Part 1

HOME PROBLEMS _from_ A NEW STANDPOINT

_By_ CAROLINE L. HUNT

WHITCOMB & BARROWS BOSTON 1908

COPYRIGHT 1908 BY CAROLINE L. HUNT

PRESS WORK BY ALFRED MUDGE & SON INC.

COMPOSITION AND ELECTROTYPING BY THOMAS TODD 14 BEACON STREET, BOSTON, MASS.

To H. C. H. and A. G. H.

INTRODUCTORY

“Given a number of human beings, with a certain development of physical and mental faculties and of social resources, how can they best utilize these powers for the attainment of the most complete satisfaction?” Thus J. A. Hobson states what he calls _The Social Problem_, adding that if “complete satisfaction” seems too indefinite, owing to the various interpretations of which it is capable, we may adopt Ruskin’s words and say that the end to be sought is “the largest number of healthy and happy human beings.” It is as a factor in the Social Problem, thus broadly stated in terms of human life, that this series of papers will consider The Home.

There was a time when the home could hardly have been said to be a factor in the Social Problem. It had a problem of its own, to be sure, that of the proper management of its internal affairs, and upon the wisdom of that management the welfare of society was largely dependent. This problem, however, was not greatly affected by conditions in the world at large. The home was independent industrially and in no way involved in the general labor problem. Its women members were not tempted to prepare themselves for and to enter upon occupations unconnected with its administration and welfare; the question whether a woman could have a career and a home had not then arisen. The home was at that time independent also of public work, looking to city or village boards for assistance neither in maintaining cleanliness nor in warding off disease.

Now all has changed. The home, by consenting to use factory products and by employing outside help, has involved itself in the great labor problem; by educating its daughters to support themselves in occupations unconnected with its management it has complicated its original problem of household administration; by entrusting the education of its little children to schools, the care of its sick to hospitals, the protection of its water supply, and other important interests, to town councils or to village boards, it has entered into public affairs. It has brought to itself new problems and to women and to men new responsibilities, new opportunities, and new privileges. These new responsibilities, opportunities, and privileges will be considered in the pages that follow.

CONTENTS

I MORE LIFE FOR WOMAN 3

II MORE LIFE FOR MAN 17

III MORE LIFE FOR THE HOUSEHOLD EMPLOYEE 33

IV MORE PHYSICAL VIGOR FOR ALL 51

V MORE JOY IN MERE LIVING 67

VI MORE BEAUTY FOR ALL 83

VII MORE PLEASURE FOR THE PRODUCER OF HOUSEHOLD STUFF 99

VIII MORE CONSCIENCE FOR THE CONSUMER 119

IX NEW WORK FOR THE HOME 135

HOME PROBLEMS FROM A NEW STANDPOINT

MORE LIFE FOR WOMAN

More life for woman--not only in length through increase of years, but also in breadth through increase in joyful, satisfactory, well-directed activity.

A person is prompted to activity by certain instincts or desires. It is common to divide these desires into two classes--the self-regarding and the other-regarding. Among those of the first class are the desires for nutrition, for parenthood, for intellectual activity, and for creating objects of utility and beauty. Among those of the second class are love and sympathy. It is common, also, to divide the activities prompted by the desires into selfish and unselfish on the ground that some are of value to him alone who engages in them, and some are of value to others only. The latter division, however, is not rational, for it is easy to show of any act, that if it is of benefit to the doer it must be to others also, and _vice versa_. Eating, for example, is prompted by a desire that is entirely self-regarding, but if we did not eat we could not work for others.

Although there is no reason for a classification of activities based upon the recipient of the benefit, there is a reason for a division based upon the way in which the advantage comes to the doer or to others. The self-regarding instincts inspire one to acts which lead directly to the enrichment of his own life and only indirectly, and by way of his increased power through activity and consequent increased capacity for service, to the welfare of others. By such acts he preserves his life, promotes his health, acquires knowledge, and cultivates talents in whose expression he finds pleasure. The other-regarding instincts lead one to activities which tend directly to the welfare of others, and only by a circuitous route and by way of the benefit conferred upon others, to the enrichment of his own life. By such activities he sacrifices or endangers his life that others may live, he gives up health for the health of others, imparts knowledge at the expense of limiting his own store of information, and leads others to the satisfaction of expressing their talents by sacrificing the cultivation and exercise of his peculiar gifts.

