What if the apparent motion is toward cells to sleep in, and clubs to play bridge in, and amusements for evenings, and a strenuous business life, run on piratical principles, into which the women are drawn as decoy ducks? Because this is, is it going to be, as soon as a good proportion of the thinking people stand face to face with the problem? I believe it is possible to solve the problem, but only if the aid of scientifically trained women is brought into service to work in harmony with the engineer who has already accomplished so much.
Household engineering is the great need for material welfare, and social engineering for moral and ethical well-being. What else does this persistent forcing of scientific training to the front mean? If the State is to have good citizens, productive human beings, it must provide for the teaching of the essentials to those who are to become the parents of the next generation. No state can thrive while its citizens waste their resources of health, bodily energy, time and brain power, any more than a nation may prosper that wastes its natural resources.
The teaching of domestic economy in the elementary school and home economics in the higher is intended to give the people a sense of control over their environment and to avert a panic as to the future.
The economics of consumption, including as it does the ethics of spending, must have a place in our higher education, preceded in earlier grades by manual dexterity and scientific information, which will lead to true economy in the use of time, energy, and money in the home life of the land. Education is obliged to take cognizance of the need, because the ideal American homestead, that place of busy industry, with occupation for the dozen children, no longer exists. Gone out of it are the industries, gone out of it are ten of the children, gone out of it in large measure is that sense of moral and religious responsibility which was the keystone of the whole.
The methods of work imposed by housing conditions are wasteful of time, energy, and money, and the people are restive, they know not why. As was said earlier, shelter was found by early students of social conditions to be most in need of remedy, so we see that
“In the first place the state is beginning to offer positive aid to secure a suitable home for each family. A communistic habitation forces the members of a family to conform insensibly to communistic modes of thought. Paul Goehre, in his keen observations printed in ‘Three Months in a German Workshop,’ interpreted this tendency in all clearness. The architecture of a city tenement house is to blame for the silent but certain transformation of the home into a sty. Instead of accepting this condition as inevitable, like a law of nature, and accepting its consequences, all experience demands of those who believe in the monogamic family, that they make a united and persistent fight on the evil which threatens the slowly acquired qualities secured in the highest form of the family. It would be unworthy of us to permit a great part of a modern population to descend again to the animal level from which the race has ascended only through æons of struggle and difficulty. When we remember that very much, perhaps most of the progress has been dearly purchased at the cost of women, by the appeal of her weakness and need and motherhood, we must all the more firmly resolve not to yield the field to a temporary effect of a needless result of neglect and avarice. As the evil conditions are merely the work of unwise and untaught communities, the cure will come from education of the same communities in wisdom and science and duty. What man has marred, man can make better.”[18]
It is not impossible to furnish a decent habitation for every productive laborer in all our great cities. Many really humane people are overawed by the authority, the pompous and powerful assertions of “successful” men of affairs; and they often sleep while such men are forming secret conspiracies against national health and morality with the aid of legal talent hired to kill. Only when the social mind and conscience is educated and the entire community becomes intelligent and alert can legislation be secured which places all competitors on a level where humanity is possible.
Here, again, the monogamic family is the social interest at stake. It is a conflict for altars and fires. We are told that all these results are the effect of a natural, uniform tendency in the progress of the business world, and that it is useless to combat it. Professor Henderson reminds us that tendency to uniformity revealed by statistics may be reversed when resolute men and women, possessed of higher ideals, unite to resist it. Jacob A. Riis holds that these evils are not by a decree of fate, but are the result of positive wrong, and he dedicates his “Ten Years’ War” as follows—“to the faint-hearted and those of little faith.”
In like manner we call today for more faith in a way out of the slough of despond, more resolute endeavor to improve social and economic conditions. We beg the leaders of public opinion to pause before they condemn the efforts making to teach those means of social control which may build yet again a home life that will prove the nursery of good citizens and of efficient men and women with a sense of responsibility to God and man for the use they make of their lives.