Social ethics; Social sciences; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
In those cases in which the household employees have no family ties,
doubtless a remedy against social isolation would be the formation of
residence clubs, at least in the suburbs, where the isolation is most
keenly felt. Indeed, the beginnings of these clubs are already seen in
the servants' quarters at the summer hotels. In these residence clubs,
the household employee could have the independent life which only one's
own abiding place can afford. This, of course, presupposes a higher
grade of ability than household employees at present possess; on the
other hand, it is only by offering such possibilities that the higher
grades of intelligence can be secured for household employment. As the
plan of separate clubs for household employees will probably come first
in the suburbs, where the difficulty of securing and holding "servants"
under the present system is most keenly felt, so the plan of buying
cooked food from an outside kitchen, and of having more and more of the
household product relegated to the factory, will probably come from the
comparatively poor people in the city, who feel most keenly the pressure
of the present system. They already consume a much larger proportion of
canned goods and bakers' wares and "prepared meats" than the more
prosperous people do, because they cannot command the skill nor the time
for the more tedious preparation of the raw material. The writer has
seen a tenement-house mother pass by a basket of green peas at the door
of a local grocery store, to purchase a tin of canned peas, because they
could be easily prepared for supper and "the children liked the tinny
taste."
It is comparatively easy for an employer to manage her household
industry with a cook, a laundress, a waitress. The difficulties really
begin when the family income is so small that but one person can be
employed in the household for all these varied functions, and the
difficulties increase and grow almost insurmountable as they fall
altogether upon the mother of the family, who is living in a flat, or,
worse still, in a tenement house, where one stove and one set of
utensils must be put to all sorts of uses, fit or unfit, making the
living room of the family a horror in summer, and perfectly
insupportable on rainy washing-days in winter. Such a woman, rather than
the prosperous housekeeper, uses factory products, and thus no high
standard of quality is established.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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