Household Administration, Its Place in the Higher Education of Women

by Unknown

I. INTRODUCTORY

The household has been treated by economists with curious negligence. The founder of political economy showed so little insight into the real nature of the work carried on there as to class those whom he described as menial servants with unproductive labourers.[13] The later classical economists have followed his lead. Marshall, it is true, shows throughout his books an appreciation of the position and responsibilities of the housewife and the mother which is foreign to most of his colleagues.[14] But he has never attempted to analyse the economic functions of the household, or to show its varying relations to the rest of the community; neither has he pointed out the peculiar factors which differentiate the position 124 and remuneration of the women employed in domestic activities from those of all other workers. On the other hand, the more modern school of economists, those who devote themselves to the history of economic development in the past or to the intensive study of special economic institutions in the present, have equally failed to discuss with any adequacy the organisation of the household.

The economic historians describe with minuteness the rise and fall of gilds and chartered companies, the workings of different methods of education and of poor relief in successive epochs. They rarely indicate how the various forms of industrial organisation translated themselves into the domestic expenditure of the people. It would, for instance, be very difficult to extract from the pages of the economic historians an answer to the question, “What were the conditions determining the supply of domestic servants at the close of the Middle Ages, in the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century respectively?” It is not easy to answer definitely even simpler and more fundamental questions than these. It is often stated, for example, that the household arrangements of the serfs on the mediæval manors were rude and uncomfortable to the last degree,[15] but it is certain that this is not so universally true as has been thought. Some at all events of the more 125 prosperous inhabitants of the manors possessed household furniture and equipments of a kind not inferior to the outfit of the casual labourer to-day. Sheets, for example, are mentioned several times in extant inventories. But much more investigation than has yet been possible would be necessary before it could be determined whether these instances of a higher standard of comfort are or are not exceptions to a general rule.

To take other instances of unsettled problems: How was pottery made in the Middle Ages—by travelling potters as in the East to-day, by gilds of potters, or by the inhabitants of the manor directly for their own use? Or again: When did the custom of building houses to let on rent first become general in England? It is clear that the habit of living in rented houses has and must have the most profound influence on family life and national character. But so far, neither from economic histories on the one hand nor from histories of architecture on the other, have I been able to obtain any reliable information on this point.

When one turns to even more important questions—such, for instance, as the industrial position of women at different epochs—it is equally difficult to obtain precise and detailed knowledge. Without a very lengthy and elaborate investigation of the extant original materials, many of them scattered in municipal chambers in distant parts of England, it would be quite impossible to say on what terms women were admitted as members of 126 the gilds and fraternities which extended over the whole area of industrial life in the Middle Ages. The character and organisation of the household and the position of women in the Middle Ages are subjects still practically untouched by the economic historians.[16]

When we turn to modern times, a little more material has been collected. There is an investigation by the Board of Trade into the wages of domestic servants, and a book on domestic service by Professor Lucy Salmon of Vassar College. It deals of course mainly with American conditions, but cannot be neglected by any English student of the economic relations of the household.

Humanitarianism has prompted studies more or less elaborate of the dietaries and housing conditions of the working classes, especially in towns,[17] but it would be idle to pretend that there has been yet more than a beginning made of the task of determining how for each class of the community its share of the national income as stated in money is translated into the necessaries, comforts, and luxuries of life, into house-room, fuel, food, cleanliness, clothing, insurance, domestic service, recreation, and culture. The generalisations available are of the most meagre description. We can, for instance, say with tolerable certainty that the agricultural labourer spends three-fourths of his income on food, the town labourer two-thirds, 127 the artisan a half, the middle-class man from a third to a fourth; but there is practically no reliable information with regard to very large incomes, or to sums spent on clothing in any section of the community.

