The home: its work and influence

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In a city block there are, let us say, two hundred families, which, at our usual average of five individuals to a family, would number one thousand persons. The thousand persons should consume, we will say, five hundred quarts of milk a day. The purchase of five hundred quarts of milk and the proportionate cream, as well as butter, would maintain a nice little dairy—several blocks together would maintain a large one. Your bustling restaurant proudly advertises "Milk and cream fresh every day from our own dairies!" But your beloved home has no such purchasing power, but meekly absorbs pale cultures of tuberculosis and typhoid fever at eight cents a quart. The poorer people are, the more they pay for food, separately. The organised purchasing power of these same people would double their food supply, and treble it.

Besides the expense entailed in purchasing is that of private preparation. First, the "plant" is provided. For our two hundred families there are two hundred stoves, with their utensils. The kitchen, and all that it contains, with dining-rooms, etc., have been already referred to, but should be held firmly in mind as a large item in rent and furnishing. Next, there is the labour. Two hundred women are employed for about six hours a day each,—twelve hundred working hours,—at twenty cents an hour. This means two hundred and forty dollars a day, or sixteen hundred and eighty dollars a week, that the block of families is paying to have its wastefully home-purchased food more wastefully home-cooked. Of course, if these cooks are the housewives, they do not get the money; but the point is, that this much labour is worth that amount of money, and that productive energy is being wasted. What ought it to cost? One trained cook can cook for thirty, easily; three, more easily, for a hundred. The thousand people mentioned need, in largest allowance, thirty cooks—and the thirty cooks, organised, would not need six hours a day to do the same work, either. Thirty cooks, even at ten dollars a week, would be but three hundred dollars, and that is some slight saving as against sixteen hundred and eighty!

We have not mentioned fully another serious evil. "Insufficient food" would be easily removable from our list by a more economical method of buying and cooking it. The other element of insufficiency—ignorance,—would go also, if we had skilful and learned cooks and caterers instead of unskilled and unlearned amateurs, who know only how to cater to the demands of hungry children and injudicious men at home. Wise temperance workers know that many men drink because they are not properly fed; and women, too, consume tea and coffee to make up in stimulants for the lack of nutrition about which they know nothing. Under this same head comes the rest of that list, the over-sufficient, ill-chosen, and ill-prepared food. It is not simply that the two hundred amateur cooks (whether they be permanent wife or transient servant, they are all, in a business sense, amateurs,—ask a real cook!) waste money by their sporadic efforts, but their incapacity wastes our blood in our veins. We do not die, swift and screaming, from some sharp poison administered through malice; but our poor stomachs are slowly fretted by grease-hardened particles, and wearied out by heavy doses of hot dough. Only iron vigour can survive such things.

"It is ill-chosen," is one charge against home-cooking. What governs our choice? Why does a German eat decaying cabbage and mite-infested cheese, an American revel in fat-soaked steak and griddle-cakes, a Frenchman disguise questionable meats with subtly-blended spices, and so on, through the tastes of all the nations and localities? It is environment and heredity that governs us—that's all. It is not knowledge, not culture and experience, not an enlightened taste, or the real choice of a trained mind capable of choosing.

A child is fed by his mother, who transmits remote ancestral customs, unchanged by time. Children are hungry and like to eat. The young stomach is adapted to its food supply; it grows accustomed to it and "likes" it,—and the man continues to demand the doughnuts, the sauerkraut, the saleratus biscuit, which he "likes." One ghastly exception should be taken to this smooth statement. I have said that "the young stomach is adapted to its food supply." Alas, alas! This is true of those who survive; but think of the buried babies,—of the dear, dead children, of the "diseases incidental to childhood,"—and question if some part of that awful death-list is not due to our criminal ignorance of what is proper food! There is no knowledge, save the filtering down of ancient customs and what the private cook can pick up from house to house; no experience, save that gained by practising on one's own family or the family of one's employer—and I never heard of either wife or servant gathering statistics as to who lived and who died under her cooking—no special training; and no room or time or means to learn! It would be a miracle if all should survive.

The ignorance which keeps us so ill-fed is an essential condition of home-cooking. If we had only home-shoe-making, or home-doctoring, or home-tailoring—barbering—what you please—we should show the same wide-spread ignorance and lack of taste. What we have learned in cooking comes from the advance of that great branch of human industry in its free social field, and that advance has reacted to some degree on the immovable home.

Next consider self-control, the lack of which is so large a factor in our food diseases. We have attained some refinement of feeling in painting, music, and other arts; why are we still so frankly barbaric in our attitude toward food? Why does modern man, civilised, educated, cultured, still keep his body in a loathsome condition, still suffer, weaken, and die, from foul food habits? It is not alone the huge evil of intemperance in drink, or simple gluttony; but the common habits of our young girls, serenely indulging in unlimited candy, with its attendant internal consequences; or of our cultured women, providing at their entertainments a gross accumulation of unwholesome delicacies, with scarcely more discrimination than was shown by Heliogabalus. We eat what we like, and our liking is most crude and low.

The position of the woman who feeds us—the wife and mother—is responsible for this arrest of development. She is not a free cook, a trained cook, a scientific cook; she belongs to the family. She must cook for the man because he pays for it. He maintains the home—and her—largely for that very purpose. It is his home, his table, his market bill; and, if John does not like onions, or pork, or cereals, they do not appear. If Mrs. Peterkin paid for it, and John was cook, why John would cook to please her! In two ways is Mrs. Peterkin forced to cater to John's appetite; by this plain, economic fact, that it is his food she is cooking, and by the sexuo-economic fact that "the way to a man's heart is through his stomach." For profit and for love—to do her duty and to gain her ends—in all ways, the home cook is forced to do her home cooking to please John. It is no wonder John clings so ardently to the custom. Never again on earth will he have a whole live private cook to himself, to consider, before anything else, his special tastes and preferences. He will get better food, and he will have to get used to it. His tastes will be elevated by the quality of the food, instead of the quality of the food being adapted solely to his tastes. To the children, again, the mother caters under direct pressure of personal affection. It is very, very hard to resist the daily, yea, tri-daily, demands of those we love.

It is this steady, alluring effort of subservient love which keeps us still so primitively self-indulgent in our food habits. The mother-love of a dumb animal may teach her what is right for her young to eat, but it does not teach the human mother. Ask any doctor, any trained nurse, anyone who has watched the children of the poor. If the children of the rich are more wisely fed, it is not because of any greater amount of mother-love, but of some degree of mother-education. Motherhood and wifehood do not teach cooking.

What we need in our system of feeding the world is not instinct, affection, and duty, but knowledge, practice, and business methods. Those who are fitted by natural skill and liking to be cooks should cook, and many should profit by their improved products. Scientific training, free from the tender pressure of home habits, would soon eliminate our worst viands; and, from the wide choice offered by a general field of patronage, there would appear in time a cultivated taste. Greater freedom for personal idiosyncrasy would be given in this general field of choice, yet a simpler average would undoubtedly be formed. Great literature and great music were never developed when the bard performed for his master only.