As a natural consequence of our division of labor on sex-lines, giving
to woman the home and to man the world in which to work, we have come to
have a dense prejudice in favor of the essential womanliness of the home
duties, as opposed to the essential manliness of every other kind of
work. We have assumed that the preparation and serving of food and the
removal of dirt, the nutritive and excretive processes of the family,
are feminine functions; and we have also assumed that these processes
must go on in what we call the home, which is the external expression of
the family. In the home the human individual is fed, cleaned, warmed,
and generally cared for, while not engaged in working in the world.
Human nutrition is a long process. There’s many a ship ’twixt the cup
and the lip, to paraphrase an old proverb. Food is produced by the human
race collectively,—not by individuals for their own consumption, but by
interrelated groups of individuals, all over the world, for the world’s
consumption. This collectively produced food circulates over the earth’s
surface through elaborate processes of transportation, exchange, and
preparation, before it reaches the mouths of the consumers; and the
final processes of selection and preparation are in the hands of woman.
She is the final purchaser: she is the final handler in that process of
human nutrition known as cooking, which is a sort of extra-organic
digestion proven advantageous to our species. This department of human
digestion has become a sex-function, supposed to pertain to women by
nature.
If it is to the advantage of the human race that its food supply should
be thus handled by a special sex, this advantage should be shown in
superior health and purity of habit. But no such advantage is visible.
In spite of all our power and skill in the production and preparation of
food we remain “the sickest beast alive” in the matter of eating. Our
impotent outcries against adulteration prove that part of the trouble is
in the food products as offered for purchase, the pathetic reiteration
of our numerous cook-books proves that part of the trouble is in the
preparation of those products, and the futile exhortations of physicians
and mothers prove that part of the trouble is in our morbid tastes and
appetites. It would really seem as if the human race after all its long
centuries had not learned how to prepare good food, nor how to cook it,
nor how to eat it,—which is painfully true.
This great function of human nutrition is confounded with the
sex-relation, and is considered a sex-function: it is in the helpless
hands of that amiable but abortive agent, the economically dependent
women; and the essential incapacity of such an agent is not hard to
show. In her position as private house-steward she is the last purchaser
of the food of the world, and here we reach the governing factor in our
incredible adulteration of food products.
All kinds of deceit and imposition in human service are due to that
desire to get without giving, which, as has been shown in previous
chapters, is largely due to the training of women as non-productive
consumers. But the particular form of deceit and imposition practised by
a given dealer is governed by the intelligence and power of the buyer.
The dilution and adulteration of food products is a particularly easy
path to profit, because the ultimate purchaser has almost no power and
very little intelligence. The individual housewife must buy at short
intervals and in small quantities. This operates to her pecuniary
disadvantage, as is well known; but its effect on the quality of her
purchases is not so commonly observed. Not unless she becomes the head
of a wealthy household, and so purchases in quantity for family,
servants, and guests, is her trade of sufficient value to have force in
the market. The dealer who sells to a hundred poor women can and does
sell a much lower quality of food than he who sells an equal amount to
one purchaser. Therefore, the home, as a food agency, holds an
essentially and permanently unfavorable position as a purchaser; and it
is thereby the principal factor in maintaining the low standard of food
products against which we struggle with the cumbrous machinery of
legislation.
Most housekeepers will innocently prove their ignorance of these matters
by denying that the standard of food products is so low. Let such
offended ladies but examine the statutes and ordinances of their own
cities,—of any civilized city,—and see how the bread, the milk, the
meat, the fruit, are under a steady legislative inspection which
endeavors to protect the ignorance and helplessness of the individual
purchaser. If the private housekeeper had the technical intelligence as
purchaser which is needed to discriminate in the selection of foods, if
she were prepared to test her milk, to detect the foreign substance in
her coffee and spices, rightly to estimate the quality of her meat and
the age of her fruit and vegetables, she would then be able at least to
protest against her supply, and to seek, as far as time, distance, and
funds allowed, a better market. This technical intelligence, however, is
only to be obtained by special study and experience; and its attainment
only involves added misery and difficulty to the private purchaser,
unless accompanied by the power to enforce what the intelligence
demands.
As it is, woman brings to her selection from the world’s food only the
empirical experience gained by practising upon her helpless family, and
this during the very time when her growing children need the wise care
which she is only able to give them in later years. This experience,
with its pitiful limitation and its practical check by the personal
taste and pecuniary standing of the family, is lost where it was found.
