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INCREASING HOME EFFICIENCY
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO
DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO
INCREASING
HOME EFFICIENCY
BY
MARTHA BENSLEY BRUfiRE
AND
ROBERT W. BRU£RE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1912
All rights reserved
^^^
\^
^
Copyright, 191 i, bv P. F. Collier & Sons,
The Success Company, The Crowell Publishing Company,
The Outlook Company.
Copyright, 191 2, by The Outlook Company,
Harper and Brothers.
Copyright, 191 2,
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, igia.
PHCSS or T. MOREY <i SON
GREENFIELD, MASS., U. S. A.
CI,A327800
We gratefully acknowledge
the courtesy of the editors
of The Outlook, Har-
per's Magazine, Collier's
Weekly, Success and The
Woman's Home Com-
panion in permitting us to
use material originally pub-
lished in their magazines.
M. B. B.
R. W. B.
Contents
Chapter Page
I. How the Wind Blows ..... i
II. What Is the Home For? .... 9
III. The Basis of Efficiency .... 25
IV. Chance versus the Budget ... 46
V. First Aid to the Budget-Maker . . 75
VI. Home Administration .... 94
VII. The Home and the Market . . .118
VIII. A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts . 143
IX. How Shall We Learn to Keep House? . 161
X. Training the Consumer . . • .180
XI. The Cost of Children . . . • i97
XII. Launching the Child .... 236
XIII. Savings and Efficiency . . . .263
XIV. One Answer to Many Questions . . 288
Appendix ^93
Increasing
Home Efficiency
CHAPTER I
How THE Wind Blows
WE kept house one summer in an at-
tractive middle-class suburb, under the
ordinary conditions that make for com-
fort and compel circumspection among middle-
class people.
One day our next door neighbor came running
across the lawn and flounced — there is no other
name for it — flounced down upon our veranda.
"Fm nothing but a family clearing house!" she
cried distractedly. "I run up the family bills one
month and pay them the next! I buy what the
stores have to sell at the price they choose to set, —
I pay rent for a house somebody else has chosen to
build, — I send the children to the sort of school
the town has happened to establish, — I dress, and
come, and go, and read, and see, as other people
have arranged for me! What have I to do with
it all? Merely to pay the bills with money I
haven't earned! I don't control a single thing that
2 Increasing Home Efficiency
goes Into my housekeeping, and yet I know that
unless I see to it that we have what it is best for
us to have, I am not running my home efficiently."
This was considerable of a jounce to us. Was
not our neighbor's house clean to whiteness ? Her
children literate and well mannered.^ Her dress
in fashion.? Her mind well stocked .f^ Moreover
had we not eaten happily at her board.? Not effi-
cient indeed! What problems did she find unsolv-
able.?
We have not found her problems even stated in
print. Literature is, to be sure, peculiarly rich in
cook books, and people are apt when they hear we
are interested in home efficiency, to ask if we have
seen the latest edition of Mrs. Pancake's volume
and know the government publications on how to
cook the cheaper cuts of meat, — as though the
middle-class home were merely a popular-priced
family dining hall! It was not the preparation of
food that made our neighbor feel she was fumbling
her job.
Neither are the middle-class problems reflected
in fiction. Imaginative writers ordinarily choose-
the very rich for their subjects. They cling to the
romantic tradition that loves to linger in the pal-
aces and amid the gorgeous trappings of the leisure
class, and when they do depart from their romantic
tradition they are likely to plunge to the other
extreme — to the heroic poor, the labor and trag-
edy of whose lives supply situations almost as
thrilling as the dare-devil adventures of the noble
gentleman desperately struggling for the noble
How the Wind Blows 3
lady, or for the bag of gold, or both. And the
economists, too, like to deal with the captains of
industry, the conspicuously successful, or with the
poor who are compelled to exchange their privacy
for alms. The middle-class, because it is neither
so rich as to dazzle the attention, nor so poor as to
have to submit to investigation, is, as it were,
discreetly passed by.
