What I feel that we need today is a housekeeping center in every settlement, so that every girl who is a part of the settlement will feel it almost compulsory upon her to take the course before she marries, and if she is enjoying the intellectual life of the settlement, or the play side, or the social side, she must be learning the home-making side too. We must make our settlement girl feel that the home-making training is more important than mere recreation. The public school will follow the settlement and then, not for one-ninth of our girls will home-making instruction be given, but for every one.
A KITCHEN-CLEANING LESSON
Then there will be in every school the cooking-room, with its individual equipment (necessary, but nothing in it to suggest the kitchen at home). Next to this will be the model flat or center, this to resemble the homes from which the children come, but furnished on scientific lines. For eight years every school girl will see this home, this home made right, and she will work in it. It will be no smattering of cooking at the end of the school course,—but in the beginning, when the love of playing house is strong, then the training will begin. Even in the lowest school grade a child could dust her desk with a damp duster and be told why it should be damp; she could wash her own cup, if milk is served; learn to handle dishes carefully; and train the eye to see things straight and the hand to steadiness.
From these small tasks, the children would graduate to larger duties in the housekeeping center; making beds and washing many dishes. From dusting one desk, the pupil would soon be able to give the flat a thorough cleaning. We find in our center that the love of playing house disappears if it is not cultivated, and the girl of fourteen never drops entirely the wrong way of doing housework, which she need never have acquired if the domestic science teacher could be in her training early enough.
Scientific management means more than “having system.” You may be ever so systematic in the way you do things, but if you happen to be doing them the wrong way, you are doing the way that is unnecessarily expensive in time, energy, money, comfort and beauty.
I believe that the labor in the kitchen will become more and more professionalized. It is too serious a work to be handled by unskilled hands, and we must lose the nervous, irritable, overtired slave of housework and make woman more of a child-trainer and cheerful home-maker. She must guide her home with the quiet and skill and delight with which the engineer drives his engine or the chauffeur his car. This, some day, will be brought about by centralizing the work and by an army of trained workers who will expeditiously and noiselessly do a large part of what each woman is now trying to do herself. But that day can come only when women through universal home-making education push forward and demand this better management of the home.
We must have restlessness and dissatisfaction first. This comes from a realization of the right way and a disgust with the wrong way, and then will come the push from the home-maker herself, not from a few outside reformers. The tenement house occupant now is too ready to accept the fallen plaster, the dish-water that leaks through from the flat above and the dirty and dark halls. Her own senses are dull and she does not see or think about these things, and the tenement house reformer sometimes feels his work has been accomplished by a few bath tubs and a little more light, and then wonders at the indifference with which these gifts are received and blames the abuse of them. Train a girl to know a home of order from one of unrest. Teach a woman to be miserable at the thought of a close room or an unaired bed for her baby, and the social worker can go off and do something else. The power of action is where it ought to be, in the awakened tenement house mother. She will not be content to crowd her family into dark rooms; she will work until she gets space enough and light enough for her children. She will be driven to action because she knows the value of what she has to fight for. When the suffrage comes to women, how naturally then these intelligent, orderly home-makers will take their part in municipal housecleaning!
Let us not be satisfied to force through bills at Albany that improve our tenements; at the same time the tenement girl must be receiving her scientific home training, so that she too, can take her part in this great home-making profession.