{71}
It is not merely as the adviser about household matters that the visitor can be helpful to the homemaker. Many women in poor neighborhoods lead starved, sordid lives, and long for genuine friendliness and sympathy. A friend who would be helpful to them must exercise the same self-restraint that our own friends exercise with us. The friends who encourage us to exaggerate our troubles and difficulties are not our best friends: theirs is a friendship that tends to weaken our moral fibre. But the sympathy that the poor need and all of us need is the sympathy that makes us feel stronger, the sympathy that is farthest removed from sentimentality. We should be willing to listen patiently to the homemaker's troubles, and should strive to see the world from her point of view, but at the same time we should help her to take a cheerful and courageous tone. One unfailing help, when our poor friends dwell too much upon their own troubles, is to tell them ours. Here, too, indirect suggestion is powerful. The wife, in her attitude toward husband and children, will unconsciously imitate our own attitude {72} toward them. As Miss Jane Addams says, if the visitor kisses the baby and makes much of it, the mother will do the same. A Baltimore visitor has cured one tired woman of scolding her husband in season and out of season by diverting her attention to other things, and by seeking her coöperation in plans for improving the man's habits.
A New York visitor tells of a woman living in a two-room tenement who is regarded as a marvel by her husband's friends because she makes a point of having a specially good meal one night in the week, and it is understood that her husband can bring his friends home to supper on that night without giving her warning. The home is very humble, but she has learned the wisdom of making it a real home for her husband, and one that he can be proud of.
So far, I have ignored the fact that, in the poor home, the woman is often the breadwinner as well as the homemaker. I wish it were possible to ignore the further fact that charitable visitors, finding it difficult to get work for the man or finding him disinclined {73} to take it, will bestir themselves to get work for the woman instead. One of the few rules which it is safe to follow blindly is the rule that we should not encourage any woman to become the breadwinner who has an able-bodied, unemployed man in the house. "Only harm can result," says Mrs. Lowell, "if efforts are made to induce the woman to leave her home daily for work."
Where the breadwinner is disabled, or the woman is a deserted wife or widow, work is, of course, necessary. We must distinguish, however, between the deserted wife and the wife whose husband chronically deserts her, until her condition attracts the charitable help that he returns to share. Widows with children belong to a class with which charity has dealt too harshly in the past. When the woman is incapable of supporting all her children, and this is usually the case, charity has either allowed her family to depend upon insufficient doles and so drift into beggary, or else has put all the children in orphanages. If the mother is a good mother, capable with help of rearing her children to independence and {74} self-support, this latter is not only a cruel but a wasteful method. As charity becomes more discriminating and resourceful, it will be possible to organize pensions for widows of this class, though these pensions will need the careful oversight of a visitor, who should see that the children are taught to bear the family burden as they become older.
There is great diversity of opinion about the value of mothers' meetings for women whose home duties prevent them from attending church on Sunday. If these meetings confined themselves to providing what the church service provides,—a chance for spiritual uplifting and refreshment,—there could be no possible objection to them; but, unfortunately, many mothers' meetings strive to attract and hold members by such small devices as paying them for very bad sewing, or making small gifts, or selling things below cost. These attractions, small as they are, lead many women to neglect their home duties, and it is no unusual thing for one woman to belong to three mothers' meetings of three different denominations, which take her away {75} from home three afternoons in the week. The atmosphere of patronage and "sprinkling charity" that is so common in these meetings, distinctly lowers the self-respect of the women; before very long they learn to write begging notes or send begging messages to "the ladies" in charge, and the place that should be for them a source of spiritual strength becomes merely a source of supplies.
Collateral Readings: "The Lustig's" and "Corinna's Fiametta," Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer in "One Man who was Content and Other Stories." "Practical Sanitary and Economic Cooking" (adapted to persons of moderate and small means), Mrs. Mary Hinman Abel, published by American Public Health Association, Rochester, N.Y. "Foods: Nutritive Value and Cost," by W. O. Atwater in Farmer's Bulletin No. 23 of United States Department of Agriculture. "Dietary Studies in New York City," W. O. Atwater and Charles D. Woods in Bulletin No. 46 of United States Department of Agriculture. The Health Department of New York City will soon publish leaflets prepared by experts, which will contain simple directions about buying and preparing food. "The Le Play Method of Social Observation," "American Journal of Sociology," Vol. II, No. 1. "Treatment of Widows and Dependent Children," Mrs. L. Wolcott in Proceedings of Fifteenth National Conference of Charities, pp. 137 sq. "Girls in a Factory Valley," Mrs. Lillie B. Chace Wyman in "Atlantic," Vol. LXXVIII, pp. 391 sq. and 506 sq.
[1] Mrs. Roger Wolcott in Proceedings of International Congress of Charities at Chicago, Volume on "Organization of Charities," p. 110.
{76}