POSSIBLE REMEDIES—EDUCATION IN HOUSEHOLD AFFAIRS
One of the greatest obstacles in the way of improving domestic service
has been the prevailing lack of information in regard to household
affairs and of careful, systematic education of housekeepers.
Information and education are often used as synonymous terms, but the two
words carry with them entirely different ideas. Information concerning
household affairs includes a ready knowledge of the history of all
household employments and household service, of the economic basis on
which the household rests, and of the economic principles on which it is
conducted. Much of this information it is now difficult to obtain. Many
houses are found in Southern Germany without windows looking towards
the public highway. Light and air are admitted through openings in the
rear or on a court, but no chance passer-by is permitted to look within.
The household has always been constructed on the same plan. No outsider
has been permitted to know the percentage of the family income that
goes for service, fuel, gas and water-tax, groceries, meats, fruits,
and vegetables. In the great majority of households not only is there
no disposition to give others the benefit of such information, but the
information itself does not exist. Each new generation of housekeepers
practically begins its work where the previous generation began. Its only
heritage is recipes for desserts, rules for making furniture polish,
methods of dealing with moth and mildew, which are handed down like
family property from one generation to another in a way as primitive as
that in which books were preserved before writing was known. Advance
is not thus made, as is evident from the course followed in other
occupations that have shown greatest progress. A vast accumulation of
knowledge in regard to law has come through the added experience of
individual members of the profession. It is said that every lawyer owes
a debt of gratitude to his profession which can be paid only by some
personal contribution to the sum total of legal knowledge. The constant
progress made by the profession of medicine is due to the untiring
investigations carried on by its members, the wide publicity given the
results of these investigations, and the fact that every discovery made
by one member becomes the common property of all. Until every housekeeper
is willing to recognize her obligations to her profession and to share
with other members the results of her experience, of her acquired
information, and of her personal investigations, no progress in household
affairs can be expected.
Much of the information to be gained in regard to household affairs is a
direct product of education, but education includes much more. Education
gives a certain amount of information that is of direct service, and
it gives a training that is of indirect but even greater value. The
information more immediately gained comes through the study of art,
chemistry, economics, physiology, psychology, and history. The study of
art should enable the housekeeper to build and furnish her home with
taste; of chemistry, to provide for its sanitary construction and for
the proper preparation of all food materials; of economics, to manage
her household on business principles; of physiology, to study the
physical development of her children; of psychology, to observe their
mental growth and base their training upon it; of history, to know the
progress made in all these departments of knowledge and avoid repeating
as experiments what others have advanced beyond the experimental stage.
These are the gains on the side of information. The real work of
education in supplying the needs of the household is far more important.
There are constantly arising in every household emergencies for which the
housekeeper is, and must be, totally unprepared as regards the amount
of available information she possesses. There are demands made every
hour, every moment, for the exercise of reason, judgment, self-control,
alertness, observation, accuracy, ingenuity, inventive genius, fertility
of resources. The training received by the housekeeper must be such as to
prepare her to meet at any moment any emergency that may arise within her
home. In all ordinary circumstances she avails herself of the information
gained in school or college and through her general reading, but this
is of no avail in the decision of questions which arise outside of the
field of this information, and could by no possibility be anticipated
by it. If progress is to be made in the household, it must be no longer
assumed that an establishment can be well managed by a young woman whose
reasoning powers have never been cultivated, who has never been taught
self-reliance and self-control, who has no conception of accuracy, who
has never acquired the habit of observation, and whose inventive genius
and fertility of resource are expended in providing for the pleasures of
a day.
No improvement is possible in domestic service until every part of the
household comes abreast of the progress made outside of the household;
until the profession of housekeeping advances, like the so-called learned
professions, through the accumulated wisdom of its individual members;
until it ceases to be merely a passive recipient of the progress made
elsewhere, and becomes on its own part an active, creative force.
So much has progress up to this time been hindered by this inactivity in
the household, and so great is the interdependence of all parts of the
household, that it seems necessary to consider somewhat more in detail
the causes of this condition.
Inactivity in all household affairs has largely come from three things.
