The little children of the neighborhood come in to play before lesson
time.
]
The New York board of education would be the first to admit that
it is the home more than anything else that gives, to children
health or feebleness, life or death, happiness or wretchedness and
yet they and we calmly let this neglect go on.
The school lunch committee made an investigation a short time ago
to ascertain whether malnutrition was as great an evil as we
feared. Two thousand and fifty-one children were thoroughly
examined. Half of these from an Irish neighborhood, half from an
Italian. They were selected at random from the four lower grades.
Two hundred and eighty-three or 13 per cent were found to be
suffering from pronounced malnutrition. Their homes were visited.
With the exception of eighteen tea and coffee was a part of the
daily diet. Sixty families had no prepared luncheon or dinner at
home. One hundred and fifty-seven were supplying the wrong or
insufficient food and it was found to be more ignorance than
poverty that was the cause of this condition.
If we take 13 per cent of 388,000 children we have 29,846 poorly
nourished girls who are not even taught that the heavy, dull, sick
feeling is due to the wrong kind of food. How can we place other
knowledge ahead of this? When we watch this large, half fed army
of children marching on to take up a woman’s battle with life it
does seem as if we had been asleep to our responsibilities.
We must establish an adequate twentieth century theory of
household economics and then we must put this within the reach of
every girl in our public schools.
My desk is covered always with pamphlets entitled The Profession
of Home-making, Food Values, Freehand Cooking on Scientific
Principles, and so on, but does this knowledge reach the people?
Does it reach the 388,000 school girls? Recently I heard an hour’s
talk by a member of the Board of Health on how we ought to know
good milk from bad, how careful we should be about canned
vegetables, and the horrors of buying tainted meat: but when I
asked how the common people could know these facts I could get no
satisfaction other than that the way to know whether the milk was
good or not was to examine the barns where the cows were milked or
have the milk tested; but the people I know are ignorant as to how
to wash milk bottles, or why it is wrong to leave the milk
uncovered, or why the nipple from the milk bottle can’t be played
with, fall on the floor and then be used. This representative from
the Board of Health told startling facts about candies and ice
cream, sold on push carts, but the audience at this lecture were
land owners along the Hudson River, and I doubt if one of them had
ever seen an East Side push cart, and I know that not one was ever
tempted to buy. Why can’t these facts reach the thousands of
children who do buy dyed ice cream and varnished candy, and whose
fathers sell these very things?
[Illustration:
A COOKING LESSON
]
We not only have to establish an up-to-date, scientific way to
live, but we cannot do this without the help of the tenement house
woman. We contribute the ideals, the theories and the science; she
must contribute experience. We are up in the air with our castles,
she is down in the thick of the fight where the smallness of the
tenement room presses upon her, where every day she faces the high
price of food and an insufficient income, where a gentle love for
her children is constantly at war with a nervous irritability, the
product of disorder, noise and confusion.
Do you think this woman does not want a real home? Look at the
energy and thought she puts into furnishing her house, the
scrimping that preceded the buying of the ugly red carpet and the
plush chairs. There were hours of work given to hemming and
hanging the ruffles over every door, around every shelf and even
around the bath tub. Look at the tarletan festooned around the
chandelier and over the pictures; see the dozens of calendars
collected and pinned on the wall. Isn’t this a reaching out with
all the power that is in a woman to express to her family and her
neighbors what, in her ignorance, she believes to be a home? We
need the energy and the courage and the experience of these
tenement housekeepers, but we must add education; and do we?
Take the daily life of any one of our thousands of little school
girls and see how much chance she has to know the science of
home-making or even to acquire respect for housework. She is born
with the controlling desire to copy. She sees high-heeled shoes on
another’s foot; she longs for and saves until she gets shoes like
them. Her tight skirt, her big hat, her very walk, are seen first
and admired somewhere else, and so the home, whether it is perfect
or imperfect, and the school, and the teacher, and what the
teacher stands for, make the same vivid pictures in her mind; and
some day she is going to grow up and copy as nearly as she can.
This little girl wakes in the morning in one of our crowded
tenement houses, wakes to the vivid blue walls, to rooms filled
with feather beds which have been thrown all over the floor the
night before for the family and the possible boarders to occupy.