Moreover, there is one class—large, growing in importance, and an essential element in modern civilisation—about whose domestic expenditure we have no scientific knowledge at all. This is the class which may be named “the routine brain-workers,” the people who as clerks, book-keepers, salesmen, typists, &c., are responsible for the routine administration of modern commerce. They have been compared to the nervous system, for like that system in the animal body they serve for the communication and the mechanical record of the life of the community on its industrial side. With them may be classed elementary school-teachers, reporters, and the lower ranks of the Civil Service, though I should not be prepared to say that some of these—especially the teachers—ought to be regarded as performing only routine brain-work. But all these workers can be conveniently studied together in that their labour is carried on under somewhat similar conditions—it is sedentary, highly regimented, exhausting to the brain and nervous system, and is generally remunerated by a fixed salary, &c. They earn an income larger than that of the manual labourer, but considerably less as a general rule than that of the professional man. There is a total absence of information as to the domestic expenditure of 128 this class. It is sometimes declared that its less well-paid members suffer as severely from poverty as do sections of the working-class, and that the poor clerk is really much more to be pitied than the well-to-do trade unionist, the skilled manual worker.

But no one has yet attempted to test the truth of this view by the only scientific means, namely, by the collection of precise details as to the domestic expenditure of the routine brain-working class, showing what sums are spent on house-room, food, clothing, &c., and what kind of accommodation is obtained for the money spent. In short, the investigation of domestic expenditure has never yet been carried out in a purely scientific spirit solely for the sake of the resultant knowledge. It has always been undertaken with some special practical problem in view, and is consequently always fragmentary and frequently biassed.

Yet if it is important to know how the wealth of the country is produced, it is of equal importance to know how it is consumed, and that whether the consumption takes the form of porridge and flannelette for the child of a dock-labourer, of drink and admission to a football match for the miner or cotton-operative, or of a gardener, and a holiday in Switzerland for the hard-working doctor or stockbroker. Domestic expenditure should be investigated as impartially by the economist as are the variations of plants or animals by the biologist. His one aim should 129 be the discovery and statement of truth, as complete and as unbiassed as he can make it.

Hitherto, as I have said, this field of research has remained comparatively untouched. In the first place, economists have generally been men, and have naturally devoted their energies to the elucidation of the problems of industry and business which concern men most closely. Few women, on the other hand, have until recently received any training in economics, and it has never occurred to them that the familiar and wearisome problems of the rent, the butcher’s bill, and the children’s clothes, together with the difficulty of finding a satisfactory cook, may have a wider aspect than the narrow and personal one. But even as it is, the few women who have distinguished themselves in the sphere of economics have in a note or a casual remark pointed out distinctions between household management and other branches of industry which cast a flood of light on the whole subject. There is a paragraph in the second volume of “Industrial Democracy”[18] which lays down the difference between the underlying principles of business and of the administration of the home in a few words which might serve as the text for a volume. It is precisely this difference, first clearly indicated by Mrs. Webb, which constitutes the second ground for the common neglect of this branch of economics. A factory or a shop is run for profit; a household 130 simply to provide comfort and convenience for its members. To put it in technical language, in the world of industry we are concerned with exchange values, but in the home with use values alone. From this distinction, overlooked by reason of its obviousness, there flow a large number of consequences which will be discussed later. At present we are only concerned to show that economists, with their eyes fixed on trade and the mechanism of trade, very naturally neglected that section of life in which values, material and immaterial, were being continually created, but for use alone, not for commercial purposes.

The wife who cooks her husband’s dinner, or caters, organises, and keeps accounts for him, is really engaged in work which in any rational interpretation of the word has far more right to be called productive than is much of the labour employed in manufacture or business. But the work accomplished by the wife in the household has never yet received its full acknowledgment from the economists. The truth is that, although they constantly warn students to avoid the vulgar error of confusing money wages with real wages, they themselves have been so biassed by the commercial conception of profit-making that they have almost completely overlooked even the purely economic value of much work, such as cooking, cleaning, and clothes-making, which is carried on within the home, not for profit-making or for a salary, but as part of the duties attaching to the status of wife and mother. It is acknowledged 131 by the economists themselves[19] that although in theory they have set aside a section to be devoted to the discussion of “consumption” as other sections deal with “production” and “distribution” of wealth, yet in practice the treatment of consumption has been meagre and ineffective. This, perhaps, is inevitable—it is certainly regrettable—and women economists would be performing a most useful work if they were to undertake a careful and detailed investigation into the consumption of wealth at different epochs and by different classes of the community, and one, moreover, for which their connection with housekeeping, which is only the practical application of the science of the consumption of wealth, would have already partially prepared them.

