Household labor

“ A house-mother of my acquaintance, whose husband owns a "section" farm, suffers much from illness, and has a large family, yet for months has been without any help in her work but that of her little girls,—the oldest not over twelve,—simply because she could not get a servant. The farmers themselves are under less necessity to labor than in many other parts of the country. Farms are comparatively large, and produce large crops, and it pays them to hire laborers. ”

“ Domestic Economics covers the whole care and government of the household; the maintenance of peace, health, order, and morality; the care and nourishment of children as far as done at home; the entire management of the home, as well as the spending and saving of money; are included in it. Saving is the least and poorest part of it; especially as in mere abstinence from needed things; most especially when this abstinence is mainly "Mother's." How best to spend; time, strength, love, care, labor, knowledge, and money—this should be the main study in Domestic Economics. ”

“ In many cases this position is well taken economically, for, although the opportunity for saving may be better for the employees in the household than in the factory, her family saves more when she works in a factory and lives with them. The rent is no more when she is at home. The two dollars and a half a week which she pays into the family fund more than covers the cost of her actual food, and at night she can often contribute toward the family labor by helping her mother wash and sew. ”

“ All these changes in the personnel of factory operatives have meant that while much labor has been taken out of the household, that which remained has been performed by fewer hands, and also that women of foreign nationalities have been pressed into household service. ”

“ Further, in the numerous households where husband and wife alike go out to work—perhaps at the same form of labour, as is the case in many factory districts—the woman on returning home (after working all day, just as her husband does, to contribute her share to the weekly expenses necessary for the support of household and children) has to cook, clean, sew, etc., in the time which her husband can employ as he chooses. ”

“ Knight, Madame, on treatment of servants in 1704, 28. Labor, division of, in women’s work, caused by factory system, 11; has resulted in unequal distribution of work, 13, 14; in household employments only partially accomplished, 15; characteristic of modern industry, 212; results in greater variety of products, 222. Labor of women more productive through specialization of household employments, 231, 232. Labor question, domestic service a part of, 129, 264. Laundresses, average wages, statistics, 89, 94-97. See also Cooks. Laundry work, better done out of the house, 222, 223 ”

“ The importance of housekeeping continually decreases in consequence of the extension of manufacturing, which absorbs the special tasks of the household one after another. While formerly clothes were made at home, bread was baked there, etc., at present there remains for the work of the household only the care of the house and the preparation of the food. And even these occupations may soon be taken out of the house.48 Unmarried women of the bourgeoisie used formerly often to be able to find a home with members of their family, since they were able to be of service. ”

“ A glance at our periodical literature does indeed show unusual interest in all questions affecting domestic life. Economists are asking why the wages paid for domestic service are higher than those paid the average woman in other occupations, and why, in spite of this, the demand for household workers is greater than the supply. ”

“ The mere manual performance of domestic labors is not, indeed, absolutely necessary in the female head of the family of professional men; but, even here, and also in the case of great merchants and of gentlemen living on their fortunes, surely the head of the household ought to be able to give directions as to the purchasing of meal, salting meat, making bread, making preserves of all sorts ”

“ Housekeeping comprises at least three trades, that of cook, laundress and seamstress, to which might be added that of house cleaning; and yet it is expected of woman that she will single-handed [Pg 274] successfully carry on these various trades, and at the same time bear and rear children and teach them to become great and good. How long would men undergo a like amount of labor without devising some means of lightening and separating its burdens? ”

“ The keeping of the house, the laundry work, the cleaning, the cooking, the daily oversight, must have for its conscious end the welfare of the family. It cannot be done without labor, but the labor in this as in any process may be lightened by thought and by machinery. [152]
Knowledge of labor-saving appliances is today everywhere demanded of the successful establishment EXCEPT of the family home. ”

“ Then, and only then, did her employer wake up with a start to the realization of the true position every housewife occupies in the eyes of her household employees. They evidently regard her in the light of a caterer; she does the marketing not only for her family but for them too. She pays a cook high wages, not only to cook meals for herself and family, but for her employees also. ”

“ In this respect, indeed, any improvement in domestic comfort, or any additional domestic pursuit, is likely to be beneficial, as it enlarges the sphere of household duties, and creates more reasons for the wife and children being left at home. Again, as there is hard labour to be done in a garden, this allotment system might occasionally prevent the sense of an almost unnatural dependence being so much exhibited, or felt, when the children are employed in some factory, and the grown up people are not. This is one of the greatest evils that at present attend the state of manufactures. ”

“ Of the seventy-five families, fifty had fathers working in the mill and only two of these fifty fathers, both overseers, earned enough to support a wife and three young children according to the fair standard, and four according to the minimum. A decent home life for the families of these men would be impossible were it not for the wages of the children or the income from boarders. The great variations in incomes from week to week would increase the difficulty of planning household expenditures even when the average indicates a living wage. ”

“ I look forward to a time, I believe it to be rapidly approaching, when the home of the workingman, like everyone's else home, will be truly the home, the happy resting-place, the sheltering nest of father, mother and children, and when through the rearrangement of labor, the workingman's wife will be relieved from her monotonous existence of unrelieved domestic drudgery and overwork, disguised under the name of wifely and maternal duties, when the cooking and the washing, for instance, will be no more part of the home life in the humblest home than in the wealthiest. ”