Each mother slowly acquires some knowledge of her business by practising
it upon the lives and health of her family and by observing its effect
on the survivors; and each daughter begins again as ignorant as her
mother was before her. This “rule of thumb” is not transmissible. It is
not a genuine education such as all important work demands, but a slow
animal process of soaking up experience,—hopelessly ineffectual in
protecting the health of society. As the ultimate selecting agent in
feeding humanity, the private housewife fails, and this not by reason of
any lack of effort on her part, but by the essential defect of her
position as individual purchaser. Only organization can oppose such
evils as the wholesale adulteration of food; and woman, the
house-servant, belongs to the lowest grade of unorganized labor.
Leaving the selection of food, and examining its preparation, one would
naturally suppose that the segregation of an entire sex to the
fulfilment of this function would insure most remarkable results. It
has, but they are not so favorable as might be expected. The art and
science of cooking involve a large and thorough knowledge of nutritive
value and of the laws of physiology and hygiene. As a science, it verges
on preventive medicine. As an art, it is capable of noble expression
within its natural bounds. As it stands among us to-day, it is so far
from being a science and akin to preventive medicine, that it is the
lowest of amateur handicrafts and a prolific source of disease; and, as
an art, it has developed under the peculiar stimulus of its position as
a sex-function into a voluptuous profusion as false as it is evil. Our
innocent proverb, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” is
a painfully plain comment on the way in which we have come to deprave
our bodies and degrade our souls at the table.
On the side of knowledge it is permanently impossible that half the
world, acting as amateur cooks for the other half, can attain any high
degree of scientific accuracy or technical skill. The development of any
human labor requires specialization, and specialization is forbidden to
our cook-by-nature system. What progress we have made in the science of
cooking has been made through the study and experience of professional
men cooks and chemists, not through the Sisyphean labors of our endless
generations of isolated women, each beginning again where her mother
began before her.
Here, of course, will arise a pained outcry along the “mother’s
doughnuts” line, in answer to which we refer to our second premise in
the last chapter. The fact that we like a thing does not prove it to be
right. A Missouri child may regard his mother’s saleratus biscuit with
fond desire, but that does not alter their effect upon his spirits or
his complexion. Cooking is a matter of law, not the harmless play of
fancy. Architecture might be more sportive and varied if every man built
his own house, but it would not be the art and science that we have made
it; and, while every woman prepares food for her own family, cooking can
never rise beyond the level of the amateur’s work.
But, low as is the status of cooking as a science, as an art it is
lower. Since the wife-cook’s main industry is to please,—that being her
chief means of getting what she wants or of expressing affection,—she
early learned to cater to the palate instead of faithfully studying and
meeting the needs of the stomach. For uncounted generations the grown
man and the growing child have been subject to the constant efforts of
her who cooked from affection, not from knowledge,—who cooked to please.
This is one of the widest pathways of evil that has ever been opened. In
every field of life it is an evil to put the incident before the object,
the means before the end; and here it has produced that familiar result
whereby we live to eat instead of eating to live.
This attitude of the woman has developed the rambling excess called
“fancy cookery,”—a thing as far removed from true artistic development
as a swinging ice-pitcher from a Greek vase. Through this has come the
limitless unhealthy folly of high living, in which human labor and time
and skill are wasted in producing what is neither pure food nor pure
pleasure, but an artificial performance, to be appreciated only by the
virtuoso. Lower living could hardly be imagined than that which results
from this unnatural race between artifice and appetite, in which body
and soul are both corrupted.
In the man, the subject of all this dining-room devotion, has been
developed and maintained that cultivated interest in his personal tastes
and their gratification,—that demand for things which he likes rather
than for things which he knows to be good, wherein lies one of the most
dangerous elements in character known to the psychologist. The sequences
of this affectionate catering to physical appetites may be traced far
afield to its last result in the unchecked indulgence in personal tastes
and desires, in drug habits and all intemperance. The temperament which
is unable to resist these temptations is constantly being bred at home.
As the concentration of woman’s physical energies on the sex-functions,
enforced by her economic dependence, has tended to produce and maintain
man’s excess in sex-indulgence, to the injury of the race; so the
concentration of woman’s industrial energies on the close and constant
service of personal tastes and appetites has tended to produce and
maintain an excess in table indulgence, both in eating and drinking,
which is also injurious to the race. It is not here alleged that this is
the only cause of our habits of this nature; but it is one of primal
importance, and of ceaseless action.
