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.