Part 6

All that has pushed and pulled reluctant man up the long path of social evolution has not touched the home-bound woman. Whatever height he reached, her place was still the same. The economic relation of the sexes here works[2] with tremendous force. Depending on the male for her economic profit, her own household labours kept to the sex-basis, and never allowed to enter the open market, there was nothing to modify her original sex-tendency to work with stationary contentment. If we can imagine for a moment a world like ours, with all our elaborate business processes in the hands of women, and the men still in the position of the male savage--painted braves, ready for the warpath, and good for little else--we get a comparison with this real condition, where the business processes are in the hands of men, and the women still in the position of the female savage--docile toilers for the family, and good for little else. That is the second limit of the housewife--that she is merely working for her own family--in the sex-relation--not the economic relation; as servant to the family instead of servant to the world.

[2] See "Women and Economics," C. P. Stetson.

Next comes her isolation. Even the bottom-level of a universal average--even the blind patience of a working mother--could be helped up a little under the beneficent influence of association. In the days when the ingenious squaw led the world, she had it. The women toiled together at their primitive tasks and talked together as they toiled. The women who founded the beginnings of agriculture were founders also of the village; and their feminine constructive tendencies held it together while the destructive tendencies of the belligerent male continually tore it apart. All through that babyhood of civilisation, the hunting and fighting instinct made men prey upon the accumulated wealth resultant from the labouring instinct of women--but industry conquered, being the best. As industry developed, as riches increased, as property rights were defined, as religions grew, women were confined more and more closely at home. Later civilisations have let them out to play--but not to work. The parasitic female of the upper classes is allowed the empty freedom of association with her useless kind; but the housewife is still confined to the house.

We are now giving great attention to this matter of home industry. We are founding chairs of Household Science, we are writing books on Domestic Economics; we are striving mightily to elevate the standard of home industry--and we omit to notice that it is just because it is home industry that all this trouble is necessary.

So far as home industry had been affected by world industry, it has improved. The implements of cooking and cleaning, for instance--where should we be if our modern squaw had to make her own utensils, as did her ancient prototype? The man, in world industry, makes not only the house, with all its elaborate labour-saving and health-protecting devices; not only the furniture of the house, the ornaments, hangings, and decorations, but the implements of the home industries as well. Go to the household furnishing store of our day--remember the one pot of the savage family to boil the meat and wash the baby--and see the difference between "homemade" and "world-made" things.

So far as home industry has progressed, it is through contact with the moving world outside; so far as it remains undeveloped, it is through the inexorable limitations of the home in itself.

There is one more limitation to be considered--the number of occupations practised. Though man has taken out and developed all the great trades, and, indeed, all trades beyond a certain grade, he has left the roots of quite a number at home. The housewife practises the conflicting elements of many kinds of work. First, she is cook. Whatever else is done or undone, we must eat; and since eating is ordained to be done at home, that is her predominant trade. The preparation and service of food is a most useful function; and as a world-industry, in the hands of professionals, students, and experts, it has reached a comparatively high stage of development.

In the nine-tenths of our homes where the housewife is cook, it comes under all these limitations: First, average capacity; second, sex-tendency; third, isolation; fourth, conflicting duties.

The cook, having also the cleaning to do, the sewing, mending, nursing, and care of children, the amount of time given to cooking is perforce limited. But even the plainest of home cooking must take up a good proportion of the day. The cooking, service, and "cleaning up" of ordinary meals, in a farmhouse, with the contributory processes of picking, sorting, peeling, washing, etc., and the extra time given to special baking, pickling, and preserving, take fully six hours a day. To the man, who is out of the house during work-hours, and who seldom estimates woman's work at its real value, this may seem extreme, but the working housewife knows it is a fair allowance, even a modest one.

There are degrees of speed, skill, intelligence, and purchasing power, of course; but this is a modest average; two hours for breakfast, three for dinner, one for supper. The preparation of food as a household industry takes up half the working time of half the population of the world. This utterly undeveloped industry, inadequate and exhausting, takes nearly a quarter of a twelve-hour day of the world's working force.

Cooking and sewing are inimical; the sewing of the housewife is quite generally pushed over into the evening as well as afternoon, thus lengthening her day considerably. Nursing, as applied to the sick, must come in when it happens, other things giving way at that time. Cleaning is continuous. Cooking, of course, makes cleaning; the two main elements of dirt in the household being grease and ashes; another, and omnipresent one, dust. Then, there are the children to clean, and the clothes to clean--this latter so considerable an item as to take two days of extra labour--during which, of course, other departments must be less attended.

