The household has been treated by economists with curious negligence.
The founder of political economy showed so little insight into the
real nature of the work carried on there as to class those whom he
described as menial servants with unproductive labourers.[13] The
later classical economists have followed his lead. Marshall, it is
true, shows throughout his books an appreciation of the position and
responsibilities of the housewife and the mother which is foreign to
most of his colleagues.[14] But he has never attempted to analyse the
economic functions of the household, or to show its varying relations to
the rest of the community; neither has he pointed out the peculiar
factors which differentiate the position and remuneration of the women
employed in domestic activities from those of all other workers. On
the other hand, the more modern school of economists, those who devote
themselves to the history of economic development in the past or to
the intensive study of special economic institutions in the present,
have equally failed to discuss with any adequacy the organisation of
the household.
The economic historians describe with minuteness the rise and fall of
gilds and chartered companies, the workings of different methods of
education and of poor relief in successive epochs. They rarely indicate
how the various forms of industrial organisation translated themselves
into the domestic expenditure of the people. It would, for instance, be
very difficult to extract from the pages of the economic historians an
answer to the question, "What were the conditions determining the supply
of domestic servants at the close of the Middle Ages, in the eighteenth
century and in the nineteenth century respectively?" It is not easy to
answer definitely even simpler and more fundamental questions than
these. It is often stated, for example, that the household arrangements
of the serfs on the mediaeval manors were rude and uncomfortable to the
last degree,[15] but it is certain that this is not so universally true
as has been thought. Some at all events of the more prosperous
inhabitants of the manors possessed household furniture and equipments
of a kind not inferior to the outfit of the casual labourer to-day.
Sheets, for example, are mentioned several times in extant inventories.
But much more investigation than has yet been possible would be
necessary before it could be determined whether these instances of a
higher standard of comfort are or are not exceptions to a general rule.
To take other instances of unsettled problems: How was pottery made in
the Middle Ages--by travelling potters as in the East to-day, by gilds
of potters, or by the inhabitants of the manor directly for their own
use? Or again: When did the custom of building houses to let on rent
first become general in England? It is clear that the habit of living in
rented houses has and must have the most profound influence on family
life and national character. But so far, neither from economic histories
on the one hand nor from histories of architecture on the other, have I
been able to obtain any reliable information on this point.
When one turns to even more important questions--such, for instance, as
the industrial position of women at different epochs--it is equally
difficult to obtain precise and detailed knowledge. Without a very
lengthy and elaborate investigation of the extant original materials,
many of them scattered in municipal chambers in distant parts of
England, it would be quite impossible to say on what terms women were
admitted as members of the gilds and fraternities which extended over
the whole area of industrial life in the Middle Ages. The character and
organisation of the household and the position of women in the Middle
Ages are subjects still practically untouched by the economic
historians.[16]
When we turn to modern times, a little more material has been collected.
There is an investigation by the Board of Trade into the wages of
domestic servants, and a book on domestic service by Professor Lucy
Salmon of Vassar College. It deals of course mainly with American
conditions, but cannot be neglected by any English student of the
economic relations of the household.
Humanitarianism has prompted studies more or less elaborate of the
dietaries and housing conditions of the working classes, especially in
towns,[17] but it would be idle to pretend that there has been yet more
than a beginning made of the task of determining how for each class of
the community its share of the national income as stated in money is
translated into the necessaries, comforts, and luxuries of life, into
house-room, fuel, food, cleanliness, clothing, insurance, domestic
service, recreation, and culture. The generalisations available are of
the most meagre description. We can, for instance, say with tolerable
certainty that the agricultural labourer spends three-fourths of his
income on food, the town labourer two-thirds, the artisan a half, the
middle-class man from a third to a fourth; but there is practically no
reliable information with regard to very large incomes, or to sums spent
on clothing in _any_ section of the community.
