This old-fashioned word is used here to include the methods and processes connected with the actual work of the house, excepting the cookery, sewing, and laundering, which have fuller treatment elsewhere. This department of household management is a combination of sanitation and the economics of labor.
Order in place.—Keep articles of a kind together conveniently arranged in places set apart for them, these places to be easily accessible. Make an inventory of household goods in a card file,—household linen, personal apparel, including lists of clothing put away for summer or winter, dishes, and valuables. Each housekeeper must make a scheme that suits her own needs, but a few suggestions may be helpful.
Keep bed linen and towels, piled preferably on shelves, near bedrooms and bathrooms, marked and numbered. Put the clean underneath when they come from the laundry.
Clothing should be kept in an orderly way by each member of the family. Winter clothing and furs should be cleansed for putting away, protected from moths by wrapping in paper, hanging in tar bags, putting in cedar chests, or in trunks with some strong odored substances,—moth balls or cedar oil. Camphor is too expensive. Summer clothing should be washed and put away unstarched and unironed.
Dishes and silver should be carefully arranged in very definite places, and counted often enough to keep account of breakage and loss.
Fig. 79.—Madam, who keeps your house? Courtesy of the Woman’s City Club, Chicago.
Brooms, brushes, dusters, and cleansing materials should have a place of their own, well ventilated when possible, and all articles put away clean.
Order in work and division of labor.—This depends so largely upon the number of workers, and upon the equipment of the house that no definite plan can be made for all. The question must be differently answered for the woman who has a helper one day a week, or with one or two, or with a large staff of workers. However, there should be some definite plan for the days of the week and the hours of the day, and some division of work among the members of the family or between the family and paid helpers. The young people of the family should each have some regular piece of work, at least in their own rooms; and the paid helpers should have a definite plan given them, including some hours to themselves, as regular as possible. There are emergencies that upset even the most perfect system, and these must be met as they come, but a fair amount of work at regular times should be the system.