Varius

“ 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. ”

“ How many fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, friends and lovers throughout this country, have lived through the agony endured by the Elder Sister and the lover in Miss Robins’ book? That which had been their greatest care and burden, the frail health of Bettina, becomes the Elder Sister’s one comfort and hope. How many a bereft father and mother today not only cling in anguish to that hope, but desperately refuse to believe but that their girl is dead! ”

“ 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. ”

“ A desire for life—if it is a feast, he would sit at it; if it is a dream he would have it a beautiful one—a love of the outdoor country life which he knew as a boy and which he believed all should enjoy, mingled with a sense of impotence and despair, varying with outbursts of wailing and outbursts of hate, these things characterize the poetry of Morris Rosenfeld. For all his power to vizualize and voice the world about him, he is never constructive, never militant, and seldom even virile. ”

“ Is it the fault of the home-maker of today if weakness instead of strength is the inheritance of her children, and will it be the fault of the home-maker of tomorrow if she bears and rears a weak race? If household administration is to take its place in the front rank with the other professions of the day, educators as well as women must wake up and realize that the whole housekeeping question is dependent upon scientific management, efficiency, skilled labor, and effective tools. ”

“ The day’s work on shrimp is much shorter than on oysters as the fingers of the worker give out in spite of the fact that they are compelled to harden them in an alum solution at the end of the day. Moreover, the shrimp are packed in ice, and a few hours handling of these icy things is dangerous for any child. Then, too, the mornings, and many of the days, are cold, foggy and damp.
The workers are thinly clad, but, like the fabled ostrich, cover their heads and imagine they are warm. If a child is sick, it gets a vacation, and wanders around to kill time. ”

“ WILLIAM ENGLISH WALLING If the Belgian strike is a world-event of the first magnitude for the general public, it has a still greater significance for the world’s ten or twenty million Socialists. The two wings of the Socialist movement are equally interested; the reformers and conciliators, because the strike aims at a purely political reform, and involves co-operation with a part of the capitalists, both in order to win success now and in order to get immediate use out of the suffrage after it is won ”

“ 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. ”

“ GRAHAM TAYLOR The nation-wide strike for manhood suffrage in Belgium which paralyzed the industries and almost suspended the normal life of the people was foreshadowed in a spectacular demonstration in Brussels two years ago.
On August 15, 1911, the streets of that gay, medieval capital witnessed scenes which every American who looked on knew were making history. Over 60,000 men, from larger and smaller places throughout Belgium, took a day off without wages and paid their way to the capital of their country, in order to voice their protest against the unjust inequalities of the suffrage. ”

“ Elizabeth Robins has let us hear a great cry out of the depths—an actual human cry.
True, many snug, comfortable people, shaken for a moment out of their apathy, dismiss it all carelessly, even contemptuously. Many who are gripped to the heart as they read brush away the tears with a sign of relief and say, “Well, it’s only a story.” ”

“ Miss Eberle is best known, perhaps, for her dancing figures, and her depiction of the everyday picturesque life on the lower East Side in New York, where she lived for years. Her people live for us, and speak for themselves,—from the placid, necessitous hunt of the Rag Picker to the tremulous wistfulness of the loving Little Mother ”

“ Again, home-making must be made interesting. The man regards his business as a pleasure. He plays it as he plays a game, and he plays to win. And so housekeeping has become a 189“game, not a duty.” In a natural, enjoyable way our girls should be taught to play the game of household administration. Home duties are not mere duties any longer; the old way of “doing up the housework” made every act an end in itself. Now every act is simply a means to an end; every move is important,—the way the dishes are washed, the beds made, the cooking done, may win or lose the game. ”

“ It often seems an utter waste to insist upon children plodding doggedly at subjects which make no appeal to them. Here lies the opportunity for vocational training. More than one case of apathy on the part of a child has been dispelled when a chance was given him to express himself in some sort of manual or industrial activity.
Occasionally it is found that at neither the door of the home nor at that of the school can the whole blame for the child’s failure to live up to his best moments be laid. ”

“ But when the effort is made to introduce direct social service into the school system itself a suspicion has often been felt on the part of the governing body, or on that of the taxpayer, that here is an attempt to turn the schools into charitable centers. They do not seem to realize nor take to heart the message of that minister of twenty years ago that while it is all very well to talk about training the mind, no one has ever yet seen a mind that was not connected with a body. ”

