HOUSEKEEPING CENTERS IN SETTLEMENTS AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS
MABEL HYDE KITTREDGE
THE HOME OF A GRADUATE
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. 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. She cannot be as single-minded as the old-fashioned mother whose only thought was the home. Schools, newspapers, settlements, the trend of the times, all fill the mind with outside interests. These things are important, but they have a tendency to crowd out domestic responsibilities and make women restless under the homely tasks. Suffrage we will have, and we must interest and educate women until we do have it; but, at the same time, the dishes have to be washed clean, the beds have to be aired and made well, and the babies have to eat nourishing food, or we’ll have an anaemic, poor race to govern when we get the suffrage.
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.
There are those who say that this training should be taught at home, and in many cases our school children, whether foreign or American, do come from homes where the mothers are good housekeepers according to their light; but the last generation cannot teach the coming one everything. As Samuel Merwin says in a recent book, “the accumulated experience of the ages is the grandmothers, and yet she is authority no longer; since her day science has stepped in. To her mind the gulf between herself and her daughter is nothing but the old gulf between age and youth. She is wrong. It is a million miles wide and if the mother keeps to the old way she risks the life of her child.”
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 “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. In the child’s mind must be a perfect plan; to work out that plan correctly will bring health, order and happiness as the prize.
The world must stop trying to make progress by walking backward. We must make room for a vaster scheme of household economics than the last generation ever dreamed of. The home must be made to catch up with the factory, the store and the office, and we know that in comparison with these industries home-making has lagged behind. Now—suddenly—we realize that feeble-minded children are becoming more numerous, that malnutrition in school children is becoming so great that the highest standard of study is impossible and that street life is taking the place of home life. We wake up and ask what we can do to make the home-maker realize that she is responsible for these things.
But is she?
Educators who admit that life and health are absolutely dependent on the home have failed to find room in the educational scheme to provide this home knowledge. There were in the elementary schools in New York city last year 388,000 girls. Only 43,500 of them were in cooking classes. That means that 344,500 girls in this one year never had a suggestion given them that home-making was a profession worth studying. Only seventh and eighth grade girls are permitted to have cooking lessons, and that means that during the entire grammar school course a few fortunate girls received nine full days of domestic science instruction. I say a few, for out of 560 elementary schools only 170 are equipped for cooking; and for these 170 schools, there are only 135 domestic science teachers—some cooking rooms are closed altogether and others running on half time. A girl is fortunate if she happens not to be in one of the 390 schools where no instruction in domestic science is given, and still more fortunate if she stays in one of the few selected schools until she reaches the seventh grade. There she first learns that home-making is worth studying. But 20,000 left school last year before this grade was reached.
Our public school children may be cash girls, or sales women, or factory hands. These things may or may not be; but one thing is certain, and that is that every girl must live in a home and take her part in home responsibilities.
A MODEL FLAT
The little children of the neighborhood come in to play before lesson time.
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.
The school lunch committee made an investigation a short time ago to ascertain whether malnutrition was as great an evil as we feared. Two thousand and fifty-one children were thoroughly examined. Half of these from an Irish neighborhood, half from an Italian. They were selected at random from the four lower grades. Two hundred and eighty-three or 13 per cent were found to be suffering from pronounced malnutrition. Their homes were visited. With the exception of eighteen tea and coffee was a part of the daily diet. Sixty families had no prepared luncheon or dinner at home. One hundred and fifty-seven were supplying the wrong or insufficient food and it was found to be more ignorance than poverty that was the cause of this condition.
If we take 13 per cent of 388,000 children we have 29,846 poorly nourished girls who are not even taught that the heavy, dull, sick feeling is due to the wrong kind of food. How can we place other knowledge ahead of this? When we watch this large, half fed army of children marching on to take up a woman’s battle with life it does seem as if we had been asleep to our responsibilities.
We must establish an adequate twentieth century theory of household economics and then we must put this within the reach of every girl in our public schools.
