Rural school with flower bed. Many of the rural schools are doing excellent work in teaching children to beautify the school grounds
With the house built and ready for its furniture, the selection of the latter becomes both part of the scheme of decoration and part also of the domestic plans for securing comfort and inspiring surroundings. The same principles of beauty and utility, restfulness, comfort, and suitability, are called into requisition. The trained housewife will have an eye toward future dusting and will choose the less ornate articles. The same person, in her capacity as the mother of citizens, will see that chairs are comfortable to sit in, that tables and desks are the right height for work, that book cases and cabinets are sufficient in number and size to take care of the family treasures. She will use pictures sparingly and choose them to inspire. Perhaps, most of all, the woman with the trained mind will know how to avoid a superfluity of furniture in her rooms. She will be educated to the beauty of well-planned spaces and will not feel obliged to fill every nook and corner with chairs or tables or sofas or other pieces of furniture which merely "fill the space."
Photograph by Brown Bros.
An artistic living room. The principles of beauty and utility, restfulness, comfort, and suitability, must all be considered in the furnishing of a home
Before furnishing is considered complete, the housekeeper must take into account the matter of operating apparatus. Perhaps a large part of this important department of house equipment has been built into the house. The water system, the sewer connection or its substitute, and the lighting apparatus are already installed, so that the turn of a switch or a faucet, the pull of a chain, sets one or all to work for us. We are now to consider whether we shall buy a vacuum cleaner or a broom and dustpan; a washing machine and electric flatiron or the services of a washerwoman, or shall telephone the laundry to call for the wash. Shall we invest in a "home steam-canning outfit" at ten dollars, or make up a list for the retailer of the products of the canning factory? Shall we have a sewing machine, or plan to buy our clothing from "the store"?
Once upon a time practically the only labor-saving device possible to the housekeeping woman was another woman. To-day many devices are offered to take her place. Our homemaker must know about them, and must compare their value with the older piece of operating machinery, the domestic servant. She must know what it costs to keep a servant, in money, in responsibility, and in all the various ways which cannot be reduced to figures.
Already the pros and cons of the "servant question" have caused much and long-continued agitation. The woman of the future should be taught to approach the matter with a scientific summing up of the facts and with a readiness to lift domestic service to a standardized vocation or to abandon it altogether in favor of the "labor-saving devices" and the "public utilities." Certain of our home-efficiency experts assure us that all "industries in the home are doomed." If this is true, the domestic servant must of necessity cease to exist. Most persons, however, cannot yet see how "public utilities" will be able to do all of our work. We may send the washing out, but we cannot send out the beds to be made, the eggs to be boiled, or the pictures, chairs, and window sills to be dusted. The table must be set at home, and the dishes washed there, until we approach the day of communal eating places, which, as we all know, will be difficult to utilize for infants and the aged, for invalids, and for the vast army of those who are averse to faring forth three times daily in search of food. For a long time yet the domestic servant, or her substitute, will be with us, doing the work that even so great a power as "public utilities" cannot remove from the home.
Photograph by Brown Bros.