“ From the economy she purposes to observe in her elevation, let even ladies of condition learn, that there are family employments, in which they may and ought to make themselves useful, and give good examples to their inferiors, as well as equals: and that their duty to God, charity to the poor and sick, and the different branches of household management, ought to take up the most considerable portions of their time. ”

“ Family Industry is the form in which the family becomes the unit for the production of goods to be sold or exchanged.
The family consisted of father, mother, children, household servants and apprentices; the apprentices and servants being children and young people of both sexes who earned their keep and in the latter case a nominal wage, but who did not expect to remain permanently as wage-earners, hoping on the contrary in due course to marry and set up in business on their own account. The profits of family industry belonged to the family and not to individual members of it. ”

“ And here comes in the economic law that those occupations which admit the labor of women and children pay the whole family what the man alone receives in the occupations in which he is the sole bread-winner. ”

“ The household works. There is no subdivision of labour—the household, not the man, is the mint of the state. It is so by its work, its varying cares, and interchanging toil. These impose discipline, nurture affection, knit and fortify that unit. Take away these cares, this industry, this dexterity, this power of standing alone, and what will—what can—a “home” become, save a crib to sleep in, with a trough to feed at, supplied from the butcher’s cart and the huckster’s stall? Take from the household its industrial character, and you take away its social charm, and its public worth. ”

“ In modern society, being a middle class or upper class housekeeper means something entirely different from being a housekeeper in a farmer's cottage or a workingman's fiat. On the one hand we have the woman whose housekeeping means actual, domestic labor: cooking, washing, scrubbing, etc. ”

“ The result of the wife’s absence from home in order to work for wages is that she is unable to attend to the work of the household; for this reason, the housekeeping of her home is at once costly and bad; commodities and services which in working-class homes are usually provided by the labour of the housewife have to be obtained or provided elsewhere for money—washing and mending, for instance. ”

“ Unless the housewife be really poor, or unless the money be doled out to her irregularly, it will invariably pay to buy in quantity things which are not perishable, and which the household wears out and, therefore, habitually needs. ”

“ To the woman whose home ties have been disrupted by death or discord, and to the newly arrived immigrant especially, housework is a great boon, inasmuch as besides good wages, all meals and a room to sleep in are given her. Moreover housework is the only form of labor where unskilled work can command high wages. This, however, is much more fortunate for the employee than for her employer. ”

“ It is true, indeed, that cooking-classes are but indirectly connected with domestic service, but everything that breaks down artificial barriers, and permits the free industrial entrance of both men and women into whatever occupation they prefer, is a direct gain to every line of work. Any one whose attention has been turned in the direction of securing household employees must constantly come in contact with the fact that there is a considerable number of men engaged in household employments for remuneration. ”

“ In the olden times, when the daughters of the family, as well as the wife, were occupied with useful and profitable work in the household, getting the meals and washing the dishes three times in every day of every year, doing the baking, the brewing, the washing and the ironing, the whitewashing, the butter and cheese and soap making, the mending and the making of clothes for the entire family, the carding, spinning and weaving of the cloth—when everything to eat, to drink and to wear was manufactured in the home, almost no young women "went out to work." ”

“ Wages, apparently, have little to do with their decision, nor other considerations which must add very much to their material welfare, such as good food in abundance, and clean, well ventilated sleeping accommodations, for these two important items are generally included at present in the salaries of household employees. Concessions, too, are frequently made, and favors bestowed upon them by many of their employers, yet few young girls, and still fewer women are content to work in private families. ”

“ It is from the ranks below the so-called middle class, to use an invidious phrase, that the great army of household employees is recruited. It is impossible for a girl belonging to this class to go into a family whose social advantages have been greater than her own, and become at once an adept in the conventional forms of table service, an expert cook, or a good general houseworker. ”

“ If they obtain employment, their labour is perhaps repaid by wages barely sufficient to keep them alive; destitute of the means of practising anything like household management, never having known what it is to have a home, worthy to be so called, for a single day, it is scarcely possible for them to obtain that knowledge, simple as it is, which is required to contrive the various modes of making much out of a little. ”

“ Throughout the country it appears a dishonour to do household work. Most of the farms, even when in debt, have some article of the kind, but generally it is an aged and feminine body, perhaps connected with the family and liable to starve when turned off. ”

“ Minimum Wage for Fathers of Families Real Need.—When we study questions of labor as related to family well-being we must begin with an ideal of what the normal family requires of its members, men, women, and older children, and place in the first position of economic requirement the family demand upon the husband and father. He must, we have said, be in position to be a "good provider" for his group. That means he must be trained to be a worker, faithful, efficient, intelligent, who does something which society needs to have done and for which employers can and will pay adequate wages. ”

“ Many must add their earnings to the scant home store, and so the babies are cared for by grandparents or public nurseries while the mothers labor for the cause the father fights for or may have died for. ”

“ The home furnished nearly all its own food, spun and made its clothes, trained its own children, and knew scarcely any community endeavor or any syndication of effort except in the church.
The industrial revolution took labor largely out of the home into the factory. Except for farm life, the husband became an outside worker and the older boys followed him to the distant shop or factory. Earning a living ceased to be a family act and became a social act in a larger sphere. ”