We have the regular daily labour of serving meals and "clearing up," we have the regular daily labour of keeping the home in order; then we have the washing day, ironing day, baking day, and sweeping day. Some make a special mending day also. This division, best observed by the most competent, is a heroic monument to the undying efforts of the human worker to specialise. But we have left out one, and the most important one, of our home industries--the care of children.

Where is Children's Day?

The children are there every day, of course. Yes, but which hour of the day? With six for food, with--spreading out the washing and ironing over the week--two for laundry, with--spreading the sweeping day and adding the daily dusting and setting to rights--two for cleaning; and another two for sewing--after these twelve hours of necessary labour are accounted for, what time remains for the children?

The initial purpose of the home is the care of children. The initial purpose of motherhood is the care of children. How are the duties of the mother compatible with the duties of the housewife? How can child-culture, as a branch of human progress, rise to any degree of proficiency in this swarming heap of rudimentary trades?

Nothing is asked--here--as to how the housewife, doing all these things together her life long, can herself find time for culture and development; or how can she catch any glimmer of civic duty or public service beyond this towering pile of domestic duty and household service. The particular point herein advanced is that the conditions of home industry _as such_ forever limit the growth of the industry so practised; forever limit the growth of the persons so practising them; and also tend to limit the growth of the society which is content to leave any of its essential functions in this distorted state.

Our efforts to "lift the standard of household industry" ignore the laws of industry. We seek by talking and writing, by poetising and sermonising, and playing on every tender sentiment and devout aspiration, to convince the housewife that there is something particularly exalted and beautiful, as well as useful, in her occupation. This shows our deep-rooted error of sex-distinction in industry. We consider the work of the woman in the house as essentially feminine, and fail to see that, as work, it is exactly like any other kind of human activity, having the same limitations and the same possibilities.

Suppose we change the sex and consider for a while the status of a house-husband. He could be a tall, strong, fine-looking person--man-servants often are. He could love his wife and his children--industrial status does not affect these primal instincts. He could toil from morning to night, manfully, to meet their needs.

Suppose we are visiting in such a family. We should find a very rude small hut--no one man could build much of a house, but, ah! the tender love, the pride, the intimate emotion he would put into that hut! For his heart's dearest--for his precious little ones--he had dragged together the fallen logs--chipped them smooth with his flint-ax (there could have been no metal work while every man was a house-husband), and piled them together. With patient, loving hands he had daubed the chinks with clay, made beds of leaves, hung hides upon the walls. Even some rude stools he might have contrived--though furniture really belongs to a later period. But over all comes the incessant demand for food. His cherished family must eat, often and often, and under that imperative necessity all others wait.

So he goes forth to the hunt, brave, subtle, fiercely ingenious; and, actuated by his ceaseless love for his family he performs wonders. He brings home the food--day after day--even sometimes enough for several days, though meat does not keep very long. The family would have food of a sort, shelter of a sort, and love. But try to point out to the house-husband what other things he could obtain for them, create for them, provide for them, if he learned to combine with other men, to exchange labour, to organise industry. See his virtuous horror!

What! Give up his duty to his family! Let another man hunt for them!--another man build their home--another man make their garments! He will not hear of it. "It is my duty as a husband," he will tell you, "to serve my wife. It is my duty as a father to serve my children. No other person could love them as I do, and without that love the work would not be done as well." Strong in this conviction, the house-husband would remain intrenched in his home, serving his family with might and main, having no time, no strength, no brain capacity for undertaking larger methods; and there he and his family would all be, immovable in the Stone Age.

Never was any such idiot on earth as this hypothetical home-husband. It was not in him to stay in such primitive restrictions. But he has been quite willing to leave his wife in that interestingly remote period.

The permanent error of the housewife lies in that assumption that her love for her family makes her service satisfactory. Family affection has nothing to do with the specialist's skill; nor with the specialist's love of his work for the pleasure of doing it. That is the kind of love that makes good work; and that is the kind of work the world needs and the families within it. Men, specialised, give to their families all that we know of modern comforts, of scientific appliances, of works of art, of the complex necessities and conveniences of modern life. Women, unspecialised, refuse to benefit their families in like proportion; but offer to them only the grade of service which was proper enough in the Stone Age, but is a historic disgrace to-day.

