ROADTOWN HOUSEKEEPING
Though it is true that some work, which in the past rested heavily
upon the shoulders of women, has been taken into the factory, notably
the spinning, weaving and clothes making trades, and on the farm the
making of butter, still the bulk of labor of the women of the average
household comes in that group of washing, ironing, dusting, sweeping,
scrubbing, making beds, cooking and dish-washing. This is woman’s work
in the most of our homes, and a servant’s work in the homes of the rich.
_Woman’s Work not Specialized._
Industrial progress has not yet applied to this work of women the
specialization and labor saving machinery that has sent forward
the general work of the world at such a rapid pace. Another way
of expressing the same idea is to say that in at least nine-tenths
of the households, the woman is the household servant. If the work
be assigned to outsiders, then the privacy of the family circle is
broken up and the dearest ties of earth are disturbed by intruders.
At present there are two ways out of the difficulty. The way of the
rich is the employment of household servants. To counteract the
disturbance of family life an elaborate system of servant etiquette
has been established by means of which the servant is made to
resemble, as much as possible, the cookstove or the family horse.
This satisfies the family, but is disagreeable to the servant, and
incidently keeps a worker out of productive effort, raises the cost of
living to everybody, and deprives her of the most normal expression of
womanhood--that of marrying and coddling her own children.
The second solution is for those too poor to employ servants. It
consists in eulogizing the “homely virtues” and writing poems about
the duties of women in the home and artfully associating the scouring
of a brass kettle with the instinct of motherhood. This effort to
satisfy the women in the home in playing the personal servant to the
rest of the family by enshrining the dish-rag and broom is nothing new
in the history of the world. Those who have benefited from the work of
others have always been quick to quote scripture to keep the worker on
the job, and as long as there is no other way to get the work done,
this plastering over of dirty work with beautiful thoughts is indeed
a makeshift virtue, but one of which we shall some day be thoroughly
ashamed.
In the Roadtown, this problem, old as civilization, will be solved,
not by bringing in outside workers to break up family life, but by
sending most of the present work out of the home and simplifying that
which must remain until the task becomes so light that each member of
the family will perform his share of the housekeeping just as he now
dresses himself, or walks to catch the trolley car.
_No Laundry Work at Home._
The first function, washing and ironing, has long since been made an
industrial function by the rich everywhere, and also by the middle
class in our cities. Farmers’ wives and the wives of the city laborers
still do home laundrying. In the Roadtown, with its perfect system
of transportation, the trouble of sending soiled clothes to the
coöperative laundry will be very simple as compared with the present
wasteful method of city collection of laundry. The service will indeed
be so cheap that I fancy Roadtowners will vote to add the expense of
the laundry to the charge for rent, thus doing away with the cost of
accounts and collections. This would put a premium upon cleanliness,
to be sure, and might result in a slight increase of the total expense
since our clothes would be washed more often.
In connection with the laundry will be a pressing and cleaning
establishment which will likewise be run coöperatively. The pressing
machine now used by clothing manufacturers will keep people looking
spick and span for a mere trifle.
How far the Roadtowners will carry the idea of a blanket rate to cover
the cost for all these things depends on traits in human nature that
are pretty hard to anticipate. We force people to coöperate, to build
parks and statues to beautify our cities. Do we want to tax them for
a chance to be well groomed, or do we prefer to see the other fellow
slouchy so that we will look better by comparison? I for one, believe
in allowing civic pride to include live citizens as well as marble
statues of the dead.
_Dusting and Sweeping._
Dusting and sweeping must be done at home, we cannot send the house
out, but we can pipe the house for suction sweeping and discard forever
the broom, clothes brush and that arch nuisance, the feather duster,
which is used to chase the dust from room to room without getting rid
of it. Scrubbing and mopping will be greatly simplified by the cement
construction and the convenience of water and sewage. These periodic
tasks will be grouped into trades, so that they can, when desirable,
be given over to professional cleaners as is window washing in city
buildings.
