“This is one of the many wild statements of Dr. Leete”, Mr. Forest answered. “Who is sweeping the rooms, making the beds, cleaning the windows, dusting the furniture, scrubbing the floors? I have no doubt that Dr. Leete’s family is an exception, because women of the industrial army do a great deal, if not all, this work in the house of the leader of the administration party. Have you ever seen Mrs. Leete or Miss Edith doing any housework of the kind I have mentioned”?
I had to confess that I never had, and, indeed, Miss Edith had never done anything except arrange a bunch of flowers. If she were a member of the industrial army, it must be in a capacity, where there was but very little work to do. She had never mentioned that she had duties to perform, and I remembered that Dr. Leete had once spoken of his daughter as an indefatigable shopper[24], thus indicating that she had much spare time.
[24] Page 99.
“In the houses occupied by the rank and file of our industrial army the women have no help from other members of the auxiliary corps (the women of the industrial army). These women have to do all the work I have mentioned, and for them the cooking in the public eating houses is not such a great help as Dr. Leete seems to believe”, began Mr. Forest. “These women have to change their dresses three times a day, for they cannot appear at the table in the wrapper they wear while working at home, and they have to wash and dress their children, if they have any. And I am inclined to believe that by having the cooking done in the public eating houses, a great deal of material is squandered that would be saved in a private house. Besides, the public cooking houses have to prepare a large bill of fare, and there is, as a matter of course, a great deal left over that can not be used afterwards.—Therefore, the women who are members of the industrial army find actually very little time to do any work besides the labor connected with housekeeping, and the majority of them would rather do the cooking at home. They could do it while busy with their housework, without losing more time than the dressing and undressing for breakfast, dinner and supper consume. And the complaint has frequently been made that families with many children would fare much better, and the mothers of such families save much time if the cooking were done at home. When there is sickness in the family, it is very annoying to the healthy members to be obliged to go to the eating houses to procure proper food for the invalid. A Mrs. Hosmer said to me the other day, she and her seven children had frequently missed a meal, because she could not wash all her little ones and dress herself and the children in time”.
“How do you employ the married women”? I asked.
“This is a very weak point in our social system”, Mr. Forest replied. “Most of the married women do not at all relish doing outside work, and they make all kinds of excuses to avoid it. Trouble with their children and personal indisposition are frequently used as excuses for the absence of married women from their positions in the industrial army”.
“I suppose it is very difficult, even for the physicians, to ascertain whether such statements are well founded or not”, I remarked.
“Of course, in the majority of cases it is impossible to make the charge of shamming and prove it”, Mr. Forest continued. “It is this trouble with the married women, and their excuses that their small children prevent them doing any duty in the industrial army, that the radical Communists are using in support of their demand for the abolition of private housekeeping. The Radicals claim that their system would be more prosperous than ours. It would be much cheaper to lodge hundreds or thousands under one roof, than to have houses for one, two or three families. They furthermore claim that if marriages were abolished and free love introduced as the principle governing the relations of the two sexes, the passing alliances of men and women would produce better children than the offspring of the present marriages. These children would be kept and nursed, after they had passed their first year, in large nurseries, so that the mothers would have nothing to do with them and could attend all day to their work as members of the industrial army”.
“How beastly are these theories”! I exclaimed. “To establish all human institutions, the relations of the sexes, simply on a basis of calculation, and to separate the mothers from their children, because it is cheaper to raise two hundred mammifers by the bulk even if the mortality should be ten and twenty percent larger”!