Domestic service

by Lucy Maynard Salmon

So much has progress up to this time been hindered by this inactivity in the household, and so great is the interdependence of all parts of the household, that it seems necessary to consider somewhat more in detail the causes of this condition.

Inactivity in all household affairs has largely come from three things. It has in the first place been generally believed that a knowledge of all things pertaining to the house and home, unlike anything else, comes by instinct. It is assumed that the housekeeper is born with an intuitive knowledge of the right proportions of all materials to be used in cooking—this knowledge sometimes supplemented by an inherited cook-book and one purchased to aid a benevolent society soliciting funds for a charitable purpose. Her knowledge of the mental, moral, and physical training to be given her children is also to be gained through instinct and experience and the traditions handed down with regard to her own family. Instinct may sometimes be dormant, and experience prove an expensive schoolmaster through the exaction of heavy fees, but no other avenue of information has been open to her. Again, a very large proportion of all moneys spent for legitimate household purposes passes through the hands of housekeepers; yet no thorough investigation on an extensive scale has ever been carried on in regard to the expenditure made within or for the household. Few women when they assume the care of a household know the exact value of the household plant; the amount to be deducted each year for wear and tear; the relative proportions expended annually for rent, fuel, food, clothing, and service; the number of meals served and the approximate cost of each; the amount of profit, waste, or unproductiveness that results from all expenditures made. Every manufacturer, every business man knows the value of his plant, its increasing or diminishing value, the cost of materials used and of service employed. This information constitutes a part of the intellectual capital with which he begins business; he does not acquire it by instinct or tradition, but by careful and exact study of all the factors involved. It is difficult to see how a household can be successfully carried on except through the application of the same principles. If we turn to the construction and decoration of the house, ignorance, masquerading as instinct, quite as often prevails. It is true we have houses in which we live, many of them expensive and artistic, yet as a rule little or no attention is paid in their construction to the specific use each of the several parts is to serve. Libraries are built with little or no regard to the place to be occupied in them by book-shelves, desk, or library table, and no attention is paid to the question of the best methods of providing them with natural and artificial light. Drawing-rooms and parlors are built without a place for a piano, dining-rooms without regard to the position of a sideboard, butlers’ pantries without an entrance to the kitchen, kitchens with absolutely no regard to the conveniences of the work to be carried on there, and bedrooms with no normal place for a bed, bureau, or dressing-table. Something has of late been done in deference to public sentiment towards applying the principles of sanitation to the construction of public and private buildings, yet much still remains to be done, both in the investigation of the principles and in their application. Many of our private homes are pleasing to the eye, yet if we accept that definition of art which considers that it is its highest province to serve best the useful, many of the so-called artistic homes must be otherwise classed. Before improvement can be looked for in any of these directions, the position must be abandoned that the household, or any single part of it, can be managed by instinct.

A second explanation of the prevailing inactivity in regard to household affairs arises from the fact that it is always assumed that these subjects concern only women. The husband of the family often excuses his absolute ignorance of the affairs of his own household by the lame apology, “I leave all these things to my wife and daughters.” It is certainly not the intention in such remarks to belittle the affairs of the household, yet that is the natural and inevitable result. A knowledge of household affairs has never been considered a part of a liberal education as is a knowledge of literature, science, and politics, but when it is so regarded by men as well as by women a great gain will have been made. Moreover, it must be said that the natural tastes of some men would lead them to take up housekeeping as an occupation, as the natural tastes of some women lead them into different kinds of business. Inactivity in the household will cease when the arbitrary pressure is removed that now tacitly compels many women to become housekeepers in violence to their natural tastes, and at the same time prevents any man whose abilities lie in this direction from giving them scope. The time must come when each person will take up the work in life for which he or she is best adapted, be it the care of a house for a man or business for a woman, when it will cease to be a matter of odium for the husband to direct the affairs of the house and for the wife to be the breadwinner. When the fact is everywhere recognized that both men and women have a vital concern in the affairs of the house, the relation between the different parts of the household will become an organic one, and its highest development reached.

A third explanation of this inactivity in the household is the belief that all women have a natural taste for household affairs, which without cultivation grows into positive genius for carrying them on. But a young man with a genius for law or medicine is not only not expected, he is not permitted, to exercise his untrained genius in legal and medical cases. The greater the genius he gives promise of, the more careful, systematic, and prolonged is the training he receives. In a similar way the woman with a natural taste for housekeeping duties is the one who should have most training in them, while in no other way can an interest in such duties be created in women who have not an inborn love of them.

