The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

The Woman in Rural Life.—The country-woman, dealing at first hand with rural conditions, has many of the same problems of personal devotion in the provision of food, clothing, and shelter with which her ancient ancestor struggled. She has, it is true, "scientific farming" of men to raise the harvests that ancestor's heroic but feeble efforts could not secure. She has mechanical and commercial aids as housemother such as the primitive woman never imagined. She has been released from much of the drudgery which burdened her grandmother in the domestic stage of industry. She is under social protection such as no previous woman enjoyed in the solitary household of the past. And in the United States the Federal Government is offering her aids.[3] It is, however, true that the housemother in rural communities still feels many of the obligations of the ancient woman. The three-meal-a-day routine, the actual preparation of raw material of food for the table, the personal offices of housework, washing, ironing, mending, making, sweeping, dusting, cleaning, in all their varied details, keep her in active sympathy with the past. This fact furnishes the main reason why "Women's Columns" and "Magazines for Women" reach such large circulation in rural districts, where they help toward lessening the domestic burden by showing how to carry it more easily.

The farm woman, however, is moving, many thousand strong, with men as many, to mitigate the isolation of the solitary household, to bring the home nearer to the neighbors, the school, the church and the store, by massing rural homes in villages and forming the habits of the men-folk to go further afield for their own work. This movement, which is of all social reforms most needed because affecting larger classes than any other and also because affecting the basic industry of all countries, that of agriculture, is working toward making farm-life once more attractive to young men and capable of winning young women to the life of the farmer's wife.

Meanwhile, the higher forms of social organization possible in cities and in closely settled towns and villages are working to lessen house-keeping burdens to an unprecedented degree. It is noticeable that all schemes for so specializing woman's work and so easing the domestic burden as to make, as one writer puts it, "the home a rest place for women as for men," have their imaginary seat in great cities or closely built suburbs. The farm-women we know can combine and coöperate to a greater extent than they now do and the town and city women may take far better advantage of the agencies of household assistance now at their doors. How far this movement to relieve the home of household work may go we do not know.

Modern Demand for Standardization.—Is there any plan yet proposed, however, which can relieve the mother of her primary and ancient obligation to see that her family is well nourished, suitably clothed and healthfully sheltered? Some one must attend to the needs of each family in these vital particulars which underlie all problems of public and private health. Shall the state do it? So far the experience of state institutions and even of private "homes" do not encourage hope along that line. So far the physical and affectional needs of children and youth, and of husbands and wives, and of fathers and mothers have not been met by any substitute for the private home. And in the private home, under any plan, there must go on certain processes which have to cost some one member of the family a great deal of thought, much personal effort and constant attention. For most families in average condition that person is naturally the housemother. If the husband and father is the chief or only wage-earner in "gainful occupations," then his health and strength are of primary concern to all the family and must be secured by adequate and healthful provision of food and clothing, and the home must give him what he vitally needs for maintaining power of economic service to his family. If the mother, also, is a wage-or salary-earner we have the dictum of economists that her inherited and usual place in the family machinery must be filled, if at all successfully, by trained and congenial helpers at a cost in present conditions prohibitive for the average family income. The estimate of Mr. Taber, in his excellent book, The Business of the Household, is that unless for causes of illness or special emergency "no family having an income of less than three thousand dollars has any right to maintain a maid." This estimate seems not only economically correct but shows why so few families have incomes that can release the housemother from housework. It also shows why only the exceptionally trained and competent vocational worker, if a married woman and mother of young children, can earn enough to release herself from the miscellaneous tasks of the private household without loss to the family treasury. The easing of the burden of housework, almost unbearable as it has been and responsible, as we have good reason to believe, for much ill-health of women and much unhappiness in marriage, is coming fast and from quite other directions than is often perceived. The commercial aids of wholesale preparation of food and clothing, and the new fashions in house-building and household management are alike working toward such a reduction of private household service as may enable the average woman to meet the family needs, even where there are several young children, if she is strong in body and trained in efficient ways of working, and yet have considerable time left for other activities.

