recommends that
it “prohibit exhibits from the East altogether.” This restriction
undoubtedly grows out of the idea that the exchange is a dispenser of
charity and should therefore aid first its own friends and neighbors.
It is a spirit akin to that which in mediæval and even in modern
times has resented the entrance of new workers into any occupation
or community. But it must again be insisted that while the exchange
is theoretically only a benevolent association, it is practically a
business house, and as such must be judged by business principles.
The most successful business firm that should adopt the policy of
purchasing its supplies only within the state or city would soon
find its trade decreasing, while for a new house to adopt the policy
would be suicidal. Even the present high protective tariff is not so
absolutely prohibitory as is this provision of many of the exchanges.
Aside from other disadvantages, the plan prevents the infusion of
new ideas so necessary to healthy growth, and it renders almost
impossible that market criticism which secures the best industrial
results. It is in distinct violation of that principle of commercial
comity between states which led the framers of the Constitution
to prohibit both import and export duties on all goods exchanged
between the states, and to that extent is out of harmony with the
recognized policy of the country regarding interstate exchange of
commodities.

A fourth economic difficulty is the fact that the exchange has no
capital. It does simply a commission business, and it is a recipient
of whatever goods are sent it which reach a certain standard; its
attitude is therefore negative rather than positive. Its consigners
are obliged to purchase their own materials in small quantities
in retail markets, and therefore to place a higher price on their
articles than would be the case could the materials be purchased by
or through a central office. This lack of capital and its passive
attitude prevent the exchange from keeping its finger on the pulse
of the market; there is no connection between supply and demand, and
no way of establishing such connection. This difficulty, which is
encountered in all business enterprises, is multiplied by the number
of the consigners. The exchange refuses to accept articles if they
do not reach a fixed standard, but not because the market is glutted.
The loss accruing from an overstocked market, it is true, falls
immediately on the consigners rather than on the exchange, but the
exchange suffers directly through the loss of the commission retained
on all goods sold, and indirectly in acquiring the reputation as a
business house of keeping in stock articles not in demand and of
failing to supply the market with others that are.

The exchange as a business enterprise is also open to other
criticisms. It is not self-supporting, and therefore gives a partial
support to women who have come into competition with women not
receiving the assistance of the exchange. The well-meant charity
is thus instrumental in keeping at a low rate the earnings of
women who do not receive such partial support. Many women are too
much the victims of prejudice and false pride to come out openly
as wage-earners, and to these the exchange gives its assistance,
to the disadvantage of those who struggle on unaided by it. It
has employed “gentlewomen” in its salaried positions, and by this
restriction practically carried out, though not embodied in its
rules, it has deprived itself of the services of some who would have
been of valuable assistance through the business experience and
executive ability they could have brought to bear on this work. It
has required that all its consigners shall be known by number and
not by name, thus allying itself, as regards one custom, with penal
and reformatory institutions. The exchange by its limitations has
encouraged the idea that women can work by stealth without being
guilty of moral cowardice, and it has fostered the spirit that
carries lunches in music-rolls, calls for laundry-work only after
dark, and does not receive as boarders or lodgers wage-earning women.
It has countenanced a fictitious social aristocracy by referring so
uniformly to its consigners as “needy gentlewomen.” It has said in
effect, “work for remuneration is honorable for all men; work for
remuneration is honorable for women only when necessity compels it.”

But while the exchange is open to serious criticism from a business
point of view, it has accomplished much and has in it still greater
possibilities. It has set a high standard for work, and insisted
that this standard should be reached by every consigner not only
once or generally, but invariably. It has maintained this standard
in the face of hostile criticism and the feeling that a charitable
organization ought to accept poor work if those presenting it are in
need of money. It has shown that success in work cannot be attained
by a simple desire for it or need of it pecuniarily. It has taught
that accuracy, scientific knowledge, artistic training, habits of
observation, good judgment, courage and perseverance are better
staffs in reaching success than reliance upon haphazard methods and
the compliments of flattering friends. It has raised the standard of
decorative and artistic needle-work by incorporating into its rules a
refusal to accept calico patchwork, wax, leather, hair, feather rice,
spatter, splinter, and cardboard work.

It has taught many women that a model recipe for cake is not “A few
eggs, a little milk, a lump of butter, a pinch of salt, sweetening
to taste, flour enough to thicken; give a good beating and bake
according to judgment.” More than all this, it has pointed out to
women a means of support that can be carried on within their own
homes, and is perfectly compatible with other work necessarily
performed there. It has in effect opened up a new occupation to
women, in that it has taught them that their accomplishments may
become of pecuniary value, and a talent for the more prosaic
domestic duties be turned into a fine art and made remunerative. It
has enabled many women who have a taste for household employments
in their various forms to take up such occupations as a business,
when they would otherwise have drifted into other occupations for
which they have had no inclination. The exchange thus assumes a not
unimportant place in the history of woman’s occupations. The factory
system of manufactures transferred the labor of many women from the
home of the producer to the business establishment of a corporation.
The anti-slavery agitation and the founding of Mount Holyoke Seminary
and Oberlin College gave women a more prominent place as teachers
and in the professions. The Civil War opened the doors of mercantile
pursuits. It has been through the Woman’s Exchange that women have
been taught that a means of support lies open to them at their own
doors; and thus the exchange has done something to relieve the
pressure in over-crowded occupations.