Moreover, there is one class--large, growing in importance, and an
essential element in modern civilisation--about whose domestic
expenditure we have no scientific knowledge at all. This is the class
which may be named "the routine brain-workers," the people who as
clerks, book-keepers, salesmen, typists, &c., are responsible for the
routine administration of modern commerce. They have been compared to
the nervous system, for like that system in the animal body they serve
for the communication and the mechanical record of the life of the
community on its industrial side. With them may be classed elementary
school-teachers, reporters, and the lower ranks of the Civil Service,
though I should not be prepared to say that some of these--especially
the teachers--ought to be regarded as performing only routine
brain-work. But all these workers can be conveniently studied together
in that their labour is carried on under somewhat similar conditions--it
is sedentary, highly regimented, exhausting to the brain and nervous
system, and is generally remunerated by a fixed salary, &c. They earn an
income larger than that of the manual labourer, but considerably less as
a general rule than that of the professional man. There is a total
absence of information as to the domestic expenditure of this class. It
is sometimes declared that its less well-paid members suffer as severely
from poverty as do sections of the working-class, and that the poor
clerk is really much more to be pitied than the well-to-do trade
unionist, the skilled manual worker.
But no one has yet attempted to test the truth of this view by the only
scientific means, namely, by the collection of precise details as to
the domestic expenditure of the routine brain-working class, showing
what sums are spent on house-room, food, clothing, &c., and what kind
of accommodation is obtained for the money spent. In short, the
investigation of domestic expenditure has never yet been carried out
in a purely scientific spirit solely for the sake of the resultant
knowledge. It has always been undertaken with some special practical
problem in view, and is consequently always fragmentary and frequently
biassed.
Yet if it is important to know how the wealth of the country is
produced, it is of equal importance to know how it is consumed, and that
whether the consumption takes the form of porridge and flannelette for
the child of a dock-labourer, of drink and admission to a football match
for the miner or cotton-operative, or of a gardener, and a holiday in
Switzerland for the hard-working doctor or stockbroker. Domestic
expenditure should be investigated as impartially by the economist as
are the variations of plants or animals by the biologist. His one aim
should be the discovery and statement of truth, as complete and as
unbiassed as he can make it.
Hitherto, as I have said, this field of research has remained
comparatively untouched. In the first place, economists have generally
been men, and have naturally devoted their energies to the elucidation
of the problems of industry and business which concern men most closely.
Few women, on the other hand, have until recently received any training
in economics, and it has never occurred to them that the familiar and
wearisome problems of the rent, the butcher's bill, and the children's
clothes, together with the difficulty of finding a satisfactory cook,
may have a wider aspect than the narrow and personal one. But even as it
is, the few women who have distinguished themselves in the sphere of
economics have in a note or a casual remark pointed out distinctions
between household management and other branches of industry which cast a
flood of light on the whole subject. There is a paragraph in the second
volume of "Industrial Democracy"[18] which lays down the difference
between the underlying principles of business and of the administration
of the home in a few words which might serve as the text for a volume.
It is precisely this difference, first clearly indicated by Mrs. Webb,
which constitutes the second ground for the common neglect of this
branch of economics. A factory or a shop is run for profit; a household
simply to provide comfort and convenience for its members. To put it in
technical language, in the world of industry we are concerned with
exchange values, but in the home with use values alone. From this
distinction, overlooked by reason of its obviousness, there flow a large
number of consequences which will be discussed later. At present we are
only concerned to show that economists, with their eyes fixed on trade
and the mechanism of trade, very naturally neglected that section of
life in which values, material and immaterial, were being continually
created, but for use alone, not for commercial purposes.
The wife who cooks her husband's dinner, or caters, organises, and keeps
accounts for him, is really engaged in work which in any rational
interpretation of the word has far more right to be called productive
than is much of the labour employed in manufacture or business. But the
work accomplished by the wife in the household has never yet received
its full acknowledgment from the economists. The truth is that, although
they constantly warn students to avoid the vulgar error of confusing
money wages with real wages, they themselves have been so biassed by the
commercial conception of profit-making that they have almost completely
overlooked even the purely economic value of much work, such as cooking,
cleaning, and clothes-making, which is carried on within the home, not
for profit-making or for a salary, but as part of the duties attaching
to the status of wife and mother. It is acknowledged by the economists
themselves[19] that although in theory they have set aside a section to
be devoted to the discussion of "consumption" as other sections deal
with "production" and "distribution" of wealth, yet in practice the
treatment of consumption has been meagre and ineffective. This, perhaps,
is inevitable--it is certainly regrettable--and women economists would
be performing a most useful work if they were to undertake a careful and
detailed investigation into the consumption of wealth at different
epochs and by different classes of the community, and one, moreover, for
which their connection with housekeeping, which is only the practical
application of the science of the consumption of wealth, would have
already partially prepared them.