The dusty carpets, stuffed furniture, long lace curtains and
draped mantle meet her eye, and in this home of unrest there is
always the crying baby, the naturally cross father and the demand
(so well known to every little girl) to hurry up and go to the
store and buy breakfast. Poor little tenement girl, she does not
even know that in well-managed homes breakfast is bought the day
before. She may learn to respect the energy in her home, but she
will never forget the disorder, the picture of congestion and
confusion and of overwrought, tired nerves that has been stamped
forever upon her mind. And no right idea of home is given her to
correct this wrong impression.
Everyone knows the way work is done in our tenement homes; how the
beds are so large that it is impossible to move them out in the
small rooms and make them properly, and how the bed clothes are
pushed across, often with a broom handle kept for the purpose; how
often the small income makes it necessary to rent out the beds in
the day time to night workers, so they are always occupied and
never aired. And every one knows how all these things make a girl
lose respect for her home, then for her family and, finally, for
herself; and how the street seems a peaceful place in comparison.
Ideals of right home-making should in the school correct the home
mistakes, but as it is now, not until she reaches the seventh
grade does this little tenement girl get her first idea that
making a home is a part of education. After she leaves home in the
morning she gets only a picture of a schoolroom with forty or
fifty desks; of a teacher who in no way is associated in her mind
with any house, who, as I heard Mrs. Kelley say not long ago,
often brings her lunch in a music roll so that no one will suspect
that it is food.
The windows in the schoolroom are washed after school hours (and
at that only once or twice a year) by the janitor, the floors are
swept by men, swept badly, and always after school. And if this
pupil happens to be one of the twenty thousand who leave school
each year before reaching the seventh grade, she goes into
business not knowing that there is such a thing as scientific
knowledge regarding food and air and sun and cleanliness.
And yet this girl is going to marry, bear children and rear them,
and you and I are going to hold her responsible if those children
are not good citizens. Surely this is not a fair placing of
responsibility.
Eleven years ago I started the first housekeeping center in New
York. These centers are ordinary tenement flats which find their
motive power and are successful by means of the universal love in
every little girl to play at keeping house, and the universal
desire in every one to copy that which is just above her.
A girl wants her kitchen messes, her dishes, her make-believe baby
and her tiny bed or broom just as every boy wants his bat and
ball. A housekeeping center takes these natural desires and
cultivates them. It is furnished as a home should be furnished,
and such questions are answered there as: What shall be done with
the floors to insure health and save labor; what with the walls?
What curtains are the best to admit light, give beauty to the room
and wash easily? What proportion of the sum laid aside for
furnishing should go into the buying of pots and pans, what part
into mattresses, and is there any reason to spend money for
ruffles? What are the proper and necessary tools to work with?
In the housekeeping center the neighbors and the scientifically
trained teacher work out these problems together. The teacher’s
training in chemistry has taught her that a certain quality of
water and a certain kind of soap are necessary for perfect laundry
work. The tenement house woman adds what she has learned from
bitter experience; that it is hard to heat enough of any kind of
water on the stove with coal at ten cents a pail and the stove
crowded with pots and pans.
[Illustration:
A LESSON IN BED-MAKING
]
Regular lessons are given in these housekeeping centers morning,
afternoon and evening, and as the flat is like the home from which
the pupils come (only perfected) its lesson is not dissociated
with the daily home duties but is performed under home conditions
and, therefore, easy of imitation. Do the pupils want this
instruction? The answer is that every class is full and there is a
waiting list, and every girl pays for the lessons.
I find it often difficult in selling luncheons in the public
schools to persuade the children to give up three cents for a full
meal, and yet the children under fourteen in the housekeeping
centers are ready always to pay three cents a lesson, and the
working girls five cents. And what do they pay for? To learn to
clean the sink so that the pipes will not get clogged, to learn to
cook substitutes for meat (for meat is too high for many of them),
to scrub closets and floors, to make and clean beds. Only last
week a class of working girls came to one of the centers and asked
for a bedbug lesson. “The people above us are moving out” they
said, “and we want to prevent the bugs getting into our house.” A
bedbug lesson is not a lecture, it means to roll up one’s sleeves,
put on a big apron, get on your knees and scrub, this after
working hard all day in a factory or shop. The desire for this
knowledge must be very real to make a girl willing to do this
extra labor, and to pay for the privilege of doing it out of her
scanty wages.
