Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Here and there we do find an efficient lady of the house who can do wonders even with this stream of transient incapacity, but the prominence of the servant-question proves her rarity. If all ladies of houses could bring order out of such chaos, could meet constant needs by transient means, the subtleties of refined tastes by the inefficiencies of unskilled labour, then nothing more need be said. But the thing cannot be done. The average house-mistress is not a servant-charmer and the average housemaid is necessarily incapable. This is what should be squarely faced and acknowledged. The kind of work that needs to be done to keep a modern home healthy, comfortable, and refined, cannot be done — can never be done — by this office-boy grade of labour. Because home industry is home industry, because it has been left aborted in the darkness of private life while other industries have grown so broad and high in the light of public life, we have utterly failed to recognise its true value.

  These industries, so long neglected and misused, are of supreme importance. The two main ones — the preparation of food and the care of children — can hardly be over-estimated in value to the race. On the one the health of the world mainly depends, yes, its very life. On the other the progress of the world depends, and that is more than life. That these two great social functions should be left contentedly to the hands of absolutely the lowest grade of labour in our civilisation is astounding. It is the lowest grade of labour not because it is performed by the lowest class of labour — humanity can grow to splendid heights from that beginning, and does so every day; but it is the lowest because it is carried on in the home.

  The conditions of home industry as practised by either housewife or housemaid are hopelessly restrictive. They are, as we have seen, the low standard of average capacity; the element of sex-tendency; the isolation and the unspecialised nature of the work. In two of these conditions the housemaid gains on the housewife. She is partly out of the sex-tendency status and partly into the contract relation; hence the patient, submissive, conservative influence is lightened. In families of greater affluence there is some specialisation; we have varieties in housemaid; cookmaid, scullerymaid, nursemaid, chambermaid, parlourmaid, — as many as we can afford; and in such families we find such elevation of home-industry as is possible; marred, however, by serious limitations.

  Household industry is a world question; and in no way to be answered by a solution only possible of application to one family in a thousand. It is a question of our time and the future, and not met by a solution which consists in maintaining an elaborate archaism. The proper feeding of the world to-day is no more to be guaranteed by one millionaire’s French cook, than was the health of the Roman world by one patrician’s Greek doctor.

  Human needs, in remote low stages of social development, were met by privately owned labourers. As late as the Middle Ages the great lord had in hismenie every kind of functionary to minister to his wants; not only his private servants of the modern kind, with butlers and sutlers and pantlers in every degree; but his armourer, his tailor, his minstrel, and his fool.

  The feudal lord kept a fool to amuse him, whereas we go to the theatre. He kept a cook to feed him — and we do it yet. He kept a poet to celebrate his deeds and touch his emotions. We have made poetry the highest class in literature, and literature the world’s widest art — by setting the poet free.

  To work for the world at large is necessary to the development of the work. A private poet is necessarily ignoble. So is a private cook. The iron limitations of household service are immutable — world service has none. To cater to the whims of one master lowers both parties concerned. To study the needs of humanity and minister to them is the line of social progress.

  There is nothing private and special in the preparation of food; a more general human necessity does not exist. There must be freedom and personal choice in the food prepared, but it no more has to be cooked for you than the books you love best have to be written for you. We flatter ourselves that we get what we want by having it done at home. Apply that condition to any other kind of human product and see if it holds. We get what we want by free choice from the world’s markets — not from a workshop in the back yard. Imagine the grade of production, the arts, crafts, and manufactures, that we should have to select from, if we tried to have all things made for us by private servants! Apply the intelligence and skill of this zoetrope procession of housemaids to watch-making or shoe-making, or umbrella-making, or the making of paper, or glass, or steel, or any civilised commodity; and if we can easily see how immeasurably incompetent these flitting handmaids would be for any of these lines of work, why do we imagine them competent to prepare food and take care of children? Because we have never thought of it at all.

  Men are too busy doing other things, too blinded by their scorn for “women’s work.” Women are too busy doing these things to think about them at all; or if they think, stung by the pain of pressing inconvenience, they only think personally, they only feel it for themselves, each one blindly buried in her own home, like the crafty ostrich with his head in the sand.

  The question is a public one; none could be more so. It affects in one of its two branches every human being except those who board; every home, without exception. Perhaps some impression may be made on the blank spaces of our untouched minds by exhibiting the economic status of home industry.

  We Americans are credited with acuteness and good business sense. How can we reconcile ourselves to the continuance of a system not only so shamefully inadequate, but so ruinously expensive? If we are not mortified to find that our boasted industrial progress carries embedded in its very centre this stronghold of hoary antiquity, this knotted, stumpy bunch of amputated rudiments; if we are not moved by the low standard of general health as affected by food, and the no standard of general education as affecting the baby, perhaps we can be stimulated somewhat by the consideration of expense.