We can perhaps see its working better by a light-minded analogy than by
a bold statement. Suppose two large, healthy, nimble apes. Suppose that
the male ape did not allow the female ape to skip about and pluck her
own cocoanuts, but brought to her what she was to have. Suppose that she
was then required to break the shell, pick out the meat, prepare for the
male what he wished to consume; and suppose, further, that her share in
the dinner, to say nothing of her chance of a little pleasure excursion
in the treetops afterward, was dependent on his satisfaction with the
food she prepared for him. She, as an ape of intelligence, would seek,
by all devices known to her, to add stimulus and variety to the meals
she arranged, to select the bits he specially preferred to please his
taste and to meet his appetite; and he, developing under this agreeable
pressure, would gradually acquire a fine discrimination in foods, and
would look forward to his elaborate feasts with increasing complacency.
He would have a new force to make him eat,—not only his need of food,
with its natural and healthy demands, but her need of—everything, acting
through his need of food.
This sounds somewhat absurd in a family of apes, but it is precisely
what has occurred in the human family. To gratify her husband has been
the woman’s way of obtaining her own ends, and she has of necessity
learned how to do it; and, as she has been in general an uneducated and
unskilled worker, she could only seek to please him through what powers
she had,—mainly those of house service. She has been set to serve two
appetites, and to profit accordingly. She has served them well, but the
profit to either party is questionable.
On lines of social development we are progressing from the gross gorging
of the savage on whatever food he could seize, toward the discriminating
selection of proper foods, and an increasing delicacy and accuracy in
their use. Against this social tendency runs the cross-current of our
sexuo-economic relation, making the preparation of food a sex function,
and confusing all its processes with the ardor of personal affection and
the dragging weight of self-interest. This method is applied, not only
to the husband, but, in a certain degree, to the children; for, where
maternal love and maternal energy are forced to express themselves
mainly in the preparation of food, the desire properly to feed the child
becomes confounded with an unwise desire to please, and the mother
degrades her high estate by catering steadily to the lower tastes of
humanity instead of to the higher.
Our general notion is that we have lifted and ennobled our eating and
drinking by combining them with love. On the contrary, we have lowered
and degraded our love by combining it with eating and drinking; and,
what is more, we have lowered these habits also. Some progress has been
made, socially; but this unhappy mingling of sex-interest and
self-interest with normal appetites, this Cupid-in-the-kitchen
arrangement, has gravely impeded that progress. Professional cooking has
taught us much. Commerce and manufacture have added to our range of
supplies. Science has shown us what we need, and how and when we need
it. But the affectionate labor of wife and mother is little touched by
these advances. If she goes to the cooking school, it is to learn how to
make the rich delicacies that will please rather than to study the
nutritive value of food in order to guard the health of the household.
From the constantly enlarging stores opened to her through man’s
activities she chooses widely, to make “a variety” that shall kindle
appetite, knowing nothing of the combination best for physical needs. As
to science, chemistry, hygiene,—they are but names to her. “John likes
it so.” “Willie won’t eat it so.” “Your father never could bear
cabbage.” She must consider what he likes, not only because she loves to
please him or because she profits by pleasing him, but because he pays
for the dinner, and she is a private servant.
Is it not time that the way to a man’s heart through his stomach should
be relinquished for some higher avenue? The stomach should be left to
its natural uses, not made a thoroughfare for stranger passions and
purposes; and the heart should be approached through higher channels. We
need a new picture of our overworked blind god,—fat, greasy, pampered
with sweetmeats by the poor worshippers long forced to pay their
devotion through such degraded means.
No, the human race is not well nourished by making the process of
feeding it a sex-function. The selection and preparation of food should
be in the hands of trained experts. And woman should stand beside man as
the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body.
This will require large changes in our method of living. To feed the
world by expert service, bringing to that great function the skill and
experience of the trained specialist, the power of science, and the
beauty of art, is impossible in the sexuo-economic relation. While we
treat cooking as a sex-function common to all women and eating as a
family function not otherwise rightly accomplished, we can develope no
farther. We are spending much earnest study and hard labor to-day on the
problem of teaching and training women in the art of cooking, both the
wife and the servant; for, with our usual habit of considering voluntary
individual conduct as the cause of conditions, we seek to modify
conditions by changing individual conduct.
What we must recognize is that, while the conditions remain, the conduct
cannot be altered. Any trade or profession, the development of which
depended upon the labor of isolated individuals, assisted only by hired
servants more ignorant than themselves, would remain at a similarly low
level.
So far as health can be promoted by public means, we are steadily
improving by sanitary regulations and medical inspection, by
professionally prepared “health foods” and by the literature of hygiene,
by special legislation as to contagious diseases and dangerous trades;
but the health that lies in the hands of the housewife is not reached by
these measures. The nine-tenths of our women who do their own work
cannot be turned into proficient purchasers and cooks any more than
nine-tenths of our men could be turned into proficient tailors with no
better training or opportunity than would be furnished by clothing their
own families. The alternative remaining to the women who comprise the
other tenth is that peculiar survival of earlier labor methods known as
“domestic service.”