The advantage that has been taken of this new idea is widespread.
The sixteen thousand consigners on the books of the exchange are
but a part of the still larger number of women who are turning to
practical advantage their tastes for sewing and cooking in all of
their various forms. Before the opening of the exchange, as still,
indeed, women seeking remunerative employment were forced to go into
one of the four great occupations open to women--work in factories,
teaching, domestic service, and work in shops. But it has been
impossible for all women desiring occupation to find it in these four
great classes of employment. Many desire employment, but are forced
to carry it on in their own homes; others have no taste whatever for
any of the lines of work mentioned; and conditions under which many
kinds of work are performed render other occupations obnoxious to
others; still others prefer work which gives greater opportunity for
the exercise of individual taste and ingenuity than do some of these
occupations. Such women have found through the exchange a means of
support and opportunity for work which they could not find elsewhere.
They are learning that society is coming to respect more the woman
who supports herself by making good bread, cakes, and preserves than
the woman who teaches school indifferently, gives poor elocutionary
performances, or becomes a mere mechanical contrivance in a shop or
factory. They are finding that the stamp of approval is ultimately
to be put on the way work is done rather than on the occupation
itself. Thus it is that hundreds of women from Maine to Texas and
California are obtaining for themselves and others partial or entire
support by making and offering for sale, either through business
houses or private orders, cake, bread, preserved fruit, salads,
desserts, and an innumerable number of special articles, in addition
to the products of artistic needle-work and decorative art-work. Not
only are these articles found in the large cities, but in country
villages many women are engaged in such work and often find a ready
sale for it without the trouble and expense of sending it to the
city markets. In one village of only five hundred inhabitants one
young woman makes and sells daily thirty loaves of bread. In a small
Eastern village another bakes and sells daily from thirty to a
hundred loaves of bread according to the season, and cake and pastry
in the same proportion.

The demand for work of this kind is as yet limited, and therefore the
net profits are in most cases small; yet in some instances a fair
competence has been secured. One person in a country town has made a
hand-some living by making chicken salad which has been sold in New
York City. Another has cleared four hundred dollars each season by
making preserves and jellies on private orders. A third has built
up a large business, employing from three to five assistants, in
making cake. Still another, living near a Southern city, has built
up “an exceedingly remunerative business” by selling to city grocers
pickles, preserves, cakes and pies. One cause given for her success
has been the fact that “she has allowed no imperfect goods to be
sold; everything has been the best, whether she has gained or lost
on it.” A fifth has netted one thousand dollars a year by preparing
mince-meat and making pies of every description; and a sixth has,
with the assistance of two daughters, netted yearly one thousand five
hundred dollars above all expenses, except rent, in preparing fancy
lunch dishes on shortest notice and dishes for invalids. Still one
more began by borrowing a barrel of flour, and now has a salesroom
where she sells daily from eighty to a hundred dozen Parker House
rolls, in addition to bread made in every conceivable way, from every
kind of grain. More moderate incomes are made by others in putting
up pure fruit juices and shrubs, in preparing fresh sweet herbs, in
making Saratoga potatoes, and consommé in the form of jelly ready to
melt and serve. So successful have been these ventures that some of
those engaging in them have acquired not only a financial profit,
but a wide reputation for the superiority of their goods. In some
instances the articles made are included in the catalogue of goods
sold by the leading dealers in fine groceries in New York City.

These illustrations have been taken from the single department of
domestic work; similar ones could be given from the class of plain
and fancy needle-work and decorative art work. Surely it is better
for the individual and better for society that these persons should
turn to useful account their various talents, rather than attempt to
enter many of the overcrowded occupations and do work for which they
have neither talent nor inclination.

But not only is the exchange directly and indirectly of value to
producers, it is of equal importance to consumers. It simplifies
many housekeeping problems in families where there is more work than
can be performed by one domestic employee and not enough for two, by
making it possible to purchase for the table and other household
purposes many articles made out of the house of the consumer. In
a similar way it is of assistance in all families who do “light
housekeeping.” It also enables them to purchase articles ready for
use which have been made under the most favorable conditions. A
specific example of this is seen in the preparation of fruit for
winter use. This is at present done in the family of each consumer,
but the canning in cities, by individual families, of fruit, often
in an over-ripe or a half-ripe condition, is as anomalous as would
be the making to-day of dairy products in the same localities. The
canning factory has come into existence to meet the demand, but the
canning factory cannot meet the needs of private families, since the
great perfection as regards results is secured only when articles
are handled in small quantities. If all fruits could be preserved in
the localities where they are produced, the consumer would gain not
only in securing a better article than can now be produced after
shipment, but the cost would ultimately be lessened, since fruit
could be thus preserved at less expense than when it is shipped to
cities and there sold at a price including cost of transportation and
high rents. Ripe fruit demands the most speedy and therefore the most
expensive modes of transportation; preserved fruits can be shipped at
leisure, by inexpensive methods. The consumer must also be indirectly
benefited as well as the producer, from the fact that such a policy
would prevent a glut in the market of such perishable articles and
the consequent discouragement on the part of the producer, sometimes
ending in a resolution to grow no more fruit for market, owing to the
loss entailed. What is true of the purchase of fruit thus prepared
is true also of numerous other articles. Scores of articles such
as boned turkey, calf’s-foot jelly, chicken jelly, chicken broth,
chicken croquettes and chicken salad, pressed veal, mince-meat,
bouillon, plum pudding and many miscellaneous articles could be
thus produced under more advantageous conditions than at present.
Moreover, many abandoned farms could be utilized as fruit farms, or
for other purposes, which are now too remote from shipping centres
to permit the transportation of ripe fruit, but could be made of use
through the exchange.