We did, however, find our neighbor's perplex-
ities constantly fringing the gossip of our middle-
class friends.
"How much do you think I have to pay for but-
ter at Markins.^"
"I think I'll have to send Ethel to Miss Lacy's
School, — she isn't getting on well in her grade."
"The way this silk cuts on the folds is simply
appalling. There's no wear to it!"
"I hate to have Frederick go into the office, but
I don't see what else the boy is going to do."
"Did you hear that they've got typhoid down
at Mason's .^ They say there's a leak in the drain."
"William says he's going to take out another
^5000 insurance so the children and I'll be provided
for if anything was to happen : but how the money's
to come out of his salary I don't see."
Such sayings had hovered in the air unnoticed
until our neighbor's plaint that she was nothing
but a clearing house for the family bills precipi-
tated them in a rain of questions. Was it possible
that the home maker must solve her problems of
marketing in connection with the great powers of
production and manufacture.? Must she make the
4 Increasing Home Efficiency
public service corporations her household servants?
Must she control the public school system, and
business and the professions in order to launch her
children properly? Must she draw on the surplus
of a nation to provide for old age ? And could any
individual industry, intelligence or thrift enable
her to meet these forces single handed when they
met her in combination? Surely so able a woman
as our neighbor would not be baffled by problems
that could be corralled within the four walls of her
home! Had not a little Quaker lady of Indiana
her hundredth birthday just past, said to us:
"I declare I don't see what women find to do
with themselves these days ! Pretty nigh all their
house work's done for them — what with gas light
and carpet-sweepers and all!"
Was It not possible that our neighbor was play-
ing blind man's buff with her problems; trying to
catch them In one place when they had gone to
another? Where could she put her finger on the
price of electricity? Could she control the price of
meat or keep wood out of the nutmegs simply
by paying her bills? These did not seem mat-
ters that could be attended to on the Domestic
Hearth.
Take the simple matter of garbage removal —
obviously a housekeeper's problem. Time was
when we moved out of the New York East Side
onto Fifth Avenue, and brought many of our
East Side habits with us. There none so aristo-
cratic as to think of having his ash or garbage can
emptied by a privately subsidized menial. But
How the Wind Blows 5
when we had crossed the Bowery, and Broadway,
and Fourth Avenue, and University Place and
come into the region where people have days at
home and dress for dinner; when we trustingly cast
our ash cans forth in the morning as the East Side
law had required, lo, there was none to tend them!
To be sure a representative of the private company
that collected cans in the neighborhood called and
offered to remove ours — for a consideration. He
seemed turned to a pillar of scorn when we told
him that we expected the city to do the work.
Extremely unpopular It made us with our aristo-
cratic neighbors also to have the city dump carts
drive up and stand before our lawn-fronted resi-
dence, especially since they seldom came on time,
and showed a disposition to leave part of the refuse
about, a thing we could well appreciate meant dis-
comfort for our neighbors. But our backs were
up, and we said:
"Shall any inadequate ash man force out of our
pockets two dollars a month that we need for food
or clothes? No I"
And we began a system of jacking the street
cleaning department up to its work. It took tele-
phoning and time, but the city ash man came to
have a furtive look as he approached our door, and
dusting his hands on his breeks, he would pick up
our cans with gingerly softness, empty them cir-
cumspectly and proceed subduedly down the
street.
We never succeeded in making our servant the
government earn its wages from our neighbors.
6 Increasing Home EflSciency
The prejudice among the velvet clad that the
government is a fit servant only for the poor, is
hard to break down; but if the whole neighbor-
hood, or the whole city had insisted on this depart-
ment's earning its wages, would it not have solved
one of our housekeeper's problems?
We are writing from a small town in New York
State where there seem to be no rich and no poor.
To one who has not been taken into the inner coun-
cils it appears that home efficiency is rampant.
