Ménage à trois

“ If all the families of a neighborhood should put together the sums they separately spend in buying or fitting up and keeping in repair tubs, boilers, and other accommodations for washing, all that is consumed or wasted in soap, starch, bluing, fuel, together with the wages and board of an extra servant, the aggregate would suffice to fit up a neighborhood laundry, where one or two capable women could do easily and well what ten or fifteen women now do painfully and ill, and to the confusion and derangement of all other family processes. ”

“ When the family received a dispossess notice the wife's patience was at an end, and acting on the advice of a society engaged in family case work, she put the furniture in storage and went to a shelter where she could leave her children in the daytime, while she was at work, and have them with her at night. The man was told to shift for himself until he could get together sufficient money to re-establish the home. ”

“ When daughters are old enough to become their mother’s companions, they should also become joint partners in home and household responsibilities. When out of school, divide the work so that every other week the mother shall be entirely free from all care,—a guest in the family; or if that is at first too great a tax on the young partner, “take turns” in dividing the work,—the daughter one week having the charge of the cooking, marketing, and arranging for each meal entirely herself; the next week, of the dairy, if on a farm, or the laundry or chamber- work. ”

“ Consequently many have to learn, after marriage, how to take care of a family; and thus their housekeeping is, frequently, little else than a series of experiments; often unsuccessful, resulting in mortification and discomfort in the parlor, and waste and ill temper in the kitchen. ”

“ Nothing secures ease and success in housekeeping so efficiently as system in arranging work. In order to aid those who are novices in these matters, the following outlines are furnished by an accomplished housekeeper. They are the details of family work, in a family of ten persons, where a cook, chambermaid, and boy, are all the domestics employed, and where the style of living is plain, but every way comfortable. The mistress of this family arranges the work for each domestic, and writes it on a large card, which is suspended in the kitchen for guidance and reference. ”

“ If the physician had to doctor himself, the preacher preach to his wife, and the teacher teach his own children, their professions might be in as much confusion as the housekeeping profession is. The efforts to do away with these difficulties by having families live together, [65] eat together, or do anything else in a wholesale way, have not succeeded and have led in a wrong direction. What is wanted is a way to preserve the separate family and the separate family home, not a way to make them into something else. ”

“ And yet Nature herself protested against making this woman a housekeeper. Even when a child, owing probably to hereditary heart-disease, she did not love to run and skip like other children, and as a matron, walking seemed unnatural and even painful to her. ”

“ A little later, my husband secured the services of a very competent housekeeper, and my distresses and responsibilities were much diminished. After some years of this indulgence, I felt bound to make a second and more strenuous effort at housekeeping, and succeeded much better than before, having by this time managed to learn something of the nature and needs of household machinery. [p. 216]
As I now regard these matters, I would say to every young girl, rich or poor, gifted or dull: "Learn to make a home, and learn this in the days in which learning is easy. ”

“ The difficulties really begin when the family income is so small that but one person can be employed in the household for all these varied functions, and the difficulties increase and grow almost insurmountable as they fall altogether upon the mother of the family, who is living in a flat, or, worse still, in a tenement house, where one stove and one set of utensils must be put to all sorts of uses, fit or unfit, making the living room of the family a horror in summer, and perfectly insupportable on rainy washing-days in winter. ”

“ Should there be a baby besides several other children in such a household, it is not expected that the nursery governess will do more for it than to take it occasionally in her charge and do a little needlework for it when necessary, the mother washing, dressing and looking after the infant herself. The governess's work chiefly lies with the other children. ”

“ In the class where no effort is made to conceal the nature of the family misfortune from kinsfolk or neighbours, the absence of the wife and mother is often sympathetically alluded to, and there is joy in the household—a criminal household, possibly—when mother, having paid the penalty of acquiring property without payment, comes back to get father's tea ready and put the children to bed. ”

“ Yet to arrange a plan for each day requires thought and judgment, and she must be a wonderful character who, from the beginning, can so perfect a code of laws for the regular discharge of household labor, that no modification or change will be necessary. If a young housekeeper, at the end of one year’s trial, begins to feel somewhat at home in her dominions, she should be well content, nor allow a shadow of discouragement to mar her comfort, even if now and then she finds her carefully planned rules requiring some little adjustment, to secure a smooth and easy action. ”

“ The small household must choose servants according to convenience and requirements. Where there are three or four grown-up daughters and the home is a small one, one maid and one butler are sufficient. ”

“ People brought together as these were for a living, had no alternative but to occupy such dwellings. Whatever the weekly income, the wife could never make such a house comfortable; she had only one room in which to do all her work; it may be readily supposed the husband would not always find the comfort he wished in such a home. The public-house would then be his only resort. But here the evil does not end; the children brought up in such dwellings knew no better accommodation than such afforded, nor had they any opportunities of seeing better domestic management. ”

“ It is strange to see into what unreasonable disrepute active housekeeping—first social duty—has fallen in England. Take a family with four or five hundred a year—and we know how small a sum that is for 'genteel humanity' in these days—the wife who is an active housekeeper, even with 39 such an income, is an exception to the rule; and the daughters who are anything more than drawing-room dolls waiting for husbands to transfer them to a home of their own, where they may be as useless as they are now, are rarer still. ”