As a method of feeding humanity, hired domestic service is inferior even
to the service of the wife and mother, and brings to the art of cooking
an even lower degree of training and a narrower experience. The majority
of domestic servants are young girls who leave this form of service for
marriage as soon as they are able; and we thus intrust the physical
health of human beings, so far as cooking affects it, to the hands of
untrained, immature women, of the lowest social grade, who are actuated
by no higher impulse than that of pecuniary necessity. The love of the
wife and mother stimulates at least her desire to feed her family well.
The servant has no such motive. The only cases in which domestic cooking
reaches anything like proficiency are those in which the wife and mother
is “a natural-born cook,” and regales her family with the products of
genius, or those in which the households of the rich are able to command
the service of professionals.
There was a time when kings and lords retained their private poets to
praise and entertain them; but the poet is not truly great until he
sings for the world. So the art of cooking can never be lifted to its
true place as a human need and a social function by private service.
Such an arrangement of our lives and of our houses as will allow cooking
to become a profession is the only way in which to free this great art
from its present limitations. It should be a reputable, well-paid
profession, wherein those women or those men who were adapted to this
form of labor could become cooks, as they would become composers or
carpenters. Natural distinctions would be developed between the mere
craftsman and the artist; and we should have large, new avenues of
lucrative and honorable industry, and a new basis for human health and
happiness.
This does not involve what is known as “co-operation.” Co-operation, in
the usual sense, is the union of families for the better performance of
their supposed functions. The process fails because the principle is
wrong. Cooking and cleaning are not family functions. We do not have a
family mouth, a family stomach, a family face to be washed. Individuals
require to be fed and cleaned from birth to death, quite irrespective of
their family relations. The orphan, the bachelor, the childless widower,
have as much need of these nutritive and excretive processes as any
patriarchal parent. Eating is an individual function. Cooking is a
social function. Neither is in the faintest degree a family function.
That we have found it convenient in early stages of civilization to do
our cooking at home proves no more than the allied fact that we have
also found it convenient in such stages to do our weaving and spinning
at home, our soap and candle making, our butchering and pickling, our
baking and washing.
As society developes, its functions specialize; and the reason why this
great race-function of cooking has been so retarded in its natural
growth is that the economic dependence of women has kept them back from
their share in human progress. When women stand free as economic agents,
they will lift and free their arrested functions, to the much better
fulfilment of their duties as wives and mothers and to the vast
improvement in health and happiness of the human race.
Co-operation is not what is required for this, but trained professional
service and such arrangement of our methods of living as shall allow us
to benefit by such service. When numbers of people patronize the same
tailor or baker or confectioner, they do not co-operate. Neither would
they co-operate in patronizing the same cook. The change must come from
the side of the cook, not from the side of the family. It must come
through natural functional development in society, and it is so coming.
Woman, recognizing that her duty as feeder and cleaner is a social duty,
not a sexual one, must face the requirements of the situation, and
prepare herself to meet them. A hundred years ago this could not have
been done. Now it is being done, because the time is ripe for it.
If there should be built and opened in any of our large cities to-day a
commodious and well-served apartment house for professional women with
families, it would be filled at once. The apartments would be without
kitchens; but there would be a kitchen belonging to the house from which
meals could be served to the families in their rooms or in a common
dining-room, as preferred. It would be a home where the cleaning was
done by efficient workers, not hired separately by the families, but
engaged by the manager of the establishment; and a roof-garden, day
nursery, and kindergarten, under well-trained professional nurses and
teachers, would insure proper care of the children. The demand for such
provision is increasing daily, and must soon be met, not by a
boarding-house or a lodging-house, a hotel, a restaurant, or any
makeshift patching together of these; but by a permanent provision for
the needs of women and children, of family privacy with collective
advantage. This must be offered on a business basis to prove a
substantial business success; and it will so prove, for it is a growing
social need.
There are hundreds of thousands of women in New York City alone who are
wage-earners, and who also have families; and the number increases. This
is true not only among the poor and unskilled, but more and more among
business women, professional women, scientific, artistic, literary
women. Our school-teachers, who form a numerous class, are not entirely
without relatives. To board does not satisfy the needs of a human soul.
