Household Administration, Its Place in the Higher Education of Women

by Unknown

The second great distinction is that while any other business may expand to meet the demands of a growing market, and as a result of the increasing competency of its organiser and work-people, the household is definitely limited in scope by the numbers of the family included within it. Biscuit-makers or jam-makers, to put the matter concretely, may succeed by skilful management in enlarging their businesses until they supply their goods to hundreds of thousands of people, and earn a large profit by doing so. But the most efficient housekeeper continues all her life to organise and cater for the same number of people, and her reward for her good management does not consist in a raised salary or increased profits. It is, in fact, not pecuniary at all, but is the increased well-being of those whom she serves.

Important consequences follow from these two distinctions, some of them desirable, others the reverse. The household is preserved, as it were, as a little oasis in the midst of the surrounding commercialism. There at least exists no temptation to adulteration or sophistication, or to shoddy work intended to sell but not to last. No housewife would be such a fool as to put alum in the bread baked at home, to use decaying fruit in the tarts, or questionable meat in her pies. She can 178 have no object save to provide the best she can for her family with the means at her disposal. This is an enormous advantage, the value of which it is hardly possible to overrate.

But the absence of profit-making has certain disadvantages. It means that while other economic organisations are being constantly spurred to increasing efficiency by the stimulus of competition, the household remains backward. A manufacturer knows to-day that he must use the most up-to-date machinery and employ the most skilled management or be beaten in the race for commercial supremacy. But housekeepers may continue (and do continue) to use old-fashioned ranges or antiquated systems of hot-water heating without any reference to the proceedings of their neighbours. Without doubt it results that new inventions make their way much more slowly in housekeeping than in profit-making industry. How rare, for instance, it is to find properly constructed grates outside very wealthy households. How badly the kitchen, larder, and scullery are planned in relation to one another. In how few cases is any attempt made to utilise electricity for cooking or removing dust, for both of which purposes admirable machines are already on the market.

But there are other factors which also contribute to the backwardness of domestic engineering. The smallness of the household is one. It pays a large hotel, for instance, to buy special machines for cleaning knives, or to instal superheated steam, 179 for washing plates and dishes. But neither the initial expense nor the cost of running could be met out of the funds at the disposal of the small household. Another reason exists in the fact that the average housewife does not distinguish between annual and capital outlay. Unaccustomed to finance, and keeping accounts—if she keeps them at all—in a very amateurish fashion, she fails to understand that capital expenditure, let us say, on one of the little electric vacuum cleaners now on the market might pay for itself in a short time by saving the wages of a charwoman.

(a) The Organisation of the Household as Affected by the Housing Question

Then, finally, few people own their houses, and are therefore disinclined to make an outlay which would benefit their successors rather than themselves. Landlords (who are frequently retired tradesmen or elderly ladies depending on the rent of a row of houses for their sole income) are in their turn unprogressive and unenlightened. It is often hard to induce a landlord of the type indicated to consent to structural changes even if carried out at the tenant’s expense. The builders of new houses, again, are not, to put it mildly, educated in the best schools of household architecture and domestic engineering. It is true that in some suburbs, largely under the influence of the more competent architects employed by the garden city organisations, a marked improvement in domestic 180 building is noticeable. But only too often the hot-water system is inefficient, the ventilation poor, the grates wasteful, and so on. I have never yet heard of a speculative builder who deliberately planned the laying out of the streets in the area which he was developing in such a way that the living-rooms might have a maximum and the larder and pantries a minimum of sunlight. The new roads are usually all set at right angles to the main street, and the houses rigidly planted square to the roads, regardless of the points of the compass.

All these factors, acting together, prevent that general improvement in the construction of houses which is noticeable in other branches of industry. Progress does, of course, take place. The pressure exercised by the local health authorities leads to improved drainage and plumbing; lighting, owing to the recent competition between gas and electricity, has become both cheaper and better. But an intelligent application of science and investment of capital when a house is under construction could easily effect still further improvements.

Since, however, the household is not influenced by the ordinary processes of competition, advance will probably depend on some form of co-operation among tenants. The principle of tenant co-partnership has hitherto been applied only to the construction of working-class houses, but there seems to be no reason why it should be not equally useful among the middle classes. The advantages of the organisation are that it secures to the tenant a well-built house, sometimes 181 specially constructed to meet his wishes, while his complete mobility is not interfered with as it is by ownership of his dwelling. These apparently opposed results are obtained by the formation of a company which is the legal owner of the land and the houses; but no one is allowed to rent a house until he invests a certain amount of money in the company. Thus there are two classes of shareholders—tenant shareholders and ordinary shareholders. If a man wishes to move from the neighbourhood, then he ceases to be a tenant and becomes only an ordinary shareholder, and if he needs the money he can always sell out. Rent is paid in the ordinary way, and so too are dividends on the shares. Thus groups of people are enabled to control the conditions under which they are housed, without being hampered by the possession of a dwelling-house, which in an emergency they may be forced to sell at a serious loss. Minor advantages are greater cheapness of construction owing to wholesale buying of materials, and the provision of a more liberal repair fund than is contemplated by the ordinary landlord. It is possible, too, to provide common tennis courts, children’s playgrounds, pleasure gardens, &c., which are kept up out of the general funds of the company.[74] The “co-partnership tenants’” villages at Bournville, Hampstead, Ealing, &c., are all doing well,[75] and we may venture to hope that if 182 the same principle were applied to the housing of the middle classes, the worst horrors of the dreary and yet pretentious suburbs constructed by the speculative builder would soon be checked.

(b) The Problems of Domestic Service

The position of the domestic servant is the next subject which demands consideration. It is a question which has aroused much acrimonious controversy, mistresses accusing maids of ignorance and inefficiency, maids objecting in their turn to the menial position and lack of freedom involved in domestic service. Yet it is curious to notice that the conditions of this branch of work have been little studied by the economist. The number of domestic servants as enumerated in the census of 1901 was 1,330,783, the largest single occupation in the country.[76] But while dozens of books and blue-books could be named discussing the position of the textile worker or the agricultural labourer, not more than three or four investigators have concerned themselves with the domestic servant, on whose efficiency our health and comfort absolutely depend.