It has in the first place been generally believed that a knowledge of
all things pertaining to the house and home, unlike anything else,
comes by instinct. It is assumed that the housekeeper is born with an
intuitive knowledge of the right proportions of all materials to be
used in cooking—this knowledge sometimes supplemented by an inherited
cook-book and one purchased to aid a benevolent society soliciting
funds for a charitable purpose. Her knowledge of the mental, moral, and
physical training to be given her children is also to be gained through
instinct and experience and the traditions handed down with regard to
her own family. Instinct may sometimes be dormant, and experience prove
an expensive schoolmaster through the exaction of heavy fees, but no
other avenue of information has been open to her. Again, a very large
proportion of all moneys spent for legitimate household purposes passes
through the hands of housekeepers; yet no thorough investigation on an
extensive scale has ever been carried on in regard to the expenditure
made within or for the household. Few women when they assume the care
of a household know the exact value of the household plant; the amount
to be deducted each year for wear and tear; the relative proportions
expended annually for rent, fuel, food, clothing, and service; the number
of meals served and the approximate cost of each; the amount of profit,
waste, or unproductiveness that results from all expenditures made.
Every manufacturer, every business man knows the value of his plant,
its increasing or diminishing value, the cost of materials used and of
service employed. This information constitutes a part of the intellectual
capital with which he begins business; he does not acquire it by instinct
or tradition, but by careful and exact study of all the factors involved.
It is difficult to see how a household can be successfully carried on
except through the application of the same principles. If we turn to the
construction and decoration of the house, ignorance, masquerading as
instinct, quite as often prevails. It is true we have houses in which we
live, many of them expensive and artistic, yet as a rule little or no
attention is paid in their construction to the specific use each of the
several parts is to serve. Libraries are built with little or no regard
to the place to be occupied in them by book-shelves, desk, or library
table, and no attention is paid to the question of the best methods of
providing them with natural and artificial light. Drawing-rooms and
parlors are built without a place for a piano, dining-rooms without
regard to the position of a sideboard, butlers’ pantries without an
entrance to the kitchen, kitchens with absolutely no regard to the
conveniences of the work to be carried on there, and bedrooms with no
normal place for a bed, bureau, or dressing-table. Something has of
late been done in deference to public sentiment towards applying the
principles of sanitation to the construction of public and private
buildings, yet much still remains to be done, both in the investigation
of the principles and in their application. Many of our private homes
are pleasing to the eye, yet if we accept that definition of art which
considers that it is its highest province to serve best the useful,
many of the so-called artistic homes must be otherwise classed. Before
improvement can be looked for in any of these directions, the position
must be abandoned that the household, or any single part of it, can be
managed by instinct.
A second explanation of the prevailing inactivity in regard to household
affairs arises from the fact that it is always assumed that these
subjects concern only women. The husband of the family often excuses
his absolute ignorance of the affairs of his own household by the lame
apology, “I leave all these things to my wife and daughters.” It is
certainly not the intention in such remarks to belittle the affairs of
the household, yet that is the natural and inevitable result. A knowledge
of household affairs has never been considered a part of a liberal
education as is a knowledge of literature, science, and politics, but
when it is so regarded by men as well as by women a great gain will have
been made. Moreover, it must be said that the natural tastes of some
men would lead them to take up housekeeping as an occupation, as the
natural tastes of some women lead them into different kinds of business.
Inactivity in the household will cease when the arbitrary pressure is
removed that now tacitly compels many women to become housekeepers in
violence to their natural tastes, and at the same time prevents any man
whose abilities lie in this direction from giving them scope. The time
must come when each person will take up the work in life for which he or
she is best adapted, be it the care of a house for a man or business for
a woman, when it will cease to be a matter of odium for the husband to
direct the affairs of the house and for the wife to be the breadwinner.
When the fact is everywhere recognized that both men and women have a
vital concern in the affairs of the house, the relation between the
different parts of the household will become an organic one, and its
highest development reached.
A third explanation of this inactivity in the household is the belief
that all women have a natural taste for household affairs, which without
cultivation grows into positive genius for carrying them on. But a young
man with a genius for law or medicine is not only not expected, he is not
permitted, to exercise his untrained genius in legal and medical cases.
The greater the genius he gives promise of, the more careful, systematic,
and prolonged is the training he receives. In a similar way the woman
with a natural taste for housekeeping duties is the one who should have
most training in them, while in no other way can an interest in such
duties be created in women who have not an inborn love of them.
These three common errors—that a knowledge of housekeeping affairs is a
matter of inspiration, that men have no active interest in the management
of a household, and that all women have a natural love for such affairs
which supplies the place of training—are perhaps sufficient explanation
of the present lack of all opportunity for the investigation of the
household in a professional way.
