Part 27 (1/2)
”I am a young man, with good health, good courage, and good prospects. I have, for a young man, a fair income, and a prospect of its increase. But my business requires me to reside in a country town, near a great manufacturing city. The demand for labor there has made such a drain on the female population of the vicinity, that it seems, for a great part of the time, impossible to keep any servants at all; and what we can hire are of the poorest quality, and want exorbitant wages. My wife was a well-trained housekeeper, and knows perfectly all that pertains to the care of a family; but she has three little children, and a delicate babe only a few weeks old; and can any one woman do all that is needed for such a household? Something must be trusted to servants; and what is thus trusted brings such confusion and waste and dirt into our house, that the poor woman is constantly distraught between the disgust of having them and the utter impossibility of doing without them.
”Now, it has been suggested that we remedy the trouble by paying higher wages; but I find that for the very highest wages I secure only the most miserable service; and yet, poor as it is, we are obliged to put up with it, because there is an amount of work to be done in our family that is absolutely beyond my wife's strength.
”I see her health wearing away under these trials, her life made a burden; I feel no power to help her, and I ask you, Mr. Crowfield, What are we to do? What is to become of family life in this country?
”Yours truly,
”A YOUNG FAMILY MAN.”
”My friend's letter,” said I, ”touches upon the very hinge of the difficulty of domestic life with the present generation.
”The real, vital difficulty, after all, in our American life is, that our country is so wide, so various, so abounding in the richest fields of enterprise, that in every direction the cry is of the plenteousness of the harvest and the fewness of the laborers. In short, there really are not laborers enough to do the work of the country.
”Since the war has thrown the whole South open to the compet.i.tion of free labor, the demand for workers is doubled and trebled.
Manufactories of all sorts are enlarging their borders, increasing their machinery, and calling for more hands. Every article of living is demanded with an imperativeness and over an extent of territory which set at once additional thousands to the task of production. Instead of being easier to find hands to execute in all branches of useful labor, it is likely to grow every year more difficult, as new departments of manufacture and trade divide the workers. The price of labor, even now higher in this country than in any other, will rise still higher, and thus complicate still more the problem of domestic life. Even if a reasonable quota of intelligent women choose domestic service, the demand will be increasingly beyond the supply.”
”And what have you to say to this,” said my wife, ”seeing you cannot stop the prosperity of the country?”
”Simply this,--that communities will be driven to organize, as they now do in Europe, to lessen the labors of individual families by having some of the present domestic tasks done out of the house.
”In France, for example, no housekeeper counts either was.h.i.+ng, ironing, or bread-making as part of her domestic cares. All the family was.h.i.+ng goes out to a laundry, and being attended to by those who make that department of labor a specialty, it comes home in refres.h.i.+ngly beautiful order.
”We in America, though we pride ourselves on our Yankee thrift, are far behind the French in domestic economy. If all the families of a neighborhood should put together the sums they separately spend in buying or fitting up and keeping in repair tubs, boilers, and other accommodations for was.h.i.+ng, all that is consumed or wasted in soap, starch, bluing, fuel, together with the wages and board of an extra servant, the aggregate would suffice to fit up a neighborhood laundry, where one or two capable women could do easily and well what ten or fifteen women now do painfully and ill, and to the confusion and derangement of all other family processes.
”The model laundries for the poor in London had facilities which would enable a woman to do both the was.h.i.+ng and ironing of a small family in from two to three hours, and were so arranged that a very few women could, with ease, do the work of a neighborhood.
”But in the absence of an establishment of this sort, the housekeepers of a country village might help themselves very much by owning a mangle in common, to which all the heavier parts of the ironing could be sent. American ingenuity has greatly improved the machinery of the mangle. It is no longer the heavy, c.u.mbersome, structure that it used to be in the Old World, but a compact, neat piece of apparatus, made in three or four different sizes to suit different-sized apartments.
”Mr. H. F. Bond, of Waltham, Ma.s.sachusetts, now manufactures these articles, and sends them to all parts of the country. The smallest of them does not take up much more room than a sewing-machine, can be turned by a boy of ten or twelve, and thus in the course of an hour or two the heaviest and most fatiguing part of a family ironing may be accomplished.
”I should certainly advise the 'Young Family Man' with a delicate wife and uncertain domestic help to fortify his kitchen with one of these fixtures.
”But after all, I still say that the quarter to which I look for the solution of the American problem of domestic life is a wise use of the principle of a.s.sociation.
”The future model village of New England, as I see it, shall have for the use of its inhabitants not merely a town lyceum hall and a town library, but a town laundry, fitted up with conveniences such as no private house can afford, and paying a price to the operators which will enable them to command an excellence of work such as private families seldom realize. It will also have a town bakery, where the best of family bread, white, brown, and of all grains, shall be compounded; and lastly a town cook-shop, where soup and meats may be bought, ready for the table. Those of us who have kept house abroad remember the ease with which our foreign establishments were carried on. A suite of elegant apartments, a courier, and one female servant were the foundation of domestic life. Our courier boarded us at a moderate expense, and the servant took care of our rooms. Punctually at the dinner hour every day, our dinner came in on the head of a porter from a neighboring cook-shop. A large chest lined with tin, and kept warm by a tiny charcoal stove in the centre, being deposited in an anteroom, from it came forth first soup, then fish, then roasts of various names, and lastly pastry and confections,--far more courses than any reasonable Christian needs to keep him in healthy condition; and dinner being over, our box with its debris went out of the house, leaving a clear field.
”Now I put it to the distressed 'Young Family Man' whether these three inst.i.tutions of a bakery, a cook-shop, and a laundry, in the village where he lives, would not virtually annihilate his household cares, and restore peace and comfort to his now distracted family.
”There really is no more reason why every family should make its own bread than its own b.u.t.ter,--why every family should do its own was.h.i.+ng and ironing than its own tailoring or mantua-making. In France, where certainly the arts of economy are well studied, there is some specialty for many domestic needs for which we keep servants. The beautiful inlaid floors are kept waxed and glossy by a professional gentleman who wears a brush on his foot-sole, skates gracefully over the surface, and, leaving all right, departeth. Many families, each paying a small sum, keep this servant in common.
”Now, if ever there was a community which needed to study the art of living, it is our American one; for, at present, domestic life is so wearing and so oppressive as seriously to affect health and happiness.
Whatever has been done abroad in the way of comfort and convenience can be done here; and the first neighborhood that shall set the example of dividing the tasks and burdens of life by the judicious use of the principle of a.s.sociation will initiate a most important step in the way of national happiness and prosperity.
”My solution, then, of the domestic problem may be formulized as follows:--
”1st. That women make self helpfulness and family helpfulness fas.h.i.+onable, and every woman use her muscles daily in enough household work to give her a good digestion.
”2d. That the situation of a domestic be made so respectable and respected that well-educated American women shall be induced to take it as a training-school for their future family life.
”3d. That families by a.s.sociation lighten the multifarious labors of the domestic sphere.