When our neighbors call they are habited In silk,
and their hats droop over their eyes in quite the
fashion of Paris. When, carefully gloved, we
return their calls, we find the parlors swept and
garnished to spotlessness, the lawns smoothly
green and pleasant vines blowing against the
windows. But as we look down the road comes
the cook tolling up from the village with a pail of
water, for though it is a land of springs and a
season of rain, the wells, which except in the very
center of the village are the only source of supply,
are in such close proximity to the surface sewage
as to be unsafe. The center of the village is fed
by a pure and constant water supply from the
public mains regularly tested by the State's chem-
ist. What shall it profit a family to have a clean
parlor If they have a dirty well.^
Natural gas has been struck a mile or so away.
It lights the town at so low a rate that the cost of
letting it burn all day in the streets is less than the
cost of hiring a man to turn It on and oflF. Yet all
through the region Monday morning sees the cor-
How the Wind Blows 7
rugated washboard carried out to the well and the
housewife bending above it, looking for her prob-
lem inside a galvanized iron tub instead of raising
her eyes to the cheap gas (blazing all about her)
which could run a washing machine or a coopera-
tive laundry.
The new three story school house has the coal
deftly stored below the exit that must be used in
case of fire. Are the homes then overproducing.^
From the day our neighbor flounced down upon
our porch, the problems of middle-class home
making began to peep like goblins from everything
we heard or saw; they made eyes at us from the
shelves of the groceryman, they shot like steam
from the factory whistle, they trailed the loco-
motives across the country, they buzzed in our
ears through the telephone wire. The clothes we
wore and did not make, the food we ate from Flor-
ida and Minneapolis and Chicago and California,
the books we read from presses we had never
seen, — all turned to problems in our hands. Were
they the universal middle-class problems, and if
so what was their solution.^
There was no way of finding out except by con-
sulting the experiences of those who like our sub-
urban neighbor were wrestling with them. So
we set out into the middle-class country to gather
these experiences. They were not things that
could be collected under compulsion or by gum-
shoe work; you can't investigate the middle-
class, as you can the poor, without its free consent.
Through the columns of magazines, through lee-
8 Increasing Home Efficiency
tures, through innumerable personal letters and
long journeys we have put questions to middle- |
class people in all corners of the country until I
answers have flowed in to us like oil from a shot |
well. j
This book is a record of these answers. It is \
made up of the real experiences of real middle-class •
people. It does not pretend to finality. It is not ^
a tablet of laws nor an economic treatise. It is j
hardly more than a weather vane to show how the
wind blows.
CHAPTER II
What is the Home For?
ONCE upon a time there was a man whose
home was his castle; it provided the
greatest luxury of his day — safety.
That man is dead.
Then there came a man whose home was a fac-
tory in which he and his wife and his children and
his man servants and his maid servants did the
manufacturing of the world. He consumed what
he needed and bartered the rest.
That man is dead too.
Later appeared a man whose home was merely
a unit cell in the great battery that drives civiliza-
tion forward.
That man, socially speaking, is just born.
We are not concerned with those dead men ex-
cept to remove from our pathway such useless
and pernicious legacies as they have inconsid-
erately left us. Not the least disastrous of these
is the idea that the running of the home can safely
be left to instinct, moral sentiment, and romantic
inspiration. Somehow we have got to still their
ghost-voices that chant persistently:
"Who would not worship
The hand that has taught us
Five Hundred and Eighty-two
Ways to cook eggs!^^
9
lo Increasing Home Efficiency
For while we listen to their chanting, the hen has
become trustified, her versatile product cornered
in cold-storage, and the hand worthy of worship
is left without eggs to cook. When we stop listen-
ing to this soporific song of the past, we may get
time to open our eyes and see that the modern
home is but a cell in the social body held tight in
its material setting by the underground filaments
of pipe and wire and conduit, by the surface con-
nection of common carriers, public utilities and
corporate industries, and embedded in the meso-
blastic jelly of common thought, and interest, and
ambition. Are not our homes bound together into
the unit, not of families or nations, but of the race
itself.^ How can we know what the function of
any individual home is except by examining it as
a part of the larger body.^ Or whether it performs
this function efficiently but by appraising its social
effect.?