Success in either form of activity is dependent upon activity of the other kind. The man who teaches successfully finds that he at the same time systematizes his own knowledge, makes it available for his own purposes, and prepares himself for further learning. The woman who would have strong children seeks to increase her own physical vigor, and thus by work for others she secures the joys of health for herself.

On the other hand, activity of one kind, at the expense of the other, tends not only to unbalance, but to narrow life. The mother who blindly performs unnecessary services for her child, and thus curtails her time for reading and study, runs the risk of becoming incapable of directing wisely the education of the child in later life. She not only unbalances her life by too much serving, but also narrows it by reducing her chances for continued usefulness.

Breadth of life is dependent upon an equilibrium between the activities prompted by the self-regarding and those prompted by the other-regarding desires.

The wish to find expression for peculiar talents is self-regarding. Occupations suited to talent, however, lead not only to pleasure in work, but to development and to increased power for usefulness; and while the interests of the well-balanced life may at any time demand the sacrifice of talents for the sake of work for others, those same interests demand just as imperiously that talents must not be unnecessarily sacrificed for the sake of purposeless serving.

Upon woman’s opportunities for intensive cultivation of special talents, Nature has set a limitation by specializing her for childbearing. This limitation is probably not nearly so great as education and unhealthful living make it appear, but it does exist. Considered alone, it seems an unqualified disadvantage. Considered in connection with the fact that it brings the joys of motherhood and of usefulness to society, it appears to be a means for rounding out and broadening her life.

To this limitation set by Nature to woman’s chances for individualizing herself, society has added another check by specializing her for housekeeping. Does this tend to unbalance and narrow her life, or to balance and broaden it? The answer to this question depends, first, upon whether she has talents which do not find expression in housekeeping; second, upon whether her specialization for housekeeping interferes with their use; and third, if it does interfere, upon whether the interference brings with it a compensating advantage.

First, have women talents which do not find expression in housekeeping? That is easily answered. Women are successfully practicing medicine, nursing, teaching, and working at the various crafts. Society is showing its appreciation of their work by offering them employment in these various occupations.

Second, does housekeeping impose a limitation upon the use of these special talents, independent of the limitation imposed by childbearing? In answering this it is convenient to suppose a woman’s life to be divided into three equal periods. If she be granted threescore and ten years of life, each period would be about twenty-three years long. The first period in all women is, or should be, given chiefly to education and preparation for life. The second, in the case of women who marry and have children, is given chiefly to maternal cares. The third is comparatively free.

During the first period there is no bent which can be given to education for the sake of preparing a woman for motherhood that does not prepare her for life itself. Study of food, hygiene, psychology, all are useful in any form of life. Not so, however, with the bent that is given to woman’s education because of her specialization for housekeeping. In manual training, for example, except in the most progressive of schools, her work is confined to cooking and sewing. This prevents her from finding out whether she has talents for work in wood and metal or for engineering, thus defeating one of the first purposes of education, the exploration and discovery of talents. This means a waste of time in early life and frequently a failure to find a life work suited to her natural endowment. If she does not marry, it offers an unnecessary handicap to her in business or professional life. If she does marry, it brings her to the period when childbearing imposes its necessary limitation, not so well prepared as she might be for carrying on her special work in hours of leisure. The same thing could be said of the bent given to the more theoretical parts of woman’s education, for the purpose of preparing her for housekeeping.

During the second period, housekeeping adds its check to that imposed by the care of children. Ask a woman why she does not work at her specialty and she is quite as likely to say, “Because I cannot get good help in my kitchen,” as “Because the care of my children interferes.” If it were not for housekeeping, she might give the time now spent in this employment to reading the literature of her chosen subject, and oftentimes to active work in her trade or profession--to office practice, if a doctor; to private classes, if a teacher. If she had chosen a craft, her work would be practically uninterrupted, for it could be carried on at home.