_Making Beds by Machinery._
The care of the beds is the next item on our list. The Roadtown
sleeping-room will in the daytime have the appearance of a sitting-room
or library. One essential piece of furniture will be a couch or divan
with good springs upholstered with fire proof material. Plush, leather
and linen divan and chair covers will be used alternately to suit the
seasons and varying requirements. The divan forms the foundation of the
bed. The bedding including a light pad or mattress will be made about
a foot longer than is customary. At the foot this bedding and pad will
be fastened together by a metal clasp, or “bedding hanger” on the order
of a trousers-hanger. In the morning instead of making up the bed--that
is, carefully folding up all the germs and foul odors, the bed will be
suspended by the hanger in an adjoining fresh air closet. By reversing
the action of the rod supporting the bedding, which describes an arc
over the unfolded divan, the bedding is spread neatly in place--the
bed is made. This closet in which the bedding hangs freely exposed
to the air has one side, or rather edge, against the outside wall of
the building. This wall space will be formed of shutters which admit
of free circulation of air, thus the bed is aired _every day_ and _all
day_. But there are certain species of “germs,” as every housekeeper
can testify, that will survive this fresh air device, for them another
provision will be made. This closet will be piped for a certain kind
of gas which will be selected by the Roadtown biologist. At stated
intervals the outside shutters will be tightly closed as well as door
of the closet and the bedding fumigated instead of aired. This method
can also be used to disinfect clothing.
There will be few rats or mice in the Roadtown home, for there will be
little food left around to attract them, and no places for them to gnaw
through or build their nests. In the average city building used for
factory purposes, the damage from rats and vermin, I am told, is often
over 10 per cent of the gross sales.
_Coöperative Cooking Practical._
Coöperative cooking, in spite of the first natural antipathy, has
gained considerable ground in city life. We find it in two forms, the
dining-out habit and the delicatessen habit. The first is expensive of
time and money, and destroys the most delightful hours of home life.
The second is likewise expensive and results in a diet consisting
chiefly of bread, cheese, cold meat and pickles. The weakness in both
systems is in the matter of imperfect transportation. In the first case
the people must be taken to the food, and hence out of the home. In the
second, the food must be brought into the home by a system of delivery
that greatly increases expense and limits the quality, quantity, and
variety of the available meal. The Roadtown, built in the one straight
horizontal line, will make possible the use of a mechanical delivery
system which is not now available even for hotel service.
The mechanical carrier will be on the order of that used in the Library
of Congress as a “book railroad.” It is inexpensive, noiseless, and
can by means of a “key” be set to switch automatically at the house for
which the “car” or “carrier” is intended.
The Roadtown cooking will not be done in a single kitchen, but in a
number of large establishments, such as bakeries, creameries, boiling,
roasting establishments, etc. The prepared foods will then be sent
in suitable quantities to serving stations located about half a mile
apart, and there kept hot in the warming closets. Here the frying,
broiling, and other such types of cooking will be performed to order.
The bill-of-fare will be sent out by Roadtown mail. The people
will order by ’phone and the foods will be on the sideboard in the
Roadtown dining-room in less time than it takes to bring it by the
two-legged route from Delmonico’s kitchen to his dining-room. But in
the dining-room a difference arises. The carriers must be opened and
the dishes and food arranged upon the table by the women folks--a
homely virtue left that the household poet may not be entirely without
material.
The usual meal will require two carriers, one of which will be heated,
and the other containing butter, milk, ices, etc., will be chilled.
Many changes of fashion will be required in the form and material of
dishes for containing and serving food--changes that will doubtless
“upset” the good dames who have found virtue in soup tureens that can
slop over, but it is needless to add that their Roadtown daughters will
be more “upset” at the thought of a return to present customs.
At the close of the Roadtown meal, the dishes, food remnants and soiled
linen, will be put into the carrier, and dropped down a little chute
where they will travel merrily to the public dish-washery. Here a few
men with the aid of machinery will do the work which now occupies
half a hundred mothers while their families adjourn to the library,
music-room or to indulge in a nap.
In the Roadtown household there will be no furnaces to tend, no ashes
to haul out, and no marketing to do. The garbage waste will be only
the table refuse which will be placed in a paraffined paper receptacle
and sent back with the dishes. A bag for waste cloth and paper will
complete the waste disposal system.