In a housekeeping center it is easy and natural to borrow a baby
from the neighbor across the hall when the lesson is “how to bathe
and dress a baby.” There is nothing embarrassing about being the
patient when the lesson is “how to give a bath in bed and how to
change the sheets without disturbing the patient.” Then there are
the dinner classes where the pupils make out the menu, do the
marketing and cook the meat, and there are lessons in food values.
What I feel that we need today is a housekeeping center in every
settlement, so that every girl who is a part of the settlement
will feel it almost compulsory upon her to take the course before
she marries, and if she is enjoying the intellectual life of the
settlement, or the play side, or the social side, she must be
learning the home-making side too. We must make our settlement
girl feel that the home-making training is more important than
mere recreation. The public school will follow the settlement and
then, not for one-ninth of our girls will home-making instruction
be given, but for every one.
[Illustration:
A KITCHEN-CLEANING LESSON
]
Then there will be in every school the cooking-room, with its
individual equipment (necessary, but nothing in it to suggest the
kitchen at home). Next to this will be the model flat or center,
this to resemble the homes from which the children come, but
furnished on scientific lines. For eight years every school girl
will see this home, this home made right, and she will work in it.
It will be no smattering of cooking at the end of the school
course,—but in the beginning, when the love of playing house is
strong, then the training will begin. Even in the lowest school
grade a child could dust her desk with a damp duster and be told
why it should be damp; she could wash her own cup, if milk is
served; learn to handle dishes carefully; and train the eye to see
things straight and the hand to steadiness.
From these small tasks, the children would graduate to larger
duties in the housekeeping center; making beds and washing many
dishes. From dusting one desk, the pupil would soon be able to
give the flat a thorough cleaning. We find in our center that the
love of playing house disappears if it is not cultivated, and the
girl of fourteen never drops entirely the wrong way of doing
housework, which she need never have acquired if the domestic
science teacher could be in her training early enough.
Scientific management means more than “having system.” You may be
ever so systematic in the way you do things, but if you happen to
be doing them the wrong way, you are doing the way that is
unnecessarily expensive in time, energy, money, comfort and
beauty.
I believe that the labor in the kitchen will become more and more
professionalized. It is too serious a work to be handled by
unskilled hands, and we must lose the nervous, irritable,
overtired slave of housework and make woman more of a
child-trainer and cheerful home-maker. She must guide her home
with the quiet and skill and delight with which the engineer
drives his engine or the chauffeur his car. This, some day, will
be brought about by centralizing the work and by an army of
trained workers who will expeditiously and noiselessly do a large
part of what each woman is now trying to do herself. But that day
can come only when women through universal home-making education
push forward and demand this better management of the home.
We must have restlessness and dissatisfaction first. This comes
from a realization of the right way and a disgust with the wrong
way, and then will come the push from the home-maker herself, not
from a few outside reformers. The tenement house occupant now is
too ready to accept the fallen plaster, the dish-water that leaks
through from the flat above and the dirty and dark halls. Her own
senses are dull and she does not see or think about these things,
and the tenement house reformer sometimes feels his work has been
accomplished by a few bath tubs and a little more light, and then
wonders at the indifference with which these gifts are received
and blames the abuse of them. Train a girl to know a home of order
from one of unrest. Teach a woman to be miserable at the thought
of a close room or an unaired bed for her baby, and the social
worker can go off and do something else. The power of action is
where it ought to be, in the awakened tenement house mother. She
will not be content to crowd her family into dark rooms; she will
work until she gets space enough and light enough for her
children. She will be driven to action because she knows the value
of what she has to fight for. When the suffrage comes to women,
how naturally then these intelligent, orderly home-makers will
take their part in municipal housecleaning!
Let us not be satisfied to force through bills at Albany that
improve our tenements; at the same time the tenement girl must be
receiving her scientific home training, so that she too, can take
her part in this great home-making profession.