If they are city dwellers, women have seen bread and preserves
transferred; if farm dwellers, they have seen the curing of meat and
fish transferred, the making of butter and cheese. They know that
because of this transfer the home is cleaner and quieter, more people
better fed and clothed, and the hours of the factory worker made shorter
than those "mother used to work." With half an eye women cannot fail to
note that the labor which used to be occupied in the home in
interminable hours of spinning, baking and preserving, has come to
occupy itself for regulated periods in the school, in business, in
factory or cannery. And lo, Eve finds herself with a pay envelope able
to help support the quieter, cleaner home!
All this is a commonplace to the business man, who knows that the
evolution has gone so far that ten percent of the married women of
America are in gainful pursuits, and that capital ventured on apartment
hotels brings a tempting return.
But the Adamistic theory is based on the dream that women are
contentedly and efficiently conducting in their flats many occupations,
and longing to receive back into the life around the gas-log all those
industries which in years gone by were drawn from the fireside and
established as money making projects in mill or work-shop. And so Adam
addresses an exhortation to his Eve: "Don't buy bread, bake it; don't
buy flour, grind your own; don't buy soap, make it; don't buy canned,
preserved, or dried food, carry on the processes yourself; don't buy
fruits and vegetables, raise them."
Not a doubt seems to exist in Adam's mind as to the efficiency of
functioning woman-power in this way. According to the Adamistic theory,
work as mother used to do it is unqualifiedly perfect. This flattering
faith is naturally balm to women's hearts, and yet there are skeptics
among them. When quite by themselves women speculate as to how much of
the fruit and vegetables now put up in the home will "work."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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