Let me especially recommend to ladies possessing the invaluable qualities in this connection of taste and style in dress, who may be thinking of taking up dressmaking as a profession, that as an important preliminary step they should master the principles of a good method of cutting. Let 307 them make sure that the method can lay claim to this description; that it is reliable and not altogether empirical. Thus they will render themselves to some extent independent of the possible vagaries and misfits of their cutters and workers. The excellent courses of instruction now carried on in the trade schools already referred to should ere long create a supply of well-trained young women who will do their best work under an instructed head, and will be able to carry out intelligently her ideas and directions. Under such conditions there should be no room for failure in a business of this kind. As a result, the arts of needlecraft and of dressmaking will be raised to the plane of scientific certainty and success which is their due, instead of remaining at the often low level of the unorganised, empirical and inartistic occupations—a frequent source of financial disaster to their exponents and of perennial vexation to the helpless victims of their products.
II. HOUSECRAFT
The position of modern woman towards matters domestic is somewhat undefined, and at best can hardly be considered satisfactory. Her attitude towards housekeeping is not one of enthusiasm. The Lancashire mill-girl is proud to have a house of her own, but prefers her life at the mill to one spent in ordering that house; the elementary school teacher considers housekeeping of so little economic interest that she is injured if she may not devote her married life to a profession demanding the best of her energy; the university graduate pretends to a mind superior to physical comfort and welfare unless it can be produced by a creature less specialised than herself.
In the field of paid occupations for women, educated and uneducated, domestic work stands low; not necessarily low in scale of payment, but uninviting as a sphere of work and lacking the dignity of skilled employment. That good housewives may be found in every grade of society is 309 evident, but the general trend of our social evolution demands that some organised effort shall be made to simplify actual work and to raise the appreciation of that work.
In history and philosophy, the moral advantages of a good home have been acknowledged and extolled. The physical advantages are only now being fully emphasised, and there is an ever-increasing demand that women shall diligently apply their best efforts, first to the problems of the individual household, and then beyond it to those forms of housekeeping that fall to municipal and national control. We need a different estimate, a better realisation, of the enormous responsibility that lies in feeding, housing, and general hygienic conditions, and such a realisation must work from the top downwards in our social and intellectual strata.
In the care of the sick we have seen a complete revolution. Even so recently as the days of our grandparents “Sarah Gamp” was the general refuge—now her name is a byword. The work of nursing and the care of an invalid’s room, be it home or hospital, has been raised from mere manual labour. Intellect has established formulæ and dogma on which workers can be trained, and the work itself has been proved not alone a suitable means by which a woman can earn her living, but also a profession demanding a dignified respect and admiration. The researches of medical laboratories—the accumulated experience of the great physicians and surgeons of the world—are constantly 310 placing valuable knowledge in the hands of nurses and those who train them. Elaboration and fuss have gone in favour of a simplicity of service based on scientific facts; the influence of the trained worker has to some extent permeated the untrained service of home nursing. Great may still be our ignorance and great the need for a more adequate service, especially in the homes of the poor, but taken as a whole the care of the sick has been raised to what we may, without ambiguity, call a scientific art. Nursing may be popular from a love of such work and from its financial return, but the real strength of the nursing world lies in its organised provision of skilled women sent out to their work with a knowledge of its detail and a training in routine, paid for by service during years of apprenticeship.
The changes that have been effected in regard to the care of the sick may not form a perfect analogy of what can be done in other forms of domestic work, but they at least constitute a lesson in cause and effect, with many suggestions for the would-be reformer. Improvement in nursing owes its first impetus to a realisation of the part a nurse must of necessity play in curing or alleviating suffering, and any real improvements in our general domestic work and conditions will only be seriously considered when they are properly appreciated in their relation to the health and efficiency of the nation. To bring this home to individuals and classes must be the work of education. Let us magnify the office of the 311 housewife unduly rather than leave it unrecognised. We must demand something more than mere manipulative skill from the manual worker—a knowledge and interest from those who direct her work; a place in laboratories and schools for the many problems worthy of elucidation. To make lessons in housecraft a part of the curriculum of elementary and secondary schools has its own good; to make lessons in sick-nursing also a part might be good; but to leave both there would be only to patch, not mend, a rent in our social conditions. The matter must find its way into universities and research schools for its physical and economic investigation—as in other kinds of work we need an aristocracy of brains to guide the democracy of hands to found an apprenticeship system that shall provide efficient workers to bring the mighty forces of chemical, physical, and biological science to bear directly on such matters as selection of foods, methods of cooking, better apparatus for cleaning purposes, and an evolution of house-planning and furnishing that shall reduce the present elaboration of service and cleaning. It is not possible that every woman who cooks a potato shall be intimately acquainted with the structure of starch-cells or the effect of heat on those cells, nor is it likely that we shall aim at a system that makes the cooking of our food as exact as a laboratory experiment, but that thermometer, microscope, and test-tube have their own part to play is evident. The use of a disinfectant by a nurse is a scientific operation, the scope of 312 which has only been made possible by many and careful investigations in which the specialised effort of the few has resulted in a definite formula and a handy preparation only to be used with intelligent appreciation of its purpose. She understands its use and abuse, how to adapt it to circumstances, and probably how to find a substitute for it if occasion requires.
It is much on these lines that many of the problems of kitchen and household interest must be attacked.
We need a simple and reliable classification of foods that shall be useful to the practical cook. A quantitative analysis of proteid or carbo-hydrate qualities of wheat, lentils, or milk may form excellent exercise for laboratory classes, but even there it is too often taught without any relation to the assimilative properties of the average digestion and their consequent effect on food values. For ordinary use we want all this brought to a general outlook of the value, and comparative value, of such ordinary food as bread, oatmeal, eggs, and beef; not only as to suitable proportions in our diet and to methods of cooking, but also as a help in providing suitable substitutes for a particular commodity in time of scarcity. Beyond the inevitable victims of the Irish potato famine, many suffered quite unnecessarily for want of ability to replace the familiar potato by a possible substitute; and to-day we are little more intelligent in our catering. Quantity and quality of the potato crop must 313 each year to some extent make itself felt on small purses, and while not dependent on this one article of diet we might often help a meagre table by a good substitute such as rice, hominy, dumplings, and an increased supply of fresh vegetables. Substitutes for butcher’s meat too often suggest the purely vegetarian dish that to most people is but a pis aller. To replace part or even most of the meat in a dish with a food of approximate dietetic value would generally be more acceptable. A dish of haricot beans cooked with a little minced beef is, for example, a very different dish from the vegetarian treatment of the same article. Pea-soup made with the addition of a ham or beef bone will generally win approval over its less “tasty” rival. The value of eggs and the many ways of using cheese—the possibilities of oatmeal beyond mere porridge—are all matters worth understanding; so also is the problem of our milk supply.