  The performance of domestic industries involves, first, an enormous waste of labour. The fact that in nine cases out of ten this labour is unpaid does not alter its wastefulness. If half the men in the world stayed at home to wait on the other half, the loss in productive labour would be that between half and the fraction required to do the work under advanced conditions, say one-twentieth. Any group of men requiring to be cooked for, as a ship’s crew, a lumber camp, a company of soldiers, have a proportionate number of cooks. To give each man a private cook would reduce the working strength materially. Our private cooks being women makes no difference in the economic law. We are so accustomed to rate women’s labour on a sex-basis, as being her “duty” and not justly commanding any return, that we have quite overlooked this tremendous loss of productive labour.

  Then there is the waste of endless repetition of “plant.” We pay rent for twenty kitchens where one kitchen would do. All that part of our houses which is devoted to these industries, kitchen, pantry, laundry, servants’ rooms, etc., could be eliminated from the expense account by the transference of the labour involved to a suitable workshop. Not only our rent bills, but our furnishing bills, feel the weight of this expense. We have to pay severally for all these stoves and dishes, tools and utensils, which, if properly supplied in one proper place instead of twenty, would cost far less to begin with; and, in the hands of skilled professionals, would not be under the tremendous charge for breakage and ruinous misuse which now weighs heavily on the householder. Then there is the waste in fuel for these nineteen unnecessary kitchens, and lastly and largest of any item except labour, the waste in food.

  First the waste in purchasing in the smallest retail quantities; then the waste involved in separate catering, the “left overs” which the ingenious housewife spends her life in trying to “use up”; and also the waste caused by carelessness and ignorance in a great majority of cases. Perhaps this last element, careless ignorance, ought to cover both waste and breakage, and be counted by itself, or as a large item in the labour account.

  Count as you will, there could hardly be devised a more wastef
ul way of doing necessary work than this domestic way. It costs on the most modest computation three times what it need cost. Once properly aroused to a consideration of these facts it will be strange indeed if America’s business sense cannot work out some system of meeting these common human necessities more effectually and more economically.

  The housemaid would be more of a step in advance if the housewife, released from her former duties, then entered the ranks of productive labour, paid her substitute, and contributed something further to the world’s wealth. But nothing could be farther from the thoughts of the Lady of the House. Her husband being able to keep more than one woman to do the work of the house; and much preferring to exhibit an idle wife, as proof of his financial position, the idle wife proceeds so to conduct her house as to add to its labours most considerably. The housewife’s system of housekeeping is perforce limited to her own powers. The size of the home, the nature of its furnishings and decorations, the kind of clothes worn by the women and children, the amount of food served and the manner of its service; all these are regulated by the housewife’s capacity for labour. But once the housemaid enters the field of domestic labour there is a scale of increase in that labour which has no limits but the paying capacity of the man.

  This element of waste cannot be measured, because it is a progressive tendency, it “grows by what it feeds upon” (as most things do, by the way!) and waxes greater and greater with each turn of the wheel. If the lady of the house, with one servant, were content to live exactly as she did before; keeping the work within the powers of the deputy, she would be simply and absolutely idle, and that is a very wearing condition; especially to woman, the born worker. So the lady of the house, mingling with other ladies of houses, none of them having anything but houses to play with, proceeds so to furnish, decorate, and arrange those houses, and so to elaborate the functions thereof, as to call for more and ever more housemaids to do the endless work.

  This open door of senseless extravagance hinges directly upon the idle wife. She leaves her position of domestic service, not to take a higher one in world service; but to depute her own work to an inferior and do none at all.

  Thus we find that in the grade of household labour done by the housewife we have all those elements of incapacity and waste before explained; and that in the grade done by the housemaid we have a decrease in ability, a measurable increase in direct waste, and an immeasurable increase in the constantly rising sum of waste due to these bloated buildings stuffed with a thousand superfluities wherein the priceless energies of women are poured out in endless foolishness; in work that meets no real need; and in play that neither rests nor refreshes.

  So far our sufferings under the present rapid elimination of the housemaid have taught us little. Our principal idea of bettering the condition is by training servants. We seriously propose to establish schools to train these reluctant young women to our service; even in some cases to pay them for going there. This is indeed necessary; for why should they pay for tuition, or even waste time in gratuitously studying, when they can get wages without?

  We do not, and cannot, offer such graded and progressive salaries as shall tempt really high-class labour into this field. Skilled labour and domestic service are incompatible. The degree of intelligence, talent, learning, and trained skill which should be devoted to feeding and cleaning the human race will never consent to domestic service. It is the grade of work which forever limits its development, the place, the form of service. So long as the home is the workshop the housewife cannot, and the housemaid will not, even if she could, properly do this work for the neglected world.