_The End of Household Drudgery._
In such an environment with the baby cared for by experts in the
nursery or kindergarten only a thousand feet away, the mother will have
time to operate an electric sewing, knitting, or one of many other
automatic and noiseless machines, work in the garden, read, visit, or
attend the theater, lecture hall or church. Indeed the Roadtown woman
will be free to do anything and everything she chooses except home
drudgery.
The Roadtown idea will at first produce a long low wail from the
thousands of men readers which will begin and end with a plea for
“mother’s cooking.” The Roadtown cookshop is coöperative, but the
dining-room is not. And the cookshop will be there to fill the need of
the coöperators, not to make money. If there is demand it will have
uncooked food to send out as well as cooked food. Nor will there be
any law against the bringing into one’s home the fruits of one’s own
garden, berry patch, and poultry yard. Roadtown folks that keep a
cow can take their choice between setting the milk in the spring and
letting the cream rise or sending the milk to the creamery where it
is aërated, chilled, pasteurized, and bottled, and the fat contents
standardized, and thus sent back as 4 per cent milk to drink and 20 per
cent cream for the strawberries. Personally having tasted both kinds I
prefer the scientific product.
Every Roadtown home will have a boiler for hot water, a chafing dish
and as much more cooking apparatus as may be desired. The wealthy
matron of to-day keeps alive the sentiment of mother’s cooking by
making the tea, frosting the cake or making the salad dressing. The
Roadtown mother can do the same, and as much more cooking as she likes,
but once the opportunity is given for people to find the actual economy
of coöperation and to see the folly of heating up a whole house to do
one family’s cooking, the amount of cooking mothers will do will be
decidedly limited.
Sentiments can bar out progress for a while, but where there is a
great economical saving with nothing to lose but sentiment, economy
generally wins. How would you, Mr. Home-is-sacred-man, like to thresh
or flail the wheat by hand in order that the family might eat pies made
of hand threshed wheat as well as to eat mother’s pies made of machine
prepared flour?
This game of jollying mothers into playing household flunkies by
complimenting their products is getting thin, and a lot of mothers are
beginning to see through it.
The coöperative preparation of food will have many indirect effects. A
Roadtown ten miles in length could well afford to have its own canning
factory, cold storage, and, if the trusts become too dictatorial,
also its own packing house. The Pure Food Law in Roadtown will be a
dead-letter, for the buyers will be food experts and will have nothing
to gain by defrauding the people, or helping to keep them in ignorance.
With a double cause for watchfulness, economy and health, it is hardly
likely that such a buyer would find it worth while attempting to go
in partnership with food adulterators. Certainly the inducement to
adulterate is much greater in the world to-day, for every man involved
in it, profits by the practice, the consumer alone, woefully ignorant
of the whole subject, is the only dupe.
Not only will the Roadtown buyer get pure food, but he will get all
food at wholesale rates. The frightful waste, due to the putting up
of food in small cans, bottles and cartons, is little appreciated. I
recently tested this principle by buying olive oil. The oil was priced
me at $1.80 a gallon, but the oil I secured in fifty cent bottles I
found cost me $7.00 a gallon. Cotton seed oil was priced at sixty cents
a gallon. I purchased a five-cent bottle and found that I had paid at
the rate of $2.25 a gallon. These are indisputable facts and they could
be multiplied indefinitely. In barrel or car lots the above gallon
prices would be greatly reduced.
All Roadtown foods can be bought in bulk direct from the makers at
makers’ rates. The vegetables will be crisp and fresh from the Roadtown
gardens. The profits of the middlemen, of retailers, of adulterators
and advertisers, the cost of bottles and cans, of delivery boys and
bad grocery bills will certainly be eliminated with one fell swoop.
It will reduce the cost of living, mark you, at such a rate that the
unsophisticated will confuse a Roadtown meal with a charitable soup
kitchen. But if you don’t believe this, write to your country cousins
and find out just what is the producer’s price on the material out of
which a meal is made.