“ To earn a living. Whither, whither, pretty child walking so late at night? Alone through the darkness and cold? And everything is at rest, the world is silent. Whither does the wind carry you? You will yet lose your way. Scarcely has day smiled on you, how can the night help you? For it is mute and deaf and blind. Whither, whither, with easy mind?
To earn a living. [5] Thus, ten year before vice commissions began to probe into the connection between white slavery and low pay, wrote Morris Rosenfeld, the Yiddish poet. ”

“ There are no feelings, no thoughts, no reason; the bitter bloody work kills the noblest, the most beautiful and best, the richest, the deepest, the highest, which life possesses. The seconds, minutes and hours fly; the nights like the days pass as swiftly as sails ”

“ 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. ”

“ A physician in a large Boston hospital where the social service is famous for its completeness and efficiency has said that a good social service nurse saves her salary twice over by the cures she hastens and the returns she prevents.
There is a tradition in this country on which we greatly pride ourselves, that education, at least in certain of its fundamental branches, is free to all who wish to avail themselves of the opportunity afforded by the state. ”

“ How a pure white shirt adorns a man! How proper for a noble body it is, in order to be free to work humanely and be clean withal! You wish now to dress yourself in white? They will dress you, and dress you quickly enough! ”

“ 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. ”

“ I do not, however, recall a single case of a child being whipped for not working. It can easily be seen that with the parents, or employers, and children against it, the task of liberation from this commercialized family peonage of immature workers is not an easy one.
On the Atlantic Coast more Negroes are employed, than on the Gulf Coast, and they do not work the children very much, except where they have come under the influence of the immigrant workers. In almost every case, the bosses and padrones agree that the Baltimore workers are much more satisfactory than the Negroes. ”

“ Home-making has not kept pace with our great industrial advancement. The average home-maker of today is less thoroughly prepared for her business in life than the woman of a generation ago. It would seem that she considers the home-making profession of much less importance than such occupations as curling feathers and making shirtwaists. The latter has a commercial value, the former has not; and we have learned to weigh things by their money value. Then, again, competition has become the one incentive to work. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is too much to expect the regular teacher, handicapped as she is by her large class, to cope with such situations. Nor is it to be expected that those qualified to act as attendance officer or school nurse, were they not already overburdened, should do the work of the visiting teacher. In her is united the training that makes a teacher and a social service worker, and it is because of this combination that she is able to widen the regular teacher’s reach and help her interpret and solve the problems as they present themselves. ”

“ Tie badly the million little knots in the willow plume and the next girl in the line gets the job. Feed the baby with poor milk, let the air in the room become polluted, ignorantly buy and ignorantly cook, and no one takes the work from you. Why worry over the way it is done?
There are many reasons why the woman of a generation or two ago was a better home-maker than the woman of today. The home duties today often are only part of the daily work of a woman’s life. The housekeeper today is (in millions of cases) a wage earner as well. ”

“ How utterly ineffectual seem an individual mother’s effort for the safety of her child. How evident is it that a mother’s care must have back of it power—power in council and legislative hall. How strongly the lack of social sympathy is brought out; the mother’s indifference to the great crying needs of the world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every school in the city has at least one teacher who has given her time freely to this service. In some schools committees of teachers have formed voluntarily to take thought over the dropping out of boys and girls, and to organize that assistance which a school can give to parents and children in administering to the life-career motive. The work of the vocational counselors has been a labor of love. Nobody has expected that the occupational talks to which they have listened twice a month would equip them for effective vocational guidance. ”

“ In adversity he gives hope, in misery—courage. A dear companion sweetens your being, and he gives you a zest for life. And I am orphaned alone like a stone, there are no companions, I am all by myself—you will soon have companions without end ”

“ In the first place, their immigrant parents are frugal, even parsimonious, and every little helps. Then they think it keeps the children out of trouble, little realizing that they are storing up trouble when they grow up, handicapped by lack of education, broken physically, and with a distaste for work. Small wonder if they drift into the industrial maelstrom of cheap, inefficient labor, and float on as industrial misfits. ”

“ Thus is the unbelievable apathy of society pictured! Thus Miss Robins touches lightly, pitifully on the problem of a girl’s handicap in the lack of preparation for life. What a picture she gives of the sheltered girl—“Such a little thing, my not knowing how to telephone, yet it might cost my mother her life.” ”