The many avenues now open to women for public work entail on them the responsibility of fitting themselves for that work. They as much as, if not more than, the housewife need to study the sciences which treat of the safeguarding of human life. As councillors dealing with sanitary and building laws, as inspectors of workrooms, of institutions, and of the conditions of child-life, they owe it to themselves and to the community they 120 serve not to undertake those duties without adequate knowledge. Adequate knowledge must be taken to mean scientific knowledge of those matters of which, by offering themselves for such appointments, they assume an expert knowledge. It is an irony that scientific training should be willingly and even eagerly acquired when it is a question of qualifying for a salaried post for work among strangers, and that a mother should be content to bring to bear on the well-being and lives of her own circle unscientific and amateur experience.
We have only been able to touch the skirt of a great subject, but our end will have been achieved if we have succeeded in pointing the way for a fuller realisation of the aims of earnest men and women for the saving of child-life and the mitigation of disease, and if we have shown how great that subject is—how much too great for anything but the most superficial treatment in a single article.
THE ECONOMIC RELATIONS OF THE HOUSEHOLD
By MABEL ATKINSON, M.A. (Glasgow)
I. INTRODUCTORY
The household has been treated by economists with curious negligence. The founder of political economy showed so little insight into the real nature of the work carried on there as to class those whom he described as menial servants with unproductive labourers.[13] The later classical economists have followed his lead. Marshall, it is true, shows throughout his books an appreciation of the position and responsibilities of the housewife and the mother which is foreign to most of his colleagues.[14] But he has never attempted to analyse the economic functions of the household, or to show its varying relations to the rest of the community; neither has he pointed out the peculiar factors which differentiate the position 124 and remuneration of the women employed in domestic activities from those of all other workers. On the other hand, the more modern school of economists, those who devote themselves to the history of economic development in the past or to the intensive study of special economic institutions in the present, have equally failed to discuss with any adequacy the organisation of the household.
The economic historians describe with minuteness the rise and fall of gilds and chartered companies, the workings of different methods of education and of poor relief in successive epochs. They rarely indicate how the various forms of industrial organisation translated themselves into the domestic expenditure of the people. It would, for instance, be very difficult to extract from the pages of the economic historians an answer to the question, “What were the conditions determining the supply of domestic servants at the close of the Middle Ages, in the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century respectively?” It is not easy to answer definitely even simpler and more fundamental questions than these. It is often stated, for example, that the household arrangements of the serfs on the mediæval manors were rude and uncomfortable to the last degree,[15] but it is certain that this is not so universally true as has been thought. Some at all events of the more 125 prosperous inhabitants of the manors possessed household furniture and equipments of a kind not inferior to the outfit of the casual labourer to-day. Sheets, for example, are mentioned several times in extant inventories. But much more investigation than has yet been possible would be necessary before it could be determined whether these instances of a higher standard of comfort are or are not exceptions to a general rule.
To take other instances of unsettled problems: How was pottery made in the Middle Ages—by travelling potters as in the East to-day, by gilds of potters, or by the inhabitants of the manor directly for their own use? Or again: When did the custom of building houses to let on rent first become general in England? It is clear that the habit of living in rented houses has and must have the most profound influence on family life and national character. But so far, neither from economic histories on the one hand nor from histories of architecture on the other, have I been able to obtain any reliable information on this point.
When one turns to even more important questions—such, for instance, as the industrial position of women at different epochs—it is equally difficult to obtain precise and detailed knowledge. Without a very lengthy and elaborate investigation of the extant original materials, many of them scattered in municipal chambers in distant parts of England, it would be quite impossible to say on what terms women were admitted as members of 126 the gilds and fraternities which extended over the whole area of industrial life in the Middle Ages. The character and organisation of the household and the position of women in the Middle Ages are subjects still practically untouched by the economic historians.[16]