Like every living body, society does carry along
with it a lot of dead cells, a lot of menacing cells
which it takes an overplus of health to absorb
and get rid of; static quiescent cells that give the
social body nothing in return for what they take
from it, as well as the active, useful members that
push society ahead because they give back more
than they consume.
Isn't this what the home is for, to give back to
the community more than it takes out of it.'* To
produce something more valuable than it con-
sumes.? Is there any way to judge of the home's
efficiency except by its social product.? Or any
What is the Home for? n
way to judge the value of that product except
by Its effect on the race?
Mr. Frederick W. Taylor says that his book
on the Principles of Scientific Management was
written to show that the remedy for what the
country is losing through inefficiency is general
scientific management, a science resting upon
clearly defined laws. In applying efficiency meth-
ods to industry, Mr. Taylor has the advantage
of knowing what each particular plant is trying to
produce. But when we try to apply them to the
largest, most universal business we have, Home-
making, we find that almost no one knows
what the home is trying to do, or what it ought
to do.
Mr. Taylor's first experiment, — to systematize
the loading of pig iron, — was a simple problem:
given the pig iron, the cars and the men, to place
the first onto the second by means of the third.
But in the problem of systematizing the household
we have: given an income derived from some source
unnamed, certain intelligence or the lack of it in
certain unstandardized individuals, certain physi-
cal strength, and certain elements of climate,
temperament, occupation and markets, — to pro-
duce through the medium of a more or less per-
manent abiding place, the best results in the way
of useful citizenship and personal happiness; the
term "best" in this connection being necessarily
undefined. It doesn't sound like a thing you could
reduce to an equation. And yet we need des-
perately to know just what proportion of money
12 Increasing Home Efficiency
and brains and muscle are necessary to keep the
average family group in a state advantageous to
the community, and how if the home is under-
supplied with any one of these three, it can sub-
stitute one of the others; money, brains and muscle
being interchangeable parts of the home-running
machine. For the home is properly a machine to
make something with, not a self-sufficient, dis-
associated fact. It is efficient not through its
own internal harmony, but through its ability
to produce something socially valuable.
Mr. Gilbreth, speaking at the Lake Placid Con-
ference on Home Economics in 191 2, said that
scientific management must be based not on what
we think but on what we know, and that the way
to begin to know is to observe things as they are.
He said that the first man needed in the reorgan-
ization of a plant was an inspector.
From the standpoint of an inspector, then, is the
Shaw family running its home efficiently.^ They
know what product they want their home factory
to turn out and they are succeeding according to
their own standards of success. But are they run-
ning their factory efficiently from the standpoint
of the community.^
The Shaws are not only American by birth, but
by generations of tradition as well. Mr. Shaw
started as a carpenter and builder, married a school
teacher, and in 1881 settled in a little Massachusetts
town which has since become an almost fashionable
suburb of Boston. They are solid middle-class
people. Their family consists of man, wife, two
What is the Home for? 13
sons and a daughter. Mr. Shaw has advanced
until he Is now superintendent of a factory where
they make real old Colonial furniture. He and
his wife are happy in their success; and proud of
the way they achieved it. Mr. Shaw writes:
"I just worked every day that it was possible
for me to do so. I saved as fast as I could. If I got
a dollar or two extra, I saved it. The two boys
were some ambitious to get ahead. I tried to in-
still into their minds that with their help, and the
help and economy of their mother and myself,
they could have an education, and we went about
it with a will. Bear in mind it was our aim to
lift the boys one step above the step mother and
I stood on."
And they believe they have succeeded because
they have pushed their children into the clerical
occupations.
"Our oldest boy got a one-half scholarship in
the College," Mr. Shaw adds, "but we
had carfare, board and books to pay for. Every
vacation he worked and saved his money. In
four years he was outfitted for the hardships of the
world and now he has a job keeping books and
gets ^90 a month. The next boy took a business
course. He learned stenography and typewriting
and got a job at $50 a month. But he said he
would not work long at those wages, and he is
now secretary to the manager of the Com-
pany at a salary of $150 a month. Jennie is still
getting educated, but I expect she will turn out all
right."
