THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM
(3) THE HOUSEWIFE
O the soap vat is a common thing!
The pickle-tub is low!
The loom and wheel have lost their grace
In falling from the dwelling-place
To mills where all may go!
The bread-tray needeth not your love;
The wash-tub wide doth roam;
Even the oven free may rove;
But bow ye down to the Holy Stove,
The Altar of the Home!
C. P. GILMAN.
In the great majority of households the wife and mother is also the
housewife. In the great majority of households this arrangement is the
most economical and suitable in every sense. So long as families live
each in a separate home there will be a vast amount of domestic work
to be done in the home, and a great deal of this work being suited to
women’s strength and capacities, it seems more appropriate, as well as
more economical, that each woman should do the domestic work of her
own home, and do it to her liking among her own children and her own
possessions, rather than go out and do another woman’s work for wages.
Further, a woman who is attending to the needs of young children is
perforce a great deal in the home with the children, and therefore it
is again economical that whatever work she does, in addition to caring
for the children, should be work that can be done in the intervals, and
that does not require her to waste time and strength in leaving the
home. A large part of the function of child nurture is merely to be
there, on guard and for emergencies. The child is both better and happier
that is not too much interfered with; that lies kicking and crowing on
a mattress, making acquaintance with its toes, and as it grows older,
finds its own games and delights, in copying the arts and crafts of its
elders. In sickness the whole of the guardian’s attention may be taken,
but in health it is a fact that a woman can best develop the child by
being herself occupied, so long, be it well understood, as the occupation
does not take the whole of her attention. Babies must be talked to and
sympathised with, and as they grow older the busy guardian must not be
so busy that she cannot play their plays with them. The sort of work
which occupies the hands and only a portion of the head is obviously the
sort of work which is appropriate to the child-minder. A floor can be
scrubbed, a grate blacked, bread made, and clothes mended with a baby on
a mattress in the room, and a couple of tinies playing shop in a corner.
It is not an easy life, and the mother may often feel she “doesn’t
know which way to turn”; but if children were not too many and houses
were more convenient, and all housekeeping tools more adequate, and the
housekeeping money sufficient, the life of the mother who is also the
housewife would be a happy and healthy life; she could hope to do her
work really well, and most women would prefer it to any other.
What are the causes of the present discontents among housewives? Many
indeed. They feel that the woman who is not only bearing and rearing
the children, but also buying and cooking and washing and cleaning and
mending for the whole family, should have some of that independence which
comes from handling the money she has earned and saved. I remember a man
at a street-corner meeting once heckling me with the question whether a
woman had not all that she required if she had “love an’ her keep.” He
was a candid fellow, and when I asked him whether “love an’ his keep”
would satisfy _him_, and whether he did not like to have some of the
money he had earned as “spending money,” to do what he pleased with, go
to a football match,—or even make his wife a present,—he laughed and
said, “Well it takes a woman to think of such things! Of course I do,—I
never looked at it in that light before.” The mother while she is bearing
children should be “kept” in health and strength; the woman who is making
wealth by personal services just as much as any other worker, should be
paid for her services. If this is not done, if a woman only gets her
keep as any other domestic animal does, it is likely that, in modern
times, she will be tempted to go out to work, when it would be better
for all concerned that she should stay at home and work. Very often, of
course, she is not merely tempted, but forced to go. The result is that
we see women with the treble burden of child-bearing, wage-earning out of
the home, and housework within the home. Small wonder when each of these
is ill-done. The marvel is how well done they often are.
Sometimes, again, by the conditions under which the men choose to work,
a monstrous burden is piled upon the housewife. The men who have been
most persistent and most successful in obtaining an eight-hour day for
themselves, have been those who have laid the heaviest burden upon the
women. In the cottage of a miner you will sometimes find men working on
each of the three shifts, and one housewife to do for them all. This
means four sets of meals (where there are young children as well), and
three sets of hot baths, and that condition of things which a good
housewife detests more than any other, of never being “tidied up.” A
canvasser reports how she found a housewife of this class looking so
worn out over her ironing that the visitor remarked on it, and the
patient housewife replied, “You see, I’ve not been rightly to bed for a
fortnight.” It is these men, too, some of them, who were so outraged
at the suggested “indignity” of compulsory baths at the pithead. The
freeborn Briton reserves to himself the right to bring his coal dust
home to the scrubbed boards and washed pillows of his domestic drudge,
and when he secures his eight-hour day, does not dream of employing some
other woman to help his wife with her extra shifts, so that she, as well
as he, may go “rightly to bed.”
Those who are intimate with the lives of poor people know how desperately
hard on the women are the quick-coming children and the dreadful
inadequacy of the money she gets for housekeeping. The increase in
drugging as a preventive is a matter for very serious consideration. It
is not only hard work and under-feeding that makes so many of our working
women look old at thirty.
