Homemaker

“ Incomes of all sizes are lived on in some way. The way which their income will cover, is the style of living suitable for a family. If the family income pinches, however, and there is some way of increasing it which does not destroy the home life, nor work some member of the family to death, then it is well to take that way. But only in cases verging on starvation, should an increase in income be made by the homemaker leaving her housekeeping, or the breadwinner working eighteen hours a day. ”

“ The implements of cooking and cleaning, for instance—where should we be if our modern squaw had to make her own utensils, as did her ancient prototype? The man, in world industry, makes not only the house, with all its elaborate labour-saving and health-protecting devices; not only the furniture of the house, the ornaments, hangings, and decorations, but the implements of the home industries as well. Go to the household furnishing store of our day—remember the one pot of the savage family to boil the meat and wash the baby—and see the difference between "homemade" and "world-made" things. ”

“ The will is shown in the growing disposition of the home-maker, who of all consumers exercises greatest control over the producer, to assume responsibility not only for the one who labors in her kitchen or sewing room, but also for the one who works for her in the far-off factory. ”

“ ABOUT FURNISHING THE HOUSE. IN these days of lavish ornamentation and bric-à-brac, the young housekeeper must be on guard against filling her house with such furnishings as would make it stuffy and cause it to lack individuality. The home should be an index to the character of the family. Do not furnish your house fully until you have lived in it a while. Buy at first only such furniture as you need for comfort. When you are settled you can study the needs of each part of the house, and, after you have fully determined exactly what you want, buy it whenever you see an advantageous chance. ”

“ But the farm is yet, as it always was, a place where there is greater complexity to master because many more things are done there. The spirit of machinery has entered into the life of the city kitchen and eased the burden; it must now enter the country household and work the same magic there.
If the kitchen is to be a combination laboratory and machine shop it must look like one. It must be filled with appliances for every part of the intricate work of making ten thousand things that are needed for the family through the various seasons and changes of the year. ”

“ The problems of mending, and of taking proper care of household furnishings, are part of the duty of the home maker. She should also be an expert buyer, and should be able to judge of the quality and price of fabrics and of their suitability. If she employs a houseworker, she must be able to plan the work of her helper. It is important that the home maker should be fair to everyone whom she employs. Wages, hours, food and shelter, treatment and standing, should all be of the best character that she can give. ”

“ She used to be the housewife working at home, with her daughters, at spindle or at loom, making tablecloths and napkins, bed furnishings, and carpets for use in her own family. Now the cabinet maker, having deserted his little shop, has moved up to town and become an employee in a great manufacturing establishment; and the housewife, having ceased entirely from producing, is trying to content herself with buying and with using. The producer of household stuff today is neither housewife nor village cabinet maker, but a factory “hand.” ”

“ Since more than three-fourths of the life of the farmer and his family are spent in sight of home, more than one-half of life in the house, and more than one-fourth in bed, the house, the place where they live, should receive most careful attention. Having secured sufficient land to maintain a home, and having made certain that these lands are productive and profitable, a problem is presented in locating and building the house which demands a high degree of intelligence, long, painstaking study, and a good understanding of what constitutes fitness, beauty and durability. ”

“ Home, for home's sake, is the idea that should govern. Money can hire the work done, but it cannot infuse into the result the satisfaction that comes to the man who is his own home-maker.
But not every person who reads this book will be a home-maker in the sense spoken of above. It will come into the hands of those who have homes about which improvements have already been made by themselves or others, but who take delight in the cultivation of shrubs and plants because of love for them. Many of these persons get a great deal of pleasure out of experimenting with them. ”

“ It takes a stolid, enduring temperament to bear factory labor. Now look at Marianne’s house and family, and see what is insured to your protégée there.
“In the first place, a home,—a neat, quiet chamber, quite as good as she has probably been accustomed to,—the very best of food, served in a pleasant, light, airy kitchen, which is one of the most agreeable rooms in the house, and the table and table service quite equal to those of most farmers and mechanics. ”

“ Man puts all his inventiveness, his ingenuity, in improving methods, in facilitating his business and getting the drudgery out of his work in his office and factory, but the wife and mother still plods along in an ill-fitted kitchen and laundry. And yet our greatest modern inventor has said that the cares of the home could be reduced to a minimum and the servant problem solved if the perfectly practicable devices, for lightening household labor were adopted in the home! ”

“ That so many are ready to brave the din of machinery, and the smells of a factory for ten hours a day, with only a great, dreary, unhomelike boarding-house to go to at night, while there are so very few, if any, who are willing to preside over a comfortable and plentiful kitchen, with at least a possibility of home comforts, pleasant association, and true appreciation, is equally inexplicable. ”

“ A third idea represented in our kitchen is that it must be equipped with every labor-saving device and with every convenience for work, if satisfactory results are to be secured. The first thought of the manufacturer is for the equipment of his manufacturing plant with every modern appliance. Can a perfect product come from imperfect, [142] inadequate means of work in the household? The application of this principle has of necessity involved many experiments,—inventions will not work, or good ones are superseded by better ones, or a new need arises and must be met. ”

“ That is unnecessary; we have only to elevate it morally and intellectually, make it orderly, scientific, philosophical, and the front parlor itself cannot ask a more amiable and interesting neighbor. As the chief workshop of the house, the kitchen should be fitted up and furnished precisely as an intelligent manufacturer would fit up his factory. Every possible convenience for doing what must be done; a machine for each kind of work and a place for every machine. Provision for the removal and utilizing of all waste, for economizing to the utmost all labor and material. ”