14 Increasing Home Efficiency
Here is the Shaw budget (compiled and aver-
aged from the family account books) :
Income $2,400 a year. Two adults and three
children.
Monthly Yearly
Food $ 42.00 $ 504.00
Shelter (mortgage, repairs, taxes) 33.00 396.00
Clothes 16.00 192.00
Operating costs:
Help $10.00
Heat and light 8.00
Carfare 6.00
Refurnishing 4.50 28.50 342.00
Advancement:
Doctor, dentist, medicine $11.00
Church, charity 14.00
Vacation, travel, books,
amusement 3.25
Incidentals 7.45
Insurance (fire and life) . . 9.80
Savings 3S-oo 80.50 966.00
$200.00 $2,400.00
During the time when his children were growing
up, Mr. Shaw was not earning half as much as he
is now. It is the strait economy he and his wife
practiced then, the amount of muscle and brain
that they learned to substitute for money, that
makes them able now to put $35 into the
savings bank every month. That looks like ad-
What is the Home for? 15
mirable thrift. But their expense for vacations,
travel, books and amusements in their almost
fashionable suburb, where many sorts of entertain-
ment are to be had, is only ^3.25 a month — $39 a
year, while their expenses for sickness come to
$132. This item raises the insistent question:
if during their years of hard work they had spent
that ^132 for vacations, wouldn't the $39 have
been enough for the doctor? It seems to us that
Mrs. Shaw's letters throw some light on that ex-
cessive doctor's bill.
"Last year I kept help," she writes. "I paid
her ^10 a month and let her attend evening school
and have time to study besides; but I think she
cost as much again in food and what she wasted.
So this year I do my own work and sometimes
have a woman come in to wash."
Mrs. Shaw also suggests the reason why the
amount spent on clothes is about half what the
theoretic budget allows.
"Mr. S. and the boys always get their clothes
ready made. A suit costs them about twenty dol-
lars unless they get it at a sale. I have a dress-
maker come to the house to make Jennie's and
my clothes. My best dress costs about twenty-
five dollars and it generally wears me three years."
One sometimes wishes that Mrs. Shaw wouldn't
have all her clothes made at home, that she
wouldn't consider her savings account too care-
fully when she buys a hat, that she wasn't so fond
of. golden oak furniture, quarter-sawed and var-
nished high, that she knew the difference between
1 6 Increasing Home Efficiency
scarlet and crimson and wouldn't use these good
fast colors so profusely. This may sound like put-
ting a carping emphasis on aesthetics — but is it?
Have the Shaws done anything to justify them in
turning loose an ugly home and ugly clothes on
an unprotected community? The output of their
domestic factory so far is two sons able to earn
living salaries, who are useful to the community
undoubtedly, but as easy to replace if damaged as
any other standard products that come a dozen
to the box. They themselves didn't like the upper
reaches of the artisan class where they had spent
their lives, so they boosted their sons till they could
make a living by the sweat of their brains instead
of the sweat of their brows. Society can use the
Shaw boys, but is it profitable to produce them at
the price? The money that made these boys into
a clerk and stenographer cost twenty years of their
parents' brain and muscle. Mrs. Shaw has bred
the habit of saving into her own bones till now
when she might shift the flat-iron, the cook-stove
and the sewing machine from her shoulders, she
can't let go the $io a month her "help" eats and
wastes, long enough to straighten up her spine.
These two boys and a daughter still in the making
have cost their father and mother twenty years
which Mr. Shaw sums up by saying:
" So you see the final result of making up your
mind to do a thing, including the great trouble of
bringing up a family, is just getting down to the
ground and grinding."
Isn't it just possible that society has lost as
What is the Home for? 17
much in the parents as it has gained in the chil-
dren? Couldn't we have got the same product
some cheaper way? Or a better product by more
efficient home management?