There is still another reason why a scientific treatment of the
consumption of wealth has been delayed. It could not be developed until
medicine and hygiene had provided us with satisfactory standards of the
needs of the human body. When food, for example, was still regarded
purely as a matter of individual likes and dislikes, it was impossible
to discuss at all adequately the sufficiency or insufficiency of the
food consumption of a given class. But now that we know that the varying
tastes simply express in different ways the need for so much proteid,
carbo-hydrates and fats, we have a firm basis on which to work. It is
true that it is not yet quite so firm as we could wish; the scientists
have not yet succeeded even for a single class in fixing a dietary
standard which would be accepted by all in particular, and recently the
investigations of Professor Chittenden have suggested that the amount of
proteid hitherto thought essential may be excessive. Moreover, little
attention has yet been paid to the need of different food for different
work. Yet it seems probable, to say the least, that the sedentary
worker, using his brain and not his muscles, may require lighter and
daintier food than the labourer in the fields or the docks, and may
really suffer as seriously if that better food be denied him as does the
latter if he fails to secure a sufficiency of coarser and cheaper
nutriment. This question would be of great importance in investigating
the expenditure of the clerk class. But although the scientists have
here failed to provide the students of domestic expenditure with all the
data required, yet there is sufficient knowledge of the general
principles of dietetics to enable us to base our study of food
consumption on a fairly sound basis.
In the same way a standard of housing accommodation establishing the
minimum of space per head necessary for health is generally recognised;
and on these and similar calculations, correlated with the cost of
house-room and commodities, it will be possible to build up a science of
consumption which will be really a science and not a series of guesses
and vague generalities.
It is true, again, that it is easier to deal with the grades of society
practising the roughest and least-skilled labour than with those
engaged in the higher forms of brain-work, but we can at all events set
ourselves to discover what _is_ the average distribution of the
expenditure of men earning L1000 a year, and can afterwards appeal to
the hygienists to decide for us what kind of food, house-room, and
recreation is essential for a man who makes his living by the higher
activities of the intellect. A very close connection between economics
and hygiene is essential if the division of our subject that deals with
consumption is to be adequately treated.
So, then, a scientific study of the economics of the household would
fall into two divisions--(1) an endeavour to describe the industrial
development of each country as it affects family life, house-room, food,
and clothes; and (2) a descriptive account of the domestic circumstances
and the expenditure[20] of each class of the community at the present
time. Under each of these headings special sections should treat
domestic service, the work of woman beyond the household, and the
organisation of household work as compared with different branches
of industry and administration. Finally, a supplementary section
should set forth the practical applications of the conclusions arrived
at, and should endeavour to help the housewife or, it may be, the
superintendent of an industrial school, college, or boarding house
in the administration of the income at her disposal.
But much more careful investigation into the question of how incomes
actually are spent is essential before we can deal satisfactorily with
the even more difficult problem of how they ought to be spent. And there
is, too, another factor which must be taken into consideration.
Economists in defining wealth commonly admit nowadays that it includes
collective and immaterial well-being of various kinds.[21] But having
made this admission, they straightway put it aside and proceed to
discuss wealth as though it consisted exclusively of material
exchangeable commodities. Yet clearly the real income of a family is
increased if the children have easy access to good free schools or to
ample open spaces. It will not be possible to estimate precisely the
money value of opportunities of this description. But we should at least
notice their presence or absence for each class and for each stage of
national development. It is clear that in the present paper no attempt
can be made to deal with the problems of the economics of expenditure
or of the household save in the merest outline, and therefore the
following pages are to be taken simply as a sketch to be filled in by
more extensive and more throughgoing investigation later on.