These women want homes, but they do not want the clumsy tangle of
rudimentary industries that are supposed to accompany the home. The
strain under which such women labor is no longer necessary. The privacy
of the home could be as well maintained in such a building as described
as in any house in a block, any room, flat, or apartment, under present
methods. The food would be better, and would cost less; and this would
be true of the service and of all common necessities.
In suburban homes this purpose could be accomplished much better by a
grouping of adjacent houses, each distinct and having its own yard, but
all kitchenless, and connected by covered ways with the eating-house. No
detailed prophecy can be made of the precise forms which would
ultimately prove most useful and pleasant; but the growing social need
is for the specializing of the industries practised in the home and for
the proper mechanical provision for them.
The cleaning required in each house would be much reduced by the removal
of the two chief elements of household dirt,—grease and ashes.
Meals could of course be served in the house as long as desired; but,
when people become accustomed to pure, clean homes, where no steaming
industry is carried on, they will gradually prefer to go to their food
instead of having it brought to them. It is a perfectly natural process,
and a healthful one, to go to one’s food. And, after all, the changes
between living in one room, and so having the cooking most absolutely
convenient; going as far as the limits of a large house permit, to one’s
own dining-room; and going a little further to a dining-room not in
one’s own house, but near by,—these differ but in degree. Families could
go to eat together, just as they can go to bathe together or to listen
to music together; but, if it fell out that different individuals
presumed to develope an appetite at different hours, they could meet it
without interfering with other people’s comfort or sacrificing their
own. Any housewife knows the difficulty of always getting a family
together at meals. Why try? Then arises sentiment, and asserts that
family affection, family unity, the very existence of the family, depend
on their being together at meals. A family unity which is only bound
together with a table-cloth is of questionable value.
There are several professions involved in our clumsy method of
housekeeping. A good cook is not necessarily a good manager, nor a good
manager an accurate and thorough cleaner, nor a good cleaner a wise
purchaser. Under the free development of these branches a woman could
choose her position, train for it, and become a most valuable
functionary in her special branch, all the while living in her own home;
that is, she would live in it as a man lives in his home, spending
certain hours of the day at work and others at home.
This division of the labor of housekeeping would require the service of
fewer women for fewer hours a day. Where now twenty women in twenty
homes work all the time, and insufficiently accomplish their varied
duties, the same work in the hands of specialists could be done in less
time by fewer people; and the others would be left free to do other work
for which they were better fitted, thus increasing the productive power
of the world. Attempts at co-operation so far have endeavored to lessen
the existing labors of women without recognizing their need for other
occupation, and this is one reason for their repeated failure.
It seems almost unnecessary to suggest that women as economic producers
will naturally choose those professions which are compatible with
motherhood, and there are many professions much more in harmony with
that function than the household service. Motherhood is not a remote
contingency, but the common duty and the common glory of womanhood. If
women did choose professions unsuitable to maternity, Nature would
quietly extinguish them by her unvarying process. Those mothers who
persisted in being acrobats, horse-breakers, or sailors before the mast,
would probably not produce vigorous and numerous children. If they did,
it would simply prove that such work did not hurt them. There is no fear
to be wasted on the danger of women’s choosing wrong professions, when
they are free to choose. Many women would continue to prefer the very
kinds of work which they are doing now, in the new and higher methods of
execution. Even cleaning, rightly understood and practised, is a useful,
and therefore honorable, profession. It has been amusing heretofore to
see how this least desirable of labors has been so innocently held to be
woman’s natural duty. It is woman, the dainty, the beautiful, the
beloved wife and revered mother, who has by common consent been expected
to do the chamber-work and scullery work of the world. All that is
basest and foulest she in the last instance must handle and remove.
Grease, ashes, dust, foul linen, and sooty ironware,—among these her
days must pass. As we socialize our functions, this passes from her
hands into those of man. The city’s cleaning is his work. And even in
our houses the professional cleaner is more and more frequently a man.
The organization of household industries will simplify and centralize
its cleaning processes, allowing of many mechanical conveniences and the
application of scientific skill and thoroughness. We shall be cleaner
than we ever were before. There will be less work to do, and far better
means of doing it. The daily needs of a well-plumbed house could be met
easily by each individual in his or her own room or by one who liked to
do such work; and the labor less frequently required would be furnished
by an expert, who would clean one home after another with the swift
skill of training and experience. The home would cease to be to us a
workshop or a museum, and would become far more the personal expression
of its occupants—the place of peace and rest, of love and privacy—than
it can be in its present condition of arrested industrial development.
And woman will fill her place in those industries with far better
results than are now provided by her ceaseless struggles, her
conscientious devotion, her pathetic ignorance and inefficiency.