A house does not need a wife any more than it does a husband. Are we never to have a man-wife? A really suitable and profitable companion for a man instead of the bond-slave of a house? There is nothing in the work of a house which requires marital or maternal affection. It does require highly developed skill and business sense--but these it fails to get.

Would any amount of love on the part of that inconceivable house-husband justify him in depriving his family of all the fruits of progress? What a colossal charge of malfeasance in office could be brought against such a husband--such a father; who, under the name of love, should so fail in his great first duty--Progress.

How does the woman escape this charge? Why is not she responsible for progress, too? By that strange assumption does she justify this refusal to keep step with the world? She will tell you, perhaps, that she cannot do more than she does--she has neither time nor strength nor ambition for any more work. So might the house-husband have defended himself--as honestly and as reasonably. It is true. While every man had to spend all his time providing for his own family, no man ever had, or ever could have, time, strength, or ambition to do more.

It is not _more_ work that is asked of women, but less. It is _a different method_ of work. Human progress rests upon the interchange of labour; upon work done humanly for each other, not, like the efforts of the savage or the brute, done only for one's own. The housewife, blinded by her ancient duty, fails in her modern duty.

It is true that, while she does this work in this way, she can do no more. Therefore she must stop doing it, and learn to do differently. The house will not be "neglected" by her so doing; but is even now most shamefully neglected by her antique methods of labour. The family will not be less loved because it has a skilled worker to love it. Love has to pass muster in results, as well as intentions. Here are five mothers, equally loving. One is a Hottentot. One is an Eskimo. One is a Hindoo. One is a German peasant woman. One is an American and a successful physician.

Which could do most for her children? All might compete on even terms if "love is enough," as poets have claimed; but _which could best provide for her children_?

Neither overflowing heart nor overburdened hand sufficiently counts in the uplifting of the race; that rests on _what is done_. The position of the housewife is a final limitation and a continuous, increasing injury both to the specific industries of the place, and to her first great duty of motherhood. The human race, fathered only by house-husbands, would never have moved at all. The human race, mothered only by housewives, has moved only half as fast and as far as it rightly should have done, and the work the patient housewife spends her life on is pitifully behind in the march of events. The home as a workshop is utterly insufficient to rightly serve the needs of the growing world.

VI

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP

_II. The Housemaid_

Among that tenth part of the population sufficiently rich to keep servants, the conditions of domestic industry are familiar to us. This is the tenth which is most conscious, and most vocal. It has the widest range of social contact; it is most in touch with literature; both in speech and writing we hear oftenest from the small class who keep servants.

The woman who does her own work is not usually a writer and has little time for reading. Moreover, her difficulties, though great, are not of the sort that confound the mistress of servants. The housewife is held to her work by duty and by love; also by necessity. She cannot "better herself" by leaving; and indeed, without grave loss and pain, she cannot leave at all. So the housewife struggles on, too busy to complain; and accomplishes, under this threefold bond of duty, love, and necessity far more than can be expected of a comparatively free agent.

Therefore we hear little of the "problem" of domestic service where the wife is the servant; and have to draw our conclusions from such data as the large percentage of farmers' wives who become insane, and such generalisations as those of the preceding chapter. But the "Servant Question" is clearly before us. It is an economic problem which presses upon us all, (that tenth of us all which is so prominent that it tacitly assumes its problem to be universal;) and the pressure of which increases daily. We are even beginning to study it scientifically. Miss Salmon's valuable book on "Domestic Service" contributes much useful information. The Household Economic Association exists largely to alleviate the distresses of this system of industry. Scarce one woman (of this tenth) but feels the pinch of our imperfect method of doing housework, and as they become better educated and more intelligent, as some of them even learn something of more advanced economic processes, this crude, expensive, and inadequate system causes more and more uneasiness and distress.

What is the status of household industry as practised by servants? It is this: The Housewife having become the Lady of the House, and the work still having to be done in the house, others must be induced to do it. In the period from which this custom dates it was a simple matter of elevating "the wife or chief wife"[3] to a position of dominance, and leaving the work to be done by the rest of the women. Domestic service, as an industrial status, dates from the period of the polygynous group; the household with the male head and the group of serving women; from the time when wives were slaves and slaves were wives, indiscriminately. (See domestic relations of Jacob.)

[3] See Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class."

The genesis of the relation being thus established, it is easy to account for its present peculiar and dominating condition--celibacy. The housemaid is the modern derivative from the slave-wife. She may no longer be the sub-wife of the master--but neither may she be another man's wife.