Mr. Shaw's philosophy that we win by the things
we go without is an old, old road to success, — a kind
of success. It was beaten out at the time when
there wasn't enough of anything to go round,
when that man was more likely to survive who
could get along on little than the man who needed
a great deal to satisfy his wants. That road is
growing full of weeds though such people as the
Shaws still try to travel it, quite deaf to the good
able-bodied Angel of Plenty crying warningly as
they plod:
"Thou shalt not live by Thrift alone!"
Now in contrast to the output of the Shaws'
home and its methods of operation, is the house-
hold of the Parnells down on the edge of Kansas.
As far as we have climbed up their family tree, we
have found their ancestors living on their heads.
Mrs. Parnell's father was a business man in a small
Illinois city. Mr. Parnell's father was a doctor.
They both belonged to the circle of those who toil
and spin vicariously. Nineteen years ago Mr.
and Mrs. Parnell took their two babies and settled
as farmers on the Kansas prairie. So many people
think it is easier to compete with the coddling
moth, the cinch bug and the cut worm for the
crops, than with their human neighbors for a job!
The Parnells have gradually changed their open
prairie into fields and farms. Some of these they
1 8 Increasing Home Efficiency
have sold, some they rent to tenants, some they
work themselves, and as their income for recent
years averages ^4,000 a year, they have obviously
prospered. They have four children now and are
no longer farmers in the old sense of the word.
They have changed with their environment, which
the biologists tell us is quite the correct thing for a
form of life that wishes to persist, to do. Mrs.
Parnell writes :
"Mother spent five weeks with me in July and
August, and she said we were as much suburbanites
as she is. You know she lives in Evanston where
most of the men do business in Chicago. And it is
really true, for the city of has grown out
toward us, and the trolley lines and good auto-
mobile roads have done the rest. I do not feel
that I live in the country much more than you do.
Why, I even belong to a club that is affiliated with
yours in New York."
Now if the Parnells were the average people —
those mythical average people who are as detached
from hampering peculiarities of temperament and
locality as China dolls, — they would, according to
the accepted proportions, spend their ^4,000 a
year like this:
Food $1,000.00
Shelter 800.00
Clothes 600.00
Operating 600.00
Advancement 1,000.00
$4,000.00
What is the Home for? 19
But being real human beings with particular
problems of their own, they divide up their income
on this plan:
Income ^4,000 a year. Family: Father, mother,
four children.
Food $ 600.00
Shelter (taxes, repairs, improvements, etc.) 475 -oo
Clothes 450.00
Operating 625.00
Advancement:
College (two daughters) $1,000.00
Insurance (fire and life) 148.00
Vacation trips 200.00
Gifts, charity, church 60.00
Books, etc 50.00
Miscellaneous 192.00
Savings 200.00 1,850.00
$4,000.00
For farm people who could raise all they eat if
they had to, they spend a great deal for food; a
lot for operating expenses, since this does not in-
clude the cost of farm hands; a lot for education
and vacation trips; but not much for clothes. In
commenting on her expenditures, Mrs. Parnell
writes :
"You ask me whether we have a garden and I
feel apologetic when I tell you that we have only
the smallest kind of a one. There is no reason why
we could not have all the fruit and vegetables we
could use, for a few miles away from us there are
•
20 Increasing Home EflBciency
apples to throw away, and gardens seem to just
take care of themselves and put their produce in
the cellar. I think the great reason why we go
gardenless is the difficulty of getting farm hands.
We need all we can get to do the regular field work,
and never seem to have one to spare for vege-
tables. I suppose the children and I might do it
ourselves, but such work takes a lot out of me and
I rather save some other way. We do however
make our butter; eggs and chickens defray the
cost of living, and the profits from the stock and
crops pay the taxes and repair the house, provide
us with water and lighting plants and labor-saving
machinery, send the children to college and pay
for a trip now and then."
Mrs. Parnell insists that labor-saving machinery
is an economy whether it pays in money or not.