The apartment house has set the fashion of simplification and reduction of necessary personal service in the home. The apartment house, with its continuous hot water, its ready heat and its relief from care of sidewalks, halls and stairs, and with its hour-service at command is obviously becoming a favorite place to live in. Especially do women like it. The multiple house, however, does not seem the best place for children after the earliest months of infancy, and in many such houses they are openly "not wanted." The multiple house has also many disadvantages from the social side in the lack of home associations which support family affection. They are also for the most part in localities where people are brought together without plan or friendship and hence can not cultivate that neighborliness which, so far in the history of the race, has been a nursery of the community spirit.

The Apartment House and the Family.—The apartment house seems to be the best place for those families in which all the adult members are busy at some vocation, and in which the children are of age to profit by educational opportunities usually found only in cities. In such families the burdens of the person who is in command of the family comfort as to food and raiment and house-keeping are reduced to the lowest terms. If to the usual apartment house provisions for aids to the housemother are added, what is now offered in some places, namely, the "Auto-Service for Meals," whereby the principal meal, at least, the dinner, is brought to the door ready to place on the table and all cooking dishes hard to wash are returned to the centre of supply to be prepared for another service, then, indeed, can all the members take turns in rendering the small offices for family comfort still required and each go about his or her special vocation at will. This seems to be the goal of many progressive minds, although personal taste is seldom satisfied by "coöperative" cooking.

It must be remembered by all, that the sort of family pictured above has in it no children of ages requiring freedom of motion and constant attention (unless, indeed, "the boarding-school in the country" for all over four or five years is contemplated). It has in it no aged whose needs in diet and in physical comfort vary from the usual. It has in it no chronic invalids and no convalescents, no blind or lame or specially weak requiring special help. It is for the particular benefit, at least, of families of a particular type, of which the cities, with their more varied facilities, contain an unusual proportion. For the family of the ordinary type, with its many differing needs and its variety of claim upon some one person for its central direction and service, the various aids from without which have been indicated serve rather to relieve from excessive burdens than to remove altogether the special obligations of the woman-head of the family.

Moreover, the time left to the average housemother from the old housework by the new helps in that work is, in part at least, mortgaged in advance to social effort to make the new commercial aids to family service actual helps and not hindrances to family health and comfort. The food supply drawn upon must be sharply investigated lest it contain deleterious substances or be denuded of nourishing quality. The ready-made clothing must be bought with knowledge and constant vigilance against cheating in material or in construction or in sins of fashion against health and beauty. The labor-saving devices of every sort must be put to intelligent test and require specific training for most efficient use. The family budget must be more carefully planned and more heroically maintained at prudent levels. The public service of markets, transportation facilities and functions of "middlemen" must be understood and controlled as never before. Above all, the pressure of uniformity must be resisted if the offered supply of the essentials of life prove inadequate to the deepest needs, or the scale of living be too ambitiously set by the housing facilities adjusted to the ideas and claims of landlords rather than to the needs of family life.

Hence we may say that the old forms of effort by which mothers fed and clothed and sheltered their children led directly to absorption of interest, energy and conscientious labor within the house. The new forms of effort by which these essentials of healthful and comfortable living are secured lead directly to all manner of coöperative social adjustments of supply to demand. The standard of demand, however, let it never be forgotten, is made and maintained within the intimate family circle itself, and the personal intelligence and ethical maturity of the housemothers, who form the major purchasing class of every civilized community, determine that standard. For that great enterprise of high standardization the same personal devotion to the central demands of life is required in the average modern woman which made the ancient mother so great a leader in primitive culture. The new aids to the housemother's task may give her a better chance than any women ever had before to see the real social significance of the personal offices of home life. The poets have seen it all through the centuries and have pictured the myth goddesses bringing the cup and the bread and the fruit and weaving the web of ceremonial or of simple garment in household poetry. All human need for sustenance and the nurture of our physical being has made the wife the loaf-giver and the mother a nourisher of the young, and as such artists have portrayed her.

We may say "our father-land," but we always say "our mother-earth." To those who see clearly the value of the ancient family rite of the meal alone together, to which it may well be every member of the family has made a distinct contribution; to those to whom the private table still appeals and who still appreciate the taste and quality of every purchase made for each individual member of the intimate group (things taking time and thought most often of the mother), the individual home has meanings that are not lost but rather are growing in spiritual importance as the drudgery of the household is lessened.