For 150 years after the death of Elizabeth no startling changes occur in the organisation of the household or in its economic relations. The marked feature of this period is the existence of domestic manufactures, engaging the head of the household and his family, one or two apprentices, and sometimes a journeyman or two. It was common, indeed all but universal, for the small master manufacturers to board and lodge their employees, as it was common for farmers to board and lodge their labourers. The larger households carried on at home many of the operations—baking, brewing, washing, jam-making—which have now passed to the factory. There was a steady growth of domestic luxury and of convenience. The development of commerce made available new commodities, such as tea, coffee, cocoa, and thereby influenced social life. Furniture became more elegant, and perhaps at the same time more stuffy.
It would require much reading and research to elaborate the details of this progress, and for our present purpose it is hardly necessary, as it involved alteration in particulars but not in the general organisation of household economy. The difficulties of finding domestic servants begin, however, to make themselves felt, and are amusingly discussed by such writers as Defoe and Swift. It is at some time during this period that houses are first built in terraces and squares on 164 an identical plan for letting purposes. But there are no sweeping changes, such as mark the eighty years before the accession of Victoria.
(3) The Influence of the Second Industrial Revolution on the Home
In the last half of the eighteenth century agriculture and industry were once more revolutionised, the former by the introduction of capitalist farming, the rotation of crops, and the further enclosure of common fields, commons, and wastes, the latter by the introduction of machinery and mechanical motor power. For a detailed account of the enormous changes consequent on these new methods of production, I must refer the reader to the special treatises on the subject,[64] but we must spend some time in considering the ways in which the home, family life, and the position of women have been modified by these industrial developments.
In the first place, the introduction of machinery meant the growth of the factory system, and in consequence work left the home, which ceased to be the institution where productive industry was carried on, and became instead a centre solely of emotional and domestic life. At the same time, the alteration in the land system made it impossible 165 any longer to combine home weaving, spinning, &c. with subsistence farming; the worker becomes an employee in a business where the capital is owned by his employer, and he depends absolutely on the skill of his own hands for his livelihood.
Nothing could be more curious than to contrast Defoe’s celebrated picture of the wool-weaving districts of Yorkshire[65] with those districts in their present condition. Then the workers, semi-independent, farming small enclosures of two to six or seven acres, laboriously produced cloth by hand processes in their own houses. Now they work in enormous factories, fitted up with machinery which can spin and weave wool both easier and better than in earlier days. They return to their homes for rest and leisure alone. Work for wages and the home are now separated, and, unless the use of cheap electrical power brings about a counter-revolution, are likely to remain so. At the same time, since mobility is in modern 166 economic conditions of prime importance, it is becoming less and less common for the manual worker, or indeed for the citizen of any class, to own his house, and therefore the new trade of the speculative builder comes into existence, its place being taken in some cases, specially in mining districts, by the “company” houses provided by masters for their employees.
These alterations in the framework of society inevitably influenced home life, which was still further affected at a later period by an analogous movement. Not merely the work done for wages left the home, but also many of the commodities formerly produced for its own use by each household came to be made by outside labour.
A very interesting and quite untouched field of inquiry here awaits the economist. Why, for instance, is it customary to bake bread at home in some districts and to buy it from a shop in others? Probably the explanation is to be found in the relative cheapness of fuel. Yorkshire and the North of England are close to abundant coalfields, and in the days before cheap and quick transit the difference in the price of coal in the South and North of England must have been even greater. At a time, too, before the improvement of ovens, owing to the introduction of the iron range and kitchener, the amount of fuel used for baking bread would be even larger than at present. Therefore in the south there grew up a race of housekeepers and servants unskilled in the making of the delicious, crusty home-baked loaf, while in 167 the north, even though conditions have changed, the tradition still remains, and the weekly or bi-weekly baking day is a regular institution. But this theory does not explain why bread is not baked at home in Scotland, even in Glasgow and the districts near it, or in Fife, which are all situated right in the coal-bearing areas.
And at present there is little material for describing how brewing, jam and cake-making, biscuit-making, the making and the washing of clothes, the cleaning of furniture and carpets, &c., passed from the household to the factory and laundry. It is a process which has evidently been much quickened by the growth of town life, itself one of the most important effects of the industrial revolution.[66]
The aggregation of population in towns in the first place made the space available for household operations much smaller than was the case when the kitchen was supplemented by rows of outhouses, a green and a garden. In modern conditions, washing at home results in the discomfort of the whole family, whether that family lives in a single room or in a decent middle-class house of ten or twelve rooms. In the second place, the 168 massing into a comparatively small area of a homogeneous population makes it easy to arrange for other methods of cleansing clothes, either in the working-class districts by the provision of municipal washing-houses, or in the more well-to-do suburbs through the appearance of steam laundries. In the same way, when each household possessed a garden it was natural to pick the fruit and make it into jam. It is a different thing to buy fruit specially for the purpose. Many housewives find that when the cost of the fruit, sugar, and extra fuel is calculated, taking into account also the dislocation of the regular routine of the household caused by the extra work, it pays them better to buy the jam ready-made. On the other hand, the use of machinery, the existence of cheap methods of transit, and the multiplication of grocers’ shops makes it increasingly possible to produce jam in large quantities actually cheaper than it can be made at home, and to distribute it quickly to the consumer.