These three common errors—that a knowledge of housekeeping affairs is a matter of inspiration, that men have no active interest in the management of a household, and that all women have a natural love for such affairs which supplies the place of training—are perhaps sufficient explanation of the present lack of all opportunity for the investigation of the household in a professional way.

It has always been assumed, and asserted without fear of contradiction, that the best place to learn everything pertaining to the household is the home. But the same change must come here as has already come in the profession of medicine and in nearly every other department of knowledge. The period is not remote when every housekeeper made, as well as administered, the family tonics, bitters, pills, salves, and liniments, and every household contained a copy of Every Man his Own Practitioner. Happily that day has passed and the era of scientific investigation and practice of medicine has dawned. It was once assumed that an adequate knowledge of law could be obtained by any young man who spent six months in reading law in any lawyer’s office. But the leading members of the bar to-day have been trained in less haphazard ways. It was formerly believed that any person could be fitted for a librarian by doing the routine work of librarian’s assistant in a small country library. Such training has been supplanted by library schools open only to college graduates and offering a two years’ course of study. Less than a hundred years ago boys and girls of sixteen or seventeen years of age began teaching without even a high school education, while the tendency to-day is everywhere to insist not only on advanced academic but also on professional training. The system of apprenticeship is everywhere being supplanted by systematic, technical training given by experts.

There is evidence that this same spirit is slowly invading the household. Cooking schools are springing up that teach all the intricacies of the science “in ten easy lessons,” while the lecturer on cooking with her demonstration lessons has found her way into nearly every town. Sewing is taught in the public schools, and the free kitchen garden is following fast in the train of the free kindergarten. All this is good in its way, but it is superficial work. No permanent advance will be made as long as only those schools are found that teach simply the mechanical parts of housekeeping. New recipes for salads and puddings, new ways of cleaning brass and silver, new methods of caring for hard-wood floors—all these may be helpful in a sense, but the knowledge of these and a thousand other mechanical contrivances will never put the household on a scientific basis and turn its face towards progress.

One thing, and only one thing, will turn the household into the channels where every other occupation has made advancement. This is the establishment of a great professional school, amply equipped for the investigation of all matters pertaining to the household and open only to graduates of the leading colleges and universities of the country. This work cannot and should not be done by the college. The college offers courses in physiology and hygiene, but the college graduate is permitted to practice medicine only after a long and thorough course in a medical school. The college offers courses in constitutional law, but the college student is admitted to the bar only after technical training in the law school. The college offers courses in chemistry and economics, but the college student who expects to have the care of a home should prepare herself for this work by technical study of all that concerns the household. The mechanical parts of housekeeping can be learned in the home, providing the head of the household herself understands the intricacies of the mechanism over which she has charge, and has the gift of imparting knowledge. These assumptions, however, cannot always be made, nor can it be assumed that even all the mechanical parts of housekeeping can be learned in any single home any more than that all forms of library work can be learned from a single library. Some of these mechanical parts of housekeeping can be learned in the kitchen-garden, the public school, the cooking school, but progress is never made by treadmill methods, by mechanical repetition, by giving attention only to those things already known. Professional training and investigation must supplement home and collegiate instruction in the case of the housekeeper, as the professional school supplements private and collegiate instruction for the physician, the lawyer, and the clergyman.

The household has been up to this time a terra incognita. Until but yesterday absolutely nothing had been done in any educational institution towards investigating its past history, its present condition, its future needs. The beginning has scarcely been made, although the field for such investigation is limitless. Comparatively little is known of artistic house-building and furnishing, scarcely more of household sanitation[327] and the chemistry of foods,[328] even less of the economic principles underlying the household; fashion, not art, governs every question of costume, while, with a few notable exceptions, Porter’s Development of the Human Intellect contains the sum and substance of our knowledge of the mental development of children. Years of patient, laborious, unremitting investigation must be given to all household affairs before any appreciable advance can be made by them. The historical and scientific investigation of all the great subjects of art, economics, chemistry, physiology, and psychology in their application to the household, and the publication of the results of these investigations, would not indeed settle to-morrow all the difficulties that arise to-day in regard to household affairs; but such investigation and publication would take the subject out of the domain of sentiment and transfer it to a realm where reason and judgment have the control. Household affairs would in time come to receive the respect now accorded the learned professions. Household service, instead of being taken up as a last resort by those who themselves say “have not education enough to do anything else,” would be dignified into a profession that would attract large numbers who now seek other occupations.