CHAPTER IX 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[90] 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[91] 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[92] 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[93] 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[94] 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[95] 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;[96] 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[97] 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[98] 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.