Another advantage gained by the consumers is that they are thus able
to take advantage of specialized labor. This, again, is evident in
the domestic department. The consumer is usually obliged to depend on
the skill of a single cook or baker, while through the exchange the
works of many producers are placed side by side in competition, and
thus in the end the highest standard is secured. For both producer
and consumer, therefore, the exchange is of advantage in thus
affording an avenue for specialized work. It thus makes possible to
a certain extent the division of labor which has been but partially
accomplished in the household.

Another field of work open to the exchange is in becoming a medium
for the exchange of workers as well as of work--of affording a means
of communication between workers in different lines or between
the producer and consumer. Very much of the work now done in the
house by those living there could be done to better advantage by
those coming in from outside. Special skill in arranging rooms,
hanging pictures, preparing for lunches, teas, or other social
entertainments, repairing furniture and wardrobes, fine laundry-work,
special table-service, etc., could be performed for housekeepers by
those who retain their own homes and yet are able and anxious to give
a few hours daily to outside work. The exchange, through a bureau
of information, could accomplish much for both those wishing work
and those wishing workers, as well as in a business way for itself.
In many ways, it is thus seen, the exchange is in harmony with the
economic and industrial development of the time. As far as this
is true it has in it the elements of permanence. Wherever it runs
at right angles to present economic tendencies, it must be open to
criticism and also contain in itself the germs of subsequent failure.

If all idea of charity _per se_ could be eliminated from the
exchange, if the word “gentlewoman” could be dropped from the pages
of its reports, the by-law limiting consigners to self-supporting
women stricken out, its consigners known by name instead of by
number, and the idea abandoned that it is to help women to help
themselves only “when misfortune comes;” if it could cease to be
supported by donations, kermesses, charity balls, and miscellaneous
entertainments; if it could refuse to constitute itself a judge
of its consigners’ necessities; if the name could be changed to
Household Exchange, or one signifying the character of the goods
sold rather than the nature of the makers; if, in other words, the
Woman’s Exchange could be put on a purely business basis and become
self-supporting, it would cease to be what it now is, “a palliative
for the ills of the few,” and become what it aims to be, “a curative
for the sufferings of the many.”

FOOTNOTES:

[14] This article was first published in _The Forum_, May, 1892. It
is now republished without alteration from the original manuscript.
In the intervening years some exchanges then existing have been
abandoned, and new ones have been organized, but a somewhat careful
inquiry has disclosed no essential modifications of the principles
for which the Woman’s Exchange stood in 1892. The conclusions reached
at that time therefore remain unchanged.

[15] Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Ladies’ Depository
Association for 1890.

[16] Annual Report for 1890.

[17] A very full list is given by F. A. Lincoln, _Directory of
Exchanges for Woman’s Work_, pp. 24-26.

[18] “But it is not to be understood, because of this surplus, that
the Woman’s Exchange is in any sense self-supporting. Such is not to
be expected, and has never been any part of our scheme. The surplus
comes, as was always anticipated, from public benevolence.” _Third
Annual Report Woman’s Exchange_, San Francisco, California.

[19] How difficult the task is may be inferred from the following
extracts from annual reports of two exchanges.

“While we can by watchfulness avoid any considerable number of
such transactions (consignment of goods by other than needy and
distressed gentlewomen) on the part of the residents of this coast,
we are utterly helpless in cases coming from the other side of the
continent, for which reason I think it is just and prudent to stop
such exhibits altogether.”

“A prevalent opinion in the community, and one that does us no little
harm, is that we help many well-to-do women. It is a very difficult,
as well as a very delicate matter to learn just how needy our
depositors are; we do not attempt to do so. We assume that they need
to earn money from the fact that they desire to become depositors.
But we gradually become more or less familiar with their lives, and
we can assure you, as a rule, our money is well paid out.”

“Sometimes people unwittingly make very damaging statements. A
short time ago a lady remarked to a friend that the exchange was
not accomplishing any good--it only helped well-to-do women to earn
pin-money, and verified her statement by giving the name of a wealthy
lady who said she was a depositor. The matter was inquired into and
the said name was found, but we also learned that the ticket had been
bought to give to a needy woman, who became the depositor.”




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