My desk is covered always with pamphlets entitled The Profession of Home-making, Food Values, Freehand Cooking on Scientific Principles, and so on, but does this knowledge reach the people? Does it reach the 388,000 school girls? Recently I heard an hour’s talk by a member of the Board of Health on how we ought to know good milk from bad, how careful we should be about canned vegetables, and the horrors of buying tainted meat: but when I asked how the common people could know these facts I could get no satisfaction other than that the way to know whether the milk was good or not was to examine the barns where the cows were milked or have the milk tested; but the people I know are ignorant as to how to wash milk bottles, or why it is wrong to leave the milk uncovered, or why the nipple from the milk bottle can’t be played with, fall on the floor and then be used. This representative from the Board of Health told startling facts about candies and ice cream, sold on push carts, but the audience at this lecture were land owners along the Hudson River, and I doubt if one of them had ever seen an East Side push cart, and I know that not one was ever tempted to buy. Why can’t these facts reach the thousands of children who do buy dyed ice cream and varnished candy, and whose fathers sell these very things?
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.
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. There were hours of work given to hemming and hanging the ruffles over every door, around every shelf and even around the bath tub. Look at the tarletan festooned around the chandelier and over the pictures; see the dozens of calendars collected and pinned on the wall. Isn’t this a reaching out with all the power that is in a woman to express to her family and her neighbors what, in her ignorance, she believes to be a home? We need the energy and the courage and the experience of these tenement housekeepers, but we must add education; and do we?
Take the daily life of any one of our thousands of little school girls and see how much chance she has to know the science of home-making or even to acquire respect for housework. She is born with the controlling desire to copy. She sees high-heeled shoes on another’s foot; she longs for and saves until she gets shoes like them. Her tight skirt, her big hat, her very walk, are seen first and admired somewhere else, and so the home, whether it is perfect or imperfect, and the school, and the teacher, and what the teacher stands for, make the same vivid pictures in her mind; and some day she is going to grow up and copy as nearly as she can.
This little girl wakes in the morning in one of our crowded tenement houses, wakes to the vivid blue walls, to rooms filled with feather beds which have been thrown all over the floor the night before for the family and the possible boarders to occupy. The dusty carpets, stuffed furniture, long lace curtains and draped mantle meet her eye, and in this home of unrest there is always the crying baby, the naturally cross father and the demand (so well known to every little girl) to hurry up and go to the store and buy breakfast. Poor little tenement girl, she does not even know that in well-managed homes breakfast is bought the day before. She may learn to respect the energy in her home, but she will never forget the disorder, the picture of congestion and confusion and of overwrought, tired nerves that has been stamped forever upon her mind. And no right idea of home is given her to correct this wrong impression.
Everyone knows the way work is done in our tenement homes; how the beds are so large that it is impossible to move them out in the small rooms and make them properly, and how the bed clothes are pushed across, often with a broom handle kept for the purpose; how often the small income makes it necessary to rent out the beds in the day time to night workers, so they are always occupied and never aired. And every one knows how all these things make a girl lose respect for her home, then for her family and, finally, for herself; and how the street seems a peaceful place in comparison.
Ideals of right home-making should in the school correct the home mistakes, but as it is now, not until she reaches the seventh grade does this little tenement girl get her first idea that making a home is a part of education. After she leaves home in the morning she gets only a picture of a schoolroom with forty or fifty desks; of a teacher who in no way is associated in her mind with any house, who, as I heard Mrs. Kelley say not long ago, often brings her lunch in a music roll so that no one will suspect that it is food.
The windows in the schoolroom are washed after school hours (and at that only once or twice a year) by the janitor, the floors are swept by men, swept badly, and always after school. And if this pupil happens to be one of the twenty thousand who leave school each year before reaching the seventh grade, she goes into business not knowing that there is such a thing as scientific knowledge regarding food and air and sun and cleanliness.
And yet this girl is going to marry, bear children and rear them, and you and I are going to hold her responsible if those children are not good citizens. 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. It is furnished as a home should be furnished, and such questions are answered there as: What shall be done with the floors to insure health and save labor; what with the walls? What curtains are the best to admit light, give beauty to the room and wash easily? What proportion of the sum laid aside for furnishing should go into the buying of pots and pans, what part into mattresses, and is there any reason to spend money for ruffles? What are the proper and necessary tools to work with?
