McKeever: Farm Boys and Girls, pages 26-36.
Lee: Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy, pages 123-184.
Folks: Care of Destitute and Neglected Children.
CHAPTER VIII[ToC]
HOME ECONOMICS
64. The Economic Function of the Home.—Up to this point the domestic function of the family has been under consideration. Marriage and parenthood must hold first place, because they are fundamental to the family and to the welfare of the race. But the family has an economic as well as a domestic function. The primitive instinct of hunger finds satisfaction in the home, and economic needs are supplied in clothing, shelter, and bodily comforts. Production, distribution, and consumption are all a part of the life of the farm. Domestic economy is the foundation of all economics, and the family on the farm presents the fundamental principles and phenomena that belong to the science of economics as it presents the fundamentals of sociology. The hunger for food demands satisfaction even more insistently than the mating instinct. Birds must eat while they woo each other and build their nests, and when the nest is full of helpless young both parents find their time occupied in foraging for food. Similarly, when human mating is over and the family hearth is built, and especially when children have entered into the home life, the main occupation of man and wife is to provide maintenance for the family. The need of food, clothing, and shelter is common to the race. The requirements of the family determine largely both the amount and the kind of work that is done to meet them. However broad and elevated may be the interests of the modern gentleman and his cultured wife, they cannot forget that the physical needs of their family are as insistent as those of the unrefined day laborer.
65. Primitive Economics.—In primitive times the family provided everything for itself. In forest and field man and woman foraged for food, cooked it at the camp-fire that they made, and rested under a temporary shelter. If they required clothing they robbed the wild beasts of their hide and fur or wove an apron of vegetable fibre. Physical wants were few and required comparatively little labor. In the pastoral stage the flocks and herds provided food and clothing. Under the patriarchal system the woman was the economic slave. She was goatherd and milkmaid, fire-tender and cook, tailor and tent-maker. It was she who coaxed the grains to grow in the first cultivated field, and experimented with the first kitchen garden. She was the dependable field-hand for the sowing and reaping, when agriculture became the principal means of subsistence. But woman's position has steadily improved. She is no longer the slave but the helper. The peasant woman of Europe still works in the fields, but American women long ago confined themselves to indoor tasks, except in the gathering of special crops like cotton and cranberries. Home economics have taught the advantage of division of labor and co-operation.