There is still another reason why a scientific treatment of the consumption of wealth has been delayed. It could not be developed until medicine and hygiene had provided us with satisfactory standards of the needs of the human body. When food, for example, was still regarded purely as a matter of individual likes and dislikes, it was impossible to discuss at all adequately the sufficiency or insufficiency of the food consumption of a given class. But now that we know that the varying tastes simply express in different ways the need for so much proteid, carbo-hydrates and fats, we have a firm basis on which to work. It is true that it is not yet quite so firm as we could 132 wish; the scientists have not yet succeeded even for a single class in fixing a dietary standard which would be accepted by all in particular, and recently the investigations of Professor Chittenden have suggested that the amount of proteid hitherto thought essential may be excessive. Moreover, little attention has yet been paid to the need of different food for different work. Yet it seems probable, to say the least, that the sedentary worker, using his brain and not his muscles, may require lighter and daintier food than the labourer in the fields or the docks, and may really suffer as seriously if that better food be denied him as does the latter if he fails to secure a sufficiency of coarser and cheaper nutriment. This question would be of great importance in investigating the expenditure of the clerk class. But although the scientists have here failed to provide the students of domestic expenditure with all the data required, yet there is sufficient knowledge of the general principles of dietetics to enable us to base our study of food consumption on a fairly sound basis.

In the same way a standard of housing accommodation establishing the minimum of space per head necessary for health is generally recognised; and on these and similar calculations, correlated with the cost of house-room and commodities, it will be possible to build up a science of consumption which will be really a science and not a series of guesses and vague generalities.

It is true, again, that it is easier to deal with the grades of society practising the roughest and 133 least-skilled labour than with those engaged in the higher forms of brain-work, but we can at all events set ourselves to discover what is the average distribution of the expenditure of men earning £1000 a year, and can afterwards appeal to the hygienists to decide for us what kind of food, house-room, and recreation is essential for a man who makes his living by the higher activities of the intellect. A very close connection between economics and hygiene is essential if the division of our subject that deals with consumption is to be adequately treated.

So, then, a scientific study of the economics of the household would fall into two divisions—(1) an endeavour to describe the industrial development of each country as it affects family life, house-room, food, and clothes; and (2) a descriptive account of the domestic circumstances and the expenditure[20] of each class of the community at the present time. Under each of these headings 134 special sections should treat domestic service, the work of woman beyond the household, and the organisation of household work as compared with different branches of industry and administration. Finally, a supplementary section should set forth the practical applications of the conclusions arrived at, and should endeavour to help the housewife or, it may be, the superintendent of an industrial school, college, or boarding house in the administration of the income at her disposal.

But much more careful investigation into the question of how incomes actually are spent is essential before we can deal satisfactorily with the even more difficult problem of how they ought to be spent. And there is, too, another factor which must be taken into consideration. Economists in defining wealth commonly admit nowadays that it includes collective and immaterial well-being of various kinds.[21] But having made this admission, they straightway put it aside and proceed to discuss wealth as though it consisted exclusively of material exchangeable commodities. Yet clearly the real income of a family is increased if the children have easy access to good free schools or to ample open spaces. It will not be possible to estimate precisely the money value of opportunities of this description. But we should at least notice their presence or absence for each class and for each stage of national development. It is clear that in the present paper no attempt can be made 135 to deal with the problems of the economics of expenditure or of the household save in the merest outline, and therefore the following pages are to be taken simply as a sketch to be filled in by more extensive and more throughgoing investigation later on.