She says it not only saves her own strength, but
the mental wear and tear of getting and keeping
servants, that she doesn't have to ask a vacuum
cleaner if it wants to live in Kansas or if it likes
being a hired hand on the farm. She substitutes
money for the muscle she might use in raising
her own vegetables; spends money for service to
save time so that she can go to her club in town;
saves money on clothes to send her daughters to
college, and doesn't put a great deal into the bank
anyway. Her house is not altogether perfect in
the New England sense; it's very much lived in
by her four romping children. She and her hus-
band have undoubtedly worked hard; they have
applied business methods to the farm, and they've
What is the Home for? 21
been fortunate. They haven't sacrificed them-
selves greatly. Loading their pig iron has con-
sisted in living happily themselves and fitting their
children to spend the same sort of easy-going
happy lives after them. They are not trying to
get their children into another class than their
own as the Shaws are — possibly they are not con-
scious that there is a higher one.
"Just think," said an eastern woman who had
been a school friend of Mrs. Parnell's, "Clara is
sending her children to a western college! I'm so
disappointed in her! Why, they've money enough
so she could send them anywhere! Just think
what they're missing! And Clara used to be one
of the most progressive girls!"
Mrs. Parnell would argue that she is a middle-
west country woman and is training her children
for the same country life. She and her husband
revolted against the prospect of being clerks or
struggling professional people. They fled to the
soil, and they still think that their children have
the best chance of happiness and prosperity in
farm life.
"The agricultural colleges seem to fit our needs
better than any others," she writes. "The grad-
uates whom we know find good openings as farmers
or foresters or agricultural experts of some sort.
I'm satisfied to give the children a good practical
working education."
The Parnells have reversed the standards of the
Shaws. They are on the other swing of the pendu-
lum and think the clerk, the bookkeeper and the
22 Increasing Home Efficiency
stenographer are people to be pitied. But the
Shaws would probably pity the Parnells in turn
because they save so little money. Two hundred
out of four thousand isn't much to "put by," and
sometimes Mrs. Parnell spends even the two hun-
dred. The Shaws would very probably echo the
sentiments of a shocked gentleman from Oregon
who once wrote us about a woman who spent a
three thousand dollar income. He didn't see that
this woman had proved anything except that she
could get rid of $3,000 a year — and anybody could
do that! If she had shown how she could save
two-thirds of her husband's income, she would
have been worth while.
"I guess when she is old or when her husband
dies, she'll know more about the value of money
than she does now," he concluded.
Perhaps she will! Perhaps Mrs. Parnell too will
think regretfully of the money she might have
saved. But after all, the earth can produce enough
each year to feed everybody, and is all one's life
to be a preparation for possible misfortune.^ Are
we to look forward to a future inevitably calam-
itous? If trouble only comes late enough, you've
little chance to remember it and more chance to
dodge it altogether — the mortality rates being
what they are. The healthy reason hasn't much
sympathy with the New England woman who could
never afford anything to wear to tea-parties be-
cause she must spend her money on a suit of black
in case of possible funerals.
The methods of this salaried man and this
What is the Home for? 23
farmer are not given as models by any means.
They are examples of how two families have ac-
tually made their homes turn out the sort of prod-
uct they intended; examples of how the incomes of
money, strength and brains have been spent; of
how if either of them saved money, they had to
spend something else in its place, and had to de-
cide whether it was more valuable than money or
not. The Shaws' method was to save money, the
Parnells' method to save strength and worry in-
stead. Sitting on the fence between approbation
and condemnation, which of these homes was
really efficient.^ Was either or neither of them.**
What is the typically efficient home and how are
we to produce it? What we should all no doubt
be glad to have is a ready-made standardized effi-
cient home, that some one else has worked out for
us. The suggestion brings up all kinds of pleasant
ideas, rounded corners where the floor joins the
wainscoting, automatic dishwashers, ways of get-
ting out the ashes without soiling the carpets or
our hands, cooperative stores, the builders' last
word in city flats, some profit-sharing scheme
started either by the down-trodden working man
or the high-minded philanthropist, some service-
by-the-hour bureau from which somebody will
send us a "born cook." We wait breathless for
some mail-order house to offer these efficient,
smooth-running homes ready to ship at so much
the dozen f. o. b. But we shall wait to little pur-
pose if we think of the home as a thing of brick
and mortar, of wood, or steel, or concrete; as a
24 Increasing Home Efficiency
convenient container of stoves and chairs and tables
and beds or any other things that are, as it were,
of the flesh alone. Like the heart of our bodies,
the home is really a complicated force-pump by
means of which the race gets what it needs for its
life, and the efficiency of the home must be judged
not by what it contains, but by what it produces
for the health and advancement of us all.