During the third period, housekeeping imposes two limitations, one directly and the other in the form of an inefficiency projected from the second period because of disuse of her talents. It is during this time that the sacrifice of woman’s talents for the sake of housekeeping is most apparent. She is free from the care of young children, and if she were not handicapped by inexperience could enrich her own life and add to her usefulness by systematic work in her own line.

Housekeeping, then, does provide a check upon the development of woman’s individuality through the use of special powers, a check which extends over all her life and is independent of that imposed by childbearing.

Finally, is this check necessary to the well-balanced life? This must be determined for individual cases. In trying to answer the question, we must keep in mind that whenever an activity is necessary to the realization of the ideal of home, it is necessary to the complete life, whether it involves the sacrifice of talents or not; when it is not so necessary and does not provide an outlet for special talents, it is an unjustifiable waste of woman’s life and of society’s resources.

That which is necessary for good home-making can be determined only by holding fast to the highest ideal of home and by having a clear understanding of changing social conditions. The ideal never changes; the best home-making must always be an intelligent, affectionate effort to help others to attain as nearly as possible to completeness of life by securing for them those essentials of good living which they cannot obtain in other ways as well or better; but while the ideal remains always the same, the means by which it must be realized undergo constant change. Once it was necessary for a woman to make candles or to leave her husband and children in darkness. That time passed, for husband and children found a better light than that of homemade candles. And yet the woman continued her candle-making for a long period. She has done this with most of the varied activities of housekeeping, continuing them long after they had become only an obstacle in the way of her own independent development.

The reason for this useless clinging to outgrown activities is to be found in our conception of the purposes of housekeeping. We have thought of its multiple activities as the ends toward which the talents of all women should be bent, no matter how difficult or how wasteful the bending process. A frank recognition of the varied character of women’s talents and of society’s need for the full and free exercise of these talents, and an appreciation also of the value of good home-making, not only to the world at large, but to women themselves as a means of rounding out and balancing their lives, will lead to a different conception. A special trade, craft, profession, business, or form of public work will seem the end toward which the peculiar talent of a given woman should be directed, while housekeeping will appear, not as an end in itself, but as a means, the means which at a given stage of industrial development all women may find it necessary to employ if they would give expression to their love by making homes.

In this spirit of double appreciation we see that when the home-maker continues one of the activities of housekeeping after it has become unnecessary to good home-making, she unbalances her life by over-serving; that when she sacrifices home for the sake of a “career,” she destroys the equilibrium of her life by failing to find expression for the other-regarding desires. In this spirit alone can we view the changes which are going on in society, and separate those which tend to narrow and impoverish woman’s life from those which tend to broaden and enrich it.

Looking in this spirit, we see an advantage in boarding-house life because it reduces the amount of work necessary for cooking and serving food. We see another advantage in the reduction of the amount of superintendence when compared with the amount of work done. Housekeepers today are being nerve-racked by an amount of superintendence out of all proportion to the labor necessary for housekeeping. On the other hand, we see disadvantages in this kind of life because it is incompatible with the retirement that is necessary for mutual helpfulness, for successful child training, and for good fellowship. The adoption of a scientific and up-to-date modification of the “lodgings” system in vogue in England, or some other plan of professional catering for private families, might be the means of preserving the good in boarding-house life without perpetuating the evil.

We see in the increase of prepared foods upon the market a saving of labor but a menace to health. Women’s clubs, made possible partly because of the saving of time through the use of these foods, are largely responsible for the pure food laws that have been passed, and we are looking to them for an educational campaign which will result in further legislation and a better enforcement of present laws.

In the movement toward economic independence for woman, we see advantages and disadvantages. When it leads her to sacrifice home and motherhood and the opportunity to do work in which her soul delights rather than to be economically dependent, it enslaves her and her talents, for economic independence is worthless unless it brings expressional freedom; when it brings her the opportunity to do the work she loves and can do best, it frees her and her powers.

We see in the revival of handicraft tremendous significance to woman, because it opens up to her a great field of industries which offer activities for both hand and brain, and which can be carried on at home without interfering with the care of children. We see why it was necessary for the handicrafts to fall into disuse while we were working out the system of division of labor, which now, upon their revival, makes it possible for women to become more than mere amateurs in them. These and many other interesting movements we see in society, if we have our eyes open, both to the value of woman as a home-maker and to her value as an individual.