“ With the exception of poor management, poor service is probably the most wasteful factor of all in the household, yet there are conditions in which poor service is certainly less wasteful of the family resources, than none at all. The end of housekeeping is the health, comfort, and serenity of the family. The two main factors in producing this result are the family income and the mother’s strength and energy. Saving, however desirable, is merely an incidental end. ”

“ She understands that she is to do cooking, waiting, and chamber-work, and probably washing and ironing. Should the family be small she will perform nearly all these duties herself—that is, if the family live in a simple fashion. Should the household be large, the maid may expect a helper with the laundry-work, and the lighter house-work will devolve upon the mistress of the house or her daughters. One pair of hands, even when backed by a quick head and a willing heart, cannot accomplish everything in the work of the house without neglecting or slighting something. ”

“ We have in this country neither trained servants nor the housekeeper system. The wife and mother who is the mistress of a huge establishment wishes it to be no less a home than her former residence, and her husband would be the first to demur were she to cast upon others the burdens of immediate supervision. A moderate-sized modern house is the cause of care enough, as we all know, and wherefore should any woman seek to multiply her domestic worries by [58] duplicating or trebling the number of her servants? ”

“ Attention has been called to the fact that many housewives, either because the husband's income is inadequate or because their standard of family needs is relatively high, or because there is some special family object to be attained, become [269] wage earners and are away from their home during the hours of the working day. The devices used by these mothers for the care of the family during their absence have been described. ”

“ Yet with the increase in a family or with an alteration in the mode of living additional service becomes necessary, and, unless the housekeeper is of the type who takes life hard, there is no reason why she should not soon adapt herself to the new conditions. ”

“ The additions which a young family could make to the income of the parents would be inconsiderable, and their maintenance would chiefly be derived from the subdivision of the resources of the parents. ”

“ I do not bring up either dressmakers, or waiting-women, or housekeepers, but women for modest and poor households. The mother, in a poor household, is the housekeeper of the family."
The spirit of the age and the fascinations of luxury in an agitated epoch were too strong for the determined and reasoned will of the legislator. ”

“ In a small family there is less work to be done; in a large one there are more hands to do the work, and many hands make light labour.
We would have no mistress of a family a household drudge, while her daughters lounge over fancy-work or a novel ”

“ They all had to take their part in the household duties, and consequently did not get much education. Of family life there was hardly any, as the mother was occupied in the housekeeping, and the father in the business. ”

“ In all that has been said there has been no attempt to consider the large establishment where there is a housekeeper who assumes the duties of the mistress of the home in the way of ordering meals, directing servants, and looking after all the details of the household. Such establishments are not plentiful enough to be considered in a book of this scope. It is in the homes where but one servant or at the most two or three are kept that problems of the sort we have touched upon present themselves for solution. In such homes these problems are often matters of daily or weekly consideration. ”

“ It was only the other day, in a district of which I shall presently speak more definitely, that a "mission woman" was called in to the aid of a family, consisting of a man, his wife, his wife's brother—who was there as a lodger—and five or six children, all of whom occupied one room, where the poor woman had just given birth to an infant. The place was almost destitute of furniture; beds of straw and shavings, coverlets of old coats and such ragged clothing as could be spared; little fire and little food. ”

“ Take the care of her household out of a woman’s hands and what remains for her to do? As a generality she would sit in idleness, for these are not the days when mothers nurse and look after their own children, and, thanks to the sewing-machine, the toil of needlework is over, even in the poorest families. ”

“ A company of congenial people living together in groups of twenty to forty can secure the essentials of food, shelter, and necessary service at a cost per person far below the average expense for boarding or private housekeeping. This does not mean that families can combine easily in multiple households. The personal equation counts for its greatest influence in the real family group, of father, mother, and their children under eighteen years of age. Few, if any, schemes of coöperative housekeeping have as yet worked well for the combination of such groups. ”

“ In one class, the father may be busy in his office; and the mother in ordering a large household, taking care of the poor in her neighbourhood, and in study or keeping up her accomplishments; while the boys are with their tutor, and the girls with their governess, and the infants in the nursery.—In another, the mother may be instructing her girls, while busy at her needle ”

“ What refuge have the father and the children in such a family, save the open streets, the saloons, the public squares? Bad companions and unwholesome life are infinitely preferable to the dank, nauseating smell of clothes, forever washing and drying, and, as it seems, never washed or dried. The solidarity of family life can be maintained only by trained mothers and capable fathers, mothers who will make inhabitable homes to the extent of their means, and fathers who will use every effort to provide the means with which to make the home inhabitable. ”

“ The youngest daughter, therefore, ruled the household, and managed the one servant, and visited, advised, and generally bothered the tenants on the farms, and, strange to say, won for herself neither praise nor liking, for all her expenditure of time and trouble. ”

“ This was before my marriage, while I was living with my parents in Wisconsin. My father and I were in the library of our home, dividing the proceeds of a burglary which we had committed that night. These consisted of household goods mostly, and the task of equitable division was difficult. We got on very well with the napkins, towels and such things, and the silverware was parted pretty nearly equally, but you can see for yourself that when you try to divide a single music-box by two without a remainder you will have trouble. ”