The dissatisfaction that is caused by all the defects of housing is
purely to the good. It is to be wished that the women would all strike
against the vile houses and the antiquated and decrepit implements and
arrangements. Unhappily the women, having known no other, are often
sunk in indifference. When people criticise the “folly” of teaching
girls to cook on convenient stoves and to housekeep under reasonable
conditions, because everyone knows they never will have convenient stoves
or reasonable conditions, and it will only make them dissatisfied,
I for one hail this dissatisfaction as the one star of hope for the
housewives of the future. For it is quite certain that if the women
are not dissatisfied, the men never will be, and things will never
improve. It is difficult to find the beginning of the vicious circle in
which domestic affairs now are. You are no craftsman if you do not take
pride and joy in your tools, and is it not mockery to ask the English
cottager to take pride in her tools? Think of the crowded condition of
the rooms, so that the Sunday clothes must be kept in the parlour, and
there is no room whatever for storing perishable food, to say nothing of
groceries! Think of the extravagant, ramshackle grates on which these
women are expected to cook appetising food, without which the men will
go to the public-house! Think of the washing on a wet day! The man gets
out of the place as soon as ever he can, and we do not wonder nor blame
him. It seems to me indecent to blame the woman if she succumbs to such
conditions. When she revolts from them, she ought to have the hearty help
and sympathy of every reformer in the land.
So it is not housework that so many women are revolting from. It is
largely the horrible conditions under which so much housework has to be
done. But it is also this: that it is not wise to put all women under one
harrow, and particularly it is foolish to insist on mixing up the notions
of motherhood and housewifery into an inextricable tangle. Because, in
individual homes in the past the woman who bore the children had to cook
and clean and housekeep, it does not follow at all that this must always
be so for ever and ever. Some women who are by no means clever at child
nurture, and who detest housewifery, are capable of bearing excellent
children, beautiful and strong. It would be to impoverish the race to
say such women should not have children (and they and the men who love
them would laugh at you if you did). It would be stupid to sacrifice the
welfare of the children to the incompetent rearing of such women, and
one can only pity the men who have to eat the dinners they cook. Why not
admit frankly that women differ, and always will differ? Why try to press
them all into the same mould? If a woman has been a highly trained and
very competent class-teacher before her marriage, is it wisdom or economy
to declare that, after her marriage, she must abandon all her special
training, her natural and acquired gifts, and black her husband’s boots
and cook his dinner? Even if she has babies, is that any reason why she
should become a general servant?
Slowly, very slowly, because everything to do with women is so hedged
round with fears and tabus of all kinds, there is arising the possibility
of co-operative housekeeping and co-operative nurseries. To some
intensely individualistic women these will be a terror; they would
rather slave themselves to death than have a common kitchen or a common
dining-room; and some would not for the world miss one cry of the baby,
one clutch of its little grasping hands. Let these women have their babes
and their households to themselves; why not? But why should the other
women not also have what they want, and do what they can? No one, looking
round the world of men and women, can honestly say that men do as a
matter of fact choose their wives from the girls who love baby-minding,
cooking and cleaning beyond all things. Young men are not thinking
about such things at all when courting, and they go for nothing in the
sex-attraction a girl possesses. We women, if we have lived a good while,
have all known scores of girls left unwed who would have made better
mothers and better housekeepers than those who have married, and in some
cases “could have married a dozen times” as the saying goes. The fact is
that the perfect wife, mother, nurse, teacher and housekeeper is very
rarely one person.
Girls are less domesticated now, largely because the development of
industry has made them less so. Bread, jams, pickles, candles, hams,
yarn, cloth and clothes that used to be made in the home are now made in
the factory. It seems to me perfectly clear that by degrees much of the
cooking and laundering, even of the poor, will be done on a large scale
by those who receive wages for doing it. The discomfort and unhealthiness
of laundry work in a small cottage, and the waste of time and fuel in
cookery, are manifest to everyone who has ever seen them. There will be
a development of the crèche or day nursery in all towns, and eventually
those who love the individualist life will find it best in country
districts, while the towns will be given over to the men and women of
co-operative and gregarious temperaments.
These developments will, of course, bring with them their characteristic
dangers and disadvantages. Neither progress nor stagnation is safe; but
the one is life, the other is death. What is necessary is to face things
as they are and not go on eternally pretending that the world is what it
is not: that women all have sheltered happy homes, if only they would
stay in them; that it is only idleness or perversity which prevents women
from making their own bread (without a suitable oven) and stocking their
own jam (without even a shelf to put it on). We have seen enough of the
very serious disadvantages of modern industrialism to have a shrewd idea
of what the dangers of further development will be, and it would be the
wisest thing for sociologists not to attempt to sweep back the tide, but
to direct its channels for the future.
The divorce of the producer and the consumer has had many bad effects as
well as some good. While people prepared their own food and made their
own clothes and furniture, there was a direct personal incentive to make
them good. This incentive must be replaced by one as strong, or quality
will drop. The modern producer finds it difficult to know what his
enormous public wants, and it profits him to assert, by advertisement,
that what he makes is what the public wants. The consumer is confused and
helpless, disorganised and very open to suggestion. Moreover, the power
of finance, of trusts and combinations, to beat out competitors and to
rig the market, acts more often than not in direct opposition to the
real interests of the consumer. Hence enormous waste of material wealth,
adulteration and shoddy, and the ugliness that comes from bad material
and bad workmanship overlaid with vulgar ornament.
The fact is that, like everything else, housewifery is becoming a matter
of much greater specialisation on the one hand, and on the other the
modern state of affairs requires a modern mind. Collective effort and
political action are in these complicated conditions necessary, and the
purely individualistic attitude of mind is hopelessly old-fashioned. If
woman is to be the housewife of the future, it is the woman of the future
and not of the past who must tackle these questions, and men must give
the woman of the future her head.