No married man wishes his wife to serve another man. This household service, being esteemed as a distinctly feminine function, closely involved with maternity, or at least with marriage, or, if not with marriage, at the very least with woman's devotion, and quite inconsistent with any other marriage; therefore we find the labours of the household performed by celibate women of a lower class. Our modern household is but a variation of the primitive group--the man and his serving women still.

In the period of slave labour, where both men and women were owned and exploited, we find household labour performed by men; and in those Oriental nations where slavery yet exists we find man-service common in the home. Also in nations still influenced by feudalism, where service once went with the soil, where the lord is still attended by what was originally his contingent of fighting men, but which has gradually dwindled to an array of footmen and butlers; there we find men still contented, or partially contented, to do house-service. But it ranks last and lowest in man's mind, and justly. As fast as industrial evolution progresses we find men less and less content to do this work in this way; or, for that matter, women either.

In the highly advanced economic status of America we are especially confronted with this difficulty, and have to supply our needs from nations still largely under the influence of the feudal régime, or those in the yet lower period of slavery. Men-servants, when obtained, are generally satisfactory; no public outcry is made over them. It is the "servant-girl" that constitutes the element of difficulty, and it is she that we must consider.

Let it be clearly held in mind that the very first economic relation was that of sex, based on the natural tendency of the female to work; sex-labour. The second stage of economic relation is that of force; slave-labour. The next is that of payment, what we call the contract system; wage-labour.

Social evolution still shows us all these forms actively present in this age, though belonging to such remote and different ones; just as physical evolution still shows us monad and mollusk as well as vertebrate mammals. Each stage has its use and value. But when an early stage comes into contact with a later one there is trouble.

We have all seen how inevitably a savage status recedes and disappears before the civilised. Individual savages may be assimilated by the civilised competing race; but savagery and civilisation cannot coexist when they come in contact and competition. A savage cult may endure on an island in the South Seas, but not in England or America. So an early status of labour has to give way to a later; as shown so conspicuously in the last great historic instance in our own country.

Household industry is a mixed status, composed mainly of sex-labour, the first stage; and partially of slave-labour, the second. This slave-labour is in the act of changing to contract labour; and, as such, cannot endure the conditions of home industry. The housewife has to, the house-slave had to, the house-servant mostly had to; but the house-_employee_ does not have to, and will not if she can help it.

The contract status of labour is incompatible with home industry. Note how the condition of celibacy intereacts upon the relation. We expect of our house-servants that they be "attached," "loyal," "faithful," "respectful," "devoted"; we do not say they always are, but that is our ideal; these are the qualities for which we most praise them. Attachment is especially valued. If only we could still _own_ them! Then there would be that pleasant sense of permanence and security so painfully lacking in our modern house-service. Short of owning them we seek by various futile methods to "attach" them. Some societies give medals for long service. The best thing we can say of a servant is "she stayed with me for seven years!" or whatever period we can boast. Now we do not seek to "attach" our butcher or baker or candlestick-maker; why our cook? Because this status of celibacy has necessarily resulted in the most painful conditions of transient incapacity in house-service.

People must marry. People ought to marry. People will marry, whether we say yes or no. Why should the housemaid stay a maid for our sakes? What do we offer in the exciting prospect of always doing the same work for the same wages, compared to the prospect of doing the same work, without wages, it is true, but with a "mechanic's lien" on her husband's purse? Or what would any scale of wages or promotion be against the joys of a home of her own, a husband of her own, children of her own?

We, intrenched in our own homes and families, think she ought to be satisfied with serving our husbands and children, but she is not--and never will be. There is of course a certain percentage of old maids and widows, sufficiently disagreeable not to be wanted by their relatives, or sufficiently independent not to want them; sufficiently capable to hold a place as house-servant, but not sufficiently capable to follow any other trade; or, in last possibility, there is here and there that Blessed Damosel of our domestic dreams--a strong, capable, ingenious woman, not hampered by any personal ties or affections; not choosing to marry; preferring to work in a kitchen to working in a shop; and so impressed by the august virtues and supreme importance of our family that she becomes "attached" to it for life. These cases are, however, rare. In the vast majority of households the maid is a maid, a young woman of the lower classes, doing this work because she can do no other, and doing it only until she marries. The resultant conditions of the industry so practised are precisely what we might expect.