  Is it not time that the home be freed from these industries so palpably out of place? That the expense of living be decreased by two-thirds and the productive labour increased by nine-twentieths? That our women cease to be an almost universal class of house-servants; plus a small class of parasitic idlers and greedy consumers of wealth? That the preparation of food be raised from its present condition of inadequacy, injury, and waste to such a professional and scientific position that we may learn to spare from our street corners both the drug-store and the saloon? That the care of children become at last what it should be — the noblest and most valuable profession, to the endless profit of our little ones and progress of the race? And that our homes, no longer greasy, dusty workshops, but centres of rest and peace; no longer gorgeous places of entertainment that does not entertain, but quiet places of happiness; no longer costing the laborious lives of overworked women or supporting the useless lives of idle ones, but properly maintained by organised industries; become enjoyed by men and women alike, both glad and honourable workers in an easy world?

  See Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class.”

  See Veblen again.

  VII

  HOME-COOKING

  We are all reared in a traditional belief that what we get to eat at home is, by virtue of that location, better than what we get to eat anywhere else. The expression, “home-cooking,” carries a connotation of assured excellence, and the popular eating-house advertises “pies like those your mother used to make,” as if pie-making were a maternal function. Economy, comfort, and health are supposed to accompany our domestic food supply, and danger to follow the footsteps of those who eat in a hotel, a restaurant, or a boarding house. Is this long-accepted theory correct? Is the home, as the last stage of our elaborate processes of social nutrition, a success?

  “Home-cooking” is an alluring phrase, but lay aside the allurement; the term applies to Eskimo hut, to Choctaw wigwam, to Turk and Chinaman and Russian Jew — whose home-cooking are we praising? Our own, of course. Which means nothing — absolutely nothing — but that the stomach adapts itself to what it has to live on — unless it is too poisonous. Of course we like what we are used to; be it sauerkraut or saleratus biscuit. We like tobacco too, and alcohol, and chloral and morphine.

  The long-suffering human system (perhaps toughened by ages of home-cooking) — will adapt itself even to slow death.

  But how does our universally praised home-cooking affect our health? To find it pure and undefined, far from the deleterious products of mere business cooking, we must go to the isolated farmhouse. Does either the physician or the epicure point with pride to that dietary?

  Its results are not due to lack of proper materials. There you have no much-blamed “baker’s bread”; no “city milk”; no wilted vegetables and questionable meats; no painted confectionery and bakeshop sweets; no wild hurry to catch the morning car. You have mother love and mother instinct untrammelled, with the best materials we know, pure dairy produce and fresh vegetables and fruits. As a result, you should look for splendid health, clear complexions, bright eyes, perfect teeth, and sublime digestions. Instead, we find men who keep fairly well to middle life because their vigorous out-of-door work enables them to cope for a while with their home-cooking; but in the women you find a sadly low average of health and beauty. Dyspepsia is the rule. False teeth are needed before they are thirty.

  Patent medicine is the family divinity. Their ordinary home-cooking is pork and potatoes; and their extraordinary home-cooking is such elaborate elegance of pie and cake as to supply every element of mischief omitted in the regular diet. The morbid appetites, the uneasy demand for stimulants, both in men and women, the rarity of good digestion — these do not prove much in favour of this system of preparing food.

  The derivation of the habit is clear enough and easily traced. Among individual animals, the nutritive processes are simple. By personal effort each creature helps himself from a free supply, competing mercilessly with every other creature that comes in his way. Vegetarian animals compete peaceably as philosophical anarchists; carnivorous ones compete with more violence. Among both classes we find homes among those whose food is portable; holes, caves, or nests; places where the young can be guarded and their food brought to them. From the grisly heap of bones in the lion’s den, or shells below the squirrel’s nest, through the “kitchen mi
ddens” of primitive man, to the daily output of garbage from our well-loved homes to-day is an unbroken line. “A place to feed the young” was once a sufficient definition of a home, but the home has grown since then. Man is a social animal. He is part of something; his life is not dependent on his own efforts solely, but on those of many other men. We get our food, not by going out to quarrel with one another over a free supply, but by helping one another in various elaborate processes of production, distribution, and preparation. In this last process of preparation women long held a monopoly; and, as women were kept at home, so food was, naturally, prepared at home. But as soon as men banded together to go on long expeditions without women — which was at the beginning of the history of war — they learned to cook and eat away from home, and the cook, as a craftsman, was developed. This social functionary has been officiating for a long time. He has cooked as a business, giving his whole time to it; he has cooked for miscellaneous numbers, and has had to study averages; he has cooked for great dignitaries, epicurean and capricious. So, in course of time, has grown among us some little knowledge of the art and science of cooking. This growth has not taken place in the home. An ignorant overworked poor woman, cooking for her family, has not, and never can have, the time, means, or opportunity for the large experiment and practice which have given us the great diet-list of to-day. Each woman, learning only from her mother, has been able only to hand down to us the habits of a dark, untutored past. Outside the home, man, the specialised cook, acting under pressure of larger needs and general competition, has gradually improved the vessels, utensils, and materials of the home food supply.