It has always been assumed, and asserted without fear of contradiction,
that the best place to learn everything pertaining to the household
is the home. But the same change must come here as has already come
in the profession of medicine and in nearly every other department of
knowledge. The period is not remote when every housekeeper made, as
well as administered, the family tonics, bitters, pills, salves, and
liniments, and every household contained a copy of _Every Man his Own
Practitioner_. Happily that day has passed and the era of scientific
investigation and practice of medicine has dawned. It was once assumed
that an adequate knowledge of law could be obtained by any young man who
spent six months in reading law in any lawyer’s office. But the leading
members of the bar to-day have been trained in less haphazard ways. It
was formerly believed that any person could be fitted for a librarian
by doing the routine work of librarian’s assistant in a small country
library. Such training has been supplanted by library schools open only
to college graduates and offering a two years’ course of study. Less
than a hundred years ago boys and girls of sixteen or seventeen years
of age began teaching without even a high school education, while the
tendency to-day is everywhere to insist not only on advanced academic but
also on professional training. The system of apprenticeship is everywhere
being supplanted by systematic, technical training given by experts.
There is evidence that this same spirit is slowly invading the household.
Cooking schools are springing up that teach all the intricacies of the
science “in ten easy lessons,” while the lecturer on cooking with her
demonstration lessons has found her way into nearly every town. Sewing is
taught in the public schools, and the free kitchen garden is following
fast in the train of the free kindergarten. All this is good in its
way, but it is superficial work. No permanent advance will be made as
long as only those schools are found that teach simply the mechanical
parts of housekeeping. New recipes for salads and puddings, new ways of
cleaning brass and silver, new methods of caring for hard-wood floors—all
these may be helpful in a sense, but the knowledge of these and a
thousand other mechanical contrivances will never put the household on a
scientific basis and turn its face towards progress.
One thing, and only one thing, will turn the household into the
channels where every other occupation has made advancement. This is the
establishment of a great professional school, amply equipped for the
investigation of all matters pertaining to the household and _open only
to graduates of the leading colleges and universities of the country_.
This work cannot and should not be done by the college. The college
offers courses in physiology and hygiene, but the college graduate is
permitted to practice medicine only after a long and thorough course
in a medical school. The college offers courses in constitutional law,
but the college student is admitted to the bar only after technical
training in the law school. The college offers courses in chemistry
and economics, but the college student who expects to have the care of
a home should prepare herself for this work by technical study of all
that concerns the household. The mechanical parts of housekeeping can
be learned in the home, providing the head of the household herself
understands the intricacies of the mechanism over which she has charge,
and has the gift of imparting knowledge. These assumptions, however,
cannot always be made, nor can it be assumed that even all the mechanical
parts of housekeeping can be learned in any single home any more than
that all forms of library work can be learned from a single library.
Some of these mechanical parts of housekeeping can be learned in the
kitchen-garden, the public school, the cooking school, but progress is
never made by treadmill methods, by mechanical repetition, by giving
attention only to those things already known. Professional training and
investigation must supplement home and collegiate instruction in the case
of the housekeeper, as the professional school supplements private and
collegiate instruction for the physician, the lawyer, and the clergyman.
The household has been up to this time a _terra incognita_. Until but
yesterday absolutely nothing had been done in any educational institution
towards investigating its past history, its present condition, its future
needs. The beginning has scarcely been made, although the field for such
investigation is limitless. Comparatively little is known of artistic
house-building and furnishing, scarcely more of household sanitation[327]
and the chemistry of foods,[328] even less of the economic principles
underlying the household; fashion, not art, governs every question of
costume, while, with a few notable exceptions, Porter’s _Development of
the Human Intellect_ contains the sum and substance of our knowledge
of the mental development of children. Years of patient, laborious,
unremitting investigation must be given to all household affairs
before any appreciable advance can be made by them. The historical and
scientific investigation of all the great subjects of art, economics,
chemistry, physiology, and psychology in their application to the
household, and the publication of the results of these investigations,
would not indeed settle to-morrow all the difficulties that arise to-day
in regard to household affairs; but such investigation and publication
would take the subject out of the domain of sentiment and transfer it to
a realm where reason and judgment have the control. Household affairs
would in time come to receive the respect now accorded the learned
professions. Household service, instead of being taken up as a last
resort by those who themselves say “have not education enough to do
anything else,” would be dignified into a profession that would attract
large numbers who now seek other occupations.
It has already been said that “educational forces do not push from the
bottom, they pull from the top.” When a strong educational force exerted
from the top shall have pulled the household and all questions connected
with it out of the slough of stagnation in which it has been for so long
a time, then, and not till then, will training schools for domestic
employees be successful. Progress in every other field of human activity
has been made only through investigation and the widespread diffusion of
the results of such investigation; on similar investigations rests the
only hope of making progress in household affairs.