In the housekeeping center the neighbors and the scientifically trained teacher work out these problems together. The teacher’s training in chemistry has taught her that a certain quality of water and a certain kind of soap are necessary for perfect laundry work. The tenement house woman adds what she has learned from bitter experience; that it is hard to heat enough of any kind of water on the stove with coal at ten cents a pail and the stove crowded with pots and pans.
A LESSON IN BED-MAKING
Regular lessons are given in these housekeeping centers morning, afternoon and evening, and as the flat is like the home from which the pupils come (only perfected) its lesson is not dissociated with the daily home duties but is performed under home conditions and, therefore, easy of imitation. Do the pupils want this instruction? The answer is that every class is full and there is a waiting list, and every girl pays for the lessons.
I find it often difficult in selling luncheons in the public schools to persuade the children to give up three cents for a full meal, and yet the children under fourteen in the housekeeping centers are ready always to pay three cents a lesson, and the working girls five cents. And what do they pay for? To learn to clean the sink so that the pipes will not get clogged, to learn to cook substitutes for meat (for meat is too high for many of them), to scrub closets and floors, to make and clean beds. Only last week a class of working girls came to one of the centers and asked for a bedbug lesson. “The people above us are moving out” they said, “and we want to prevent the bugs getting into our house.” A bedbug lesson is not a lecture, it means to roll up one’s sleeves, put on a big apron, get on your knees and scrub, this after working hard all day in a factory or shop. The desire for this knowledge must be very real to make a girl willing to do this extra labor, and to pay for the privilege of doing it out of her scanty wages.
In a housekeeping center it is easy and natural to borrow a baby from the neighbor across the hall when the lesson is “how to bathe and dress a baby.” There is nothing embarrassing about being the patient when the lesson is “how to give a bath in bed and how to change the sheets without disturbing the patient.” Then there are the dinner classes where the pupils make out the menu, do the marketing and cook the meat, and there are lessons in food values.
What I feel that we need today is a housekeeping center in every settlement, so that every girl who is a part of the settlement will feel it almost compulsory upon her to take the course before she marries, and if she is enjoying the intellectual life of the settlement, or the play side, or the social side, she must be learning the home-making side too. We must make our settlement girl feel that the home-making training is more important than mere recreation. The public school will follow the settlement and then, not for one-ninth of our girls will home-making instruction be given, but for every one.
A KITCHEN-CLEANING LESSON
Then there will be in every school the cooking-room, with its individual equipment (necessary, but nothing in it to suggest the kitchen at home). Next to this will be the model flat or center, this to resemble the homes from which the children come, but furnished on scientific lines. 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.
From these small tasks, the children would graduate to larger duties in the housekeeping center; making beds and washing many dishes. From dusting one desk, the pupil would soon be able to give the flat a thorough cleaning. We find in our center that the love of playing house disappears if it is not cultivated, and the girl of fourteen never drops entirely the wrong way of doing housework, which she need never have acquired if the domestic science teacher could be in her training early enough.
Scientific management means more than “having system.” You may be ever so systematic in the way you do things, but if you happen to be doing them the wrong way, you are doing the way that is unnecessarily expensive in time, energy, money, comfort and beauty.
I believe that the labor in the kitchen will become more and more professionalized. 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. But that day can come only when women through universal home-making education push forward and demand this better management of the home.
We must have restlessness and dissatisfaction first. This comes from a realization of the right way and a disgust with the wrong way, and then will come the push from the home-maker herself, not from a few outside reformers. The tenement house occupant now is too ready to accept the fallen plaster, the dish-water that leaks through from the flat above and the dirty and dark halls. 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. She will not be content to crowd her family into dark rooms; she will work until she gets space enough and light enough for her children. She will be driven to action because she knows the value of what she has to fight for. When the suffrage comes to women, how naturally then these intelligent, orderly home-makers will take their part in municipal housecleaning!
Let us not be satisfied to force through bills at Albany that improve our tenements; at the same time the tenement girl must be receiving her scientific home training, so that she too, can take her part in this great home-making profession.