“ A Good Housekeeper and Home-maker.—If the young wife carries out the suggestions made on the preceding pages and thereby contributes her part to establishing the material success of the co-partnership, will she profit in any other way?
She will have become a good housekeeper and home-maker.
Housekeeping is an acquired art, home-making is a moral quality, an instinct. Housekeeping conducted as an art is superfluous. Home-making is a triumph under any circumstances. There are many good housekeepers; there are few competent home-makers. Housekeeping may easily be overdone ”

“ If anything, the house should be dearer than the household gear. Yet at each remove we drag a lengthening chain of tables, chairs, side-boards, portraits, landscapes, bedsteads, washstands, stoves, kitchen utensils, and bric-a-brac after us, because, as my wife says, we cannot bear to part with them. At several times in our own lives we have accumulated stuff enough to furnish two or three house and have paid a pretty stiff house-rent in the form of storage for the overflow. ”

“ Her share in the housework is ample and joyous. She says: "Myself and two grown sisters, both younger than I, take turns about doing the entire housework. The rest work in the garden and the field, irrigating, hoeing, etc. I prefer outside work too, but I always wash and iron, even when I am working outside." Her home conveniences are a washing-machine, a pump in the house, running water at the door, a telephone, the daily weather reports, a typewriter, a sewing-machine, screened windows and doors, and homemade soap. ”

“ Let, then, stove, fuel, water, work-table, and pantries be at the same end of the kitchen, and within a few steps of one another, and it will be found that while the general labor of each day must always be the same, the time required for its accomplishment will be far less, under these favorable conditions. The successful workman,—the type-setter, the cabinet-maker, or carpenter,—whose art lies in the rapid combination of materials, arranges his materials and tools so as to be used with the fewest possible movements ”

“ Let me advise the reader who concludes to try his hand at the construction of rustic work to confine his selection of design to something not very elaborate. Leave that for wealthy people who can afford to have whatever their taste inclines them to, without regard to cost, and who give the work over to the skilled workman. I am considering matters from the standpoint of the home-maker, who believes we get more real pleasure out of what we make with our own hands than from that which we hire some one to make for us. ”

“ The Early Mediaeval Methods of Industry.—Outside of the tilling of the soil, the early industries were centred in the home, which gave rise to the well-known house system of {431} culture. "Housework" has primary relation to goods which are created for the needs of the household. Much of the early manufacturing industry was carried on within the household. Gradually this has disappeared to a large extent through the multiplication of industries outside the home, power manufacture, and the organization of labor and capital. ”

“ Although the spectacle was hardly an enlivening one [Pg 77] for a dyspeptic man forced to pass his life in contact with it.
But what sickened Lester was the unscrupulous exploitation of the home-making necessity, the adroit perversion of the home-making instinct. Jerome Willing wanted to make it appear, hammering in the idea with all the ingenious variations of his advertising copy, that home-making had its beginning and end in good furniture, fine table linen, expensive rugs.... God! how about keeping alive some intellectual or spiritual passion in the home? ”

“ Your thoroughbred, full-blooded innovator always reminds us of our first housekeeper—a very good woman in her way, too, but who had a perfect craze for shifting and reshifting, adjusting and readjusting, as well as dusting and redusting every article of furniture throughout the house, at all sorts of unseasonable hours, and when to ordinary mortals such labour seemed utterly uncalled for. ”

“ An agricultural labourer entering on a cottage and garden with his family, we will suppose, is informed that so long as he pays his rent he will not be disturbed. He then sets to work in his off hours to cultivate his garden and his allotment; he plants fruit-trees; he trains a creeper over his porch. His boys and girls have a home whenever out of service, [Pg 262] and when they are at home they can assist in cultivating their father's little property. The family has a home and a centre, and there it will remain for generations. ”

“ Really, the first article of furniture which should be brought into the house is a well-equipped tool-chest, and the first room which should be fitted up is the workshop. A vast amount of labor will be saved thereby in unpacking, adjusting, repairing, and polishing the old and the new household articles, so that life in the new home be begun under the favorable auspices of the great household deity, the Goddess of Order. ”

“ We have been taught by the stern necessity of the Great War the importance of the food supply of the world and the household. Every woman who is a home maker should have, if possible, a small garden in which to grow vegetables. Even if she lives in an apartment, she may arrange to have a garden allotment in co-operation with others. Gardening is one of the oldest of the home maker's employments. ”

“ The industrial changes which have taken from the producer a large part of his pleasure in work have not, of course, been without their compensating advantages. Of these the chief, perhaps, has come to the housewife, and consists in the opportunity to buy, ready made and at low cost, most of the articles which it used to be necessary for her to make at home. This advantage, with its corollary, increased leisure, comes to her, however, in her capacity as consumer and not in that of producer. ”

“ The home that affords the most pleasure to its owner is the one which is largely the result of personal effort in the development of its possibilities. The "ready-made home," if I may be allowed the expression, may be equally as comfortable, from the standpoint of convenience,—and possibly a great deal more so,—but it invariably lacks the charm which invests the place that has developed under our own management, by slow and easy stages, until it seems to have become part of ourselves.
Home-making is a process of evolution. ”

“ In home making, regarded as one of the noblest objects of every woman's life—in fact, the object whenever possible—lies the hope of the future. To this end God speed the kitchen garden and the cooking school! ”