The home: its work and influence

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There is nothing private and special in the preparation of food; a more general human necessity does not exist. There must be freedom and personal choice in the food prepared, but it no more has to be cooked for you than the books you love best have to be written for you. We flatter ourselves that we get what we want by having it done at home. Apply that condition to any other kind of human product and see if it holds. We get what we want by free choice from the world's markets—not from a workshop in the back yard. Imagine the grade of production, the arts, crafts, and manufactures, that we should have to select from, if we tried to have all things made for us by private servants! Apply the intelligence and skill of this zoetrope procession of housemaids to watch-making or shoe-making, or umbrella-making, or the making of paper, or glass, or steel, or any civilised commodity; and if we can easily see how immeasurably incompetent these flitting handmaids would be for any of these lines of work, why do we imagine them competent to prepare food and take care of children? Because we have never thought of it at all.

Men are too busy doing other things, too blinded by their scorn for "women's work." Women are too busy doing these things to think about them at all; or if they think, stung by the pain of pressing inconvenience, they only think personally, they only feel it for themselves, each one blindly buried in her own home, like the crafty ostrich with his head in the sand.

The question is a public one; none could be more so. It affects in one of its two branches every human being except those who board; every home, without exception. Perhaps some impression may be made on the blank spaces of our untouched minds by exhibiting the economic status of home industry.

We Americans are credited with acuteness and good business sense. How can we reconcile ourselves to the continuance of a system not only so shamefully inadequate, but so ruinously expensive? If we are not mortified to find that our boasted industrial progress carries embedded in its very centre this stronghold of hoary antiquity, this knotted, stumpy bunch of amputated rudiments; if we are not moved by the low standard of general health as affected by food, and the no standard of general education as affecting the baby, perhaps we can be stimulated somewhat by the consideration of expense.

The performance of domestic industries involves, first, an enormous waste of labour. The fact that in nine cases out of ten this labour is unpaid does not alter its wastefulness. If half the men in the world stayed at home to wait on the other half, the loss in productive labour would be that between half and the fraction required to do the work under advanced conditions, say one-twentieth. Any group of men requiring to be cooked for, as a ship's crew, a lumber camp, a company of soldiers, have a proportionate number of cooks. To give each man a private cook would reduce the working strength materially. Our private cooks being women makes no difference in the economic law. We are so accustomed to rate women's labour on a sex-basis, as being her "duty" and not justly commanding any return, that we have quite overlooked this tremendous loss of productive labour.

Then there is the waste of endless repetition of "plant." We pay rent for twenty kitchens where one kitchen would do. All that part of our houses which is devoted to these industries, kitchen, pantry, laundry, servants' rooms, etc., could be eliminated from the expense account by the transference of the labour involved to a suitable workshop. Not only our rent bills, but our furnishing bills, feel the weight of this expense. We have to pay severally for all these stoves and dishes, tools and utensils, which, if properly supplied in one proper place instead of twenty, would cost far less to begin with; and, in the hands of skilled professionals, would not be under the tremendous charge for breakage and ruinous misuse which now weighs heavily on the householder. Then there is the waste in fuel for these nineteen unnecessary kitchens, and lastly and largest of any item except labour, the waste in food.

First the waste in purchasing in the smallest retail quantities; then the waste involved in separate catering, the "left overs" which the ingenious housewife spends her life in trying to "use up"; and also the waste caused by carelessness and ignorance in a great majority of cases. Perhaps this last element, careless ignorance, ought to cover both waste and breakage, and be counted by itself, or as a large item in the labour account.

Count as you will, there could hardly be devised a more wasteful way of doing necessary work than this domestic way. It costs on the most modest computation three times what it need cost. Once properly aroused to a consideration of these facts it will be strange indeed if America's business sense cannot work out some system of meeting these common human necessities more effectually and more economically.

The housemaid would be more of a step in advance if the housewife, released from her former duties, then entered the ranks of productive labour, paid her substitute, and contributed something further to the world's wealth. But nothing could be farther from the thoughts of the Lady of the House. Her husband being able to keep more than one woman to do the work of the house; and much preferring to exhibit an idle wife, as proof of his financial position,[4] the idle wife proceeds so to conduct her house as to add to its labours most considerably. The housewife's system of housekeeping is perforce limited to her own powers. The size of the home, the nature of its furnishings and decorations, the kind of clothes worn by the women and children, the amount of food served and the manner of its service; all these are regulated by the housewife's capacity for labour. But once the housemaid enters the field of domestic labour there is a scale of increase in that labour which has no limits but the paying capacity of the man.

This element of waste cannot be measured, because it is a progressive tendency, it "grows by what it feeds upon" (as most things do, by the way!) and waxes greater and greater with each turn of the wheel. If the lady of the house, with one servant, were content to live exactly as she did before; keeping the work within the powers of the deputy, she would be simply and absolutely idle, and that is a very wearing condition; especially to woman, the born worker. So the lady of the house, mingling with other ladies of houses, none of them having anything but houses to play with, proceeds so to furnish, decorate, and arrange those houses, and so to elaborate the functions thereof, as to call for more and ever more housemaids to do the endless work.