More life for woman--not through sacrifice of the joys of motherhood and home-making, but by the addition of the pleasures in satisfactory cultivation of special talents to the privileges of service.

MORE LIFE FOR MAN

The changes which are enlarging woman’s educational privileges and are giving to her an opportunity to prepare herself for work not directly connected with the home, and which by simplifying housekeeping methods are making it possible for her to carry on such work in connection with home-making, may be said to be bringing _more life to man_, providing we understand the word _life_ in its broad and not in its narrow sense, and providing we mean by _man_ no particular individual nor class of individuals, but composite man.

The individual man may be inclined to dispute this statement. If so, it is probably because of one of two facts. Either he does not see life whole, and thinks only of what he has lost by woman’s progress and not of what he has gained, or he forgets that he is only a small part of composite man, and, as such, may fall below the average with respect to his joy in living.

If he likes homemade bread and is compelled to eat baker’s bread because his wife likes to study Dante better than to cook, he may think that he is not so well off as he would have been if he had lived a half century ago, when Dante classes for women and baker’s bread were practically unknown. But if he considers the advantages of eating his supper under the eaves, as it were, of the Dante class, and of having his baker’s bread flavored with drippings of information concerning the great poet and his times, he may conclude that baker’s bread with Dante sauce is more to him than homemade bread without it.

Or it may be that his doubt of the statement is due to the fact that his quota of life is below the average. Perhaps his wife goes off to her class and does not bring back to him the information and inspiration which she has received. If so, the trouble is not with the times, but with human nature. Selfishness always has existed and always will exist. If a man has a selfish wife, the only thing he can do to assure himself that men are really better off than they used to be is to look abroad and to see if, for every one like himself, there are not two others who are profiting by woman’s broadened life and who bring up the average of life for modern man above that of his middle-of-the-nineteenth-century brother.

To live, what is it? To be healthy, to enjoy the pleasures of the senses, to taste good tastes, to hear sweet sounds, to see beautiful sights, to learn, to do (if we object to the word “work” because it is sometimes applied to drudgery), and to love. The last is most important of all. It modifies all the rest, and they at times must be sacrificed to it. It is interpreted by all the rest, for only by knowing what we consider real life for ourselves can we know what our love should seek for others.

Taking the desire to love first, woman’s expanding life is making possible for man the expression of an ever better and higher form of affection. To see how this comes about, we must read the present in the light of the past.

There was a time when man’s work as well as woman’s was almost all directly connected with the home. He raised wheat, kept cows, pigs, and chickens, hewed timber, built his own house and barn, and gathered his own fuel, while she spun, dyed, wove, sewed, cooked, and cared for the house. Neither was then a specialist. Then came division of labor, which, however, affected man’s work more than woman’s. This made it possible for him to become a farmer, a carpenter, or a coal merchant, and to provide for the needs of his home by the fruits of his specialized labor instead of by direct labor, as he had done in earlier times. To woman there has never come any such privilege. Although her duties are much lightened, she must still be a housekeeper if she would be a home-maker.

One explanation that has been given for the differences in the courses that man’s and woman’s activities have taken is that woman is less progressive than man and more opposed to change. Another is that her work is so closely connected with personal needs and has associated with it so much of sentiment that it cannot be delegated to outsiders. Whatever the cause may be, the average married man’s work today has certain distinct advantages over the average married woman’s. It is more varied and more likely to call special talents into play, and it takes him out among people and gives him a broad outlook.

If we view the situation in a bargaining spirit, it may seem fair that when man earns the money woman should care for the house. If, however, we consider the amount of life that each is securing from work, the inequalities of the situation become apparent. There is always, to be sure, an occasional man who, recognizing the disabilities under which his wife labors, seeks to equalize matters by accepting a share in home responsibilities and work. The discovery of the necessity for such action, to which neither tradition nor custom points, is a mark of intelligence. The acceptance of the responsibility after it is recognized is the result of an unselfishness of the highest form, to which society does not direct him as it does to activities for the purpose of supporting the family, nor instinct prompt him as it does woman to her self-sacrifices in caring for the family. His recognition of the unequal distribution of life and his efforts at equalization are triumphs of wisdom and love over nature, tradition, and custom.