CHAPTER III
The Basis of Efficiency
WHEN an efficiency expert reorganizes a
factory, he does not have to deter-
mine what that factory shall produce.
Whether it is to make cotton cloth or shoes or hair
brushes is already decided. His work is to see
that it furnishes the largest output, of the highest
quality, at the lowest cost in labor and money and
supervision possible under the governing circum-
stances.
The problem of reorganizing the home on an
efficiency basis does not differ in principle from
the problem of reorganizing the factory. The
community at large has tacitly agreed on what the
output of the American home shall be, — it must »
keep the members of the family in a state of body
and mind and happiness that will make it possible
for them to work at their highest capacity for the
greatest number of years; it must give to the com-
munity children that are well fitted for citizenship
and equipped to push civilization along; and it
must turn out this product on an economical ex-
penditure not of money only, but of brain and
muscle as well. This stamps as inefficient homes
with an undue proportion of sickness, homes
25
26 Increasing Home Efficiency
which are inharmonious and unhappy, and homes
in which the members are engaged in work dis-
advantageous to the community. And it stamps
as inefficient the childless home, because however
inadvertently, the home which does not give to
the community its complement of children is in-
efficient. Society has not consciously formulated
these requirements, but back somewhere in the
minds of us all is the conviction that homes that
have not produced these things have not given
to the community all it has a right to expect of
them. Indeed, these requirements are so rudi-
mentary that they will hardly be denied by any
one, and most intelligent persons will feel that the
socially efficient home ought to go a great deal
beyond them.
As a nation, we have as yet no standards by
which to measure the amount of muscle necessary
to run a home efficiently. Certainly we know there
is a point below which the members of a family
may not have enough physical energy for the right
running of their homes. We do not know what this
minimum is. We know that it varies with the
amount of mechanical energy used as a substitute
for human strength, but we. have never yet dis-
covered how far this process of substitution can
be carried. We know too that a minimum amount
of mental energy must go into the efficient running
of a home. But what this minimum of brains is
no one has yet determined. In the matter of
money, however, we have some basis of measure-
ment. Dr. Robert Coit Chapin, for instance, has
The Basis of Efficiency 27
worked out the financial minimum for decent
living In New York City. He says:
"Families having between $900 and $1,000 a
year are able in general to get food enough to keep
soul and body together, and clothing and shelter
enough to meet the most urgent demands of de-
cency."
Efforts are being made to establish this mini-
mum for Boston. A cursory and more or less
superficial Investigation has been made of the
standard of living in Buffalo, Rochester and cer-
tain other large cities. The government, in con-
nection with the Bureau of Education, and the
Departments of Agriculture and Commerce and
Labor, has gathered statistics on the cost of living.
These investigations tend to show that Dr.
Chapin's minimum of from $900 to $1,000 a year
is the money limit of decency, not only in New
York but throughout the country. From these
studies and from the analysis of family budgets
which we have collected during the last six years,
we believe that the money minimum essential to
efficiency In the average American home is $1,000
a year. We are therefore eliminating from con-
sideration In this book all families whose incomes,
either in money or Its equivalent, are less than
this, because we are convinced that no supple-
mental expenditure of brain and muscle can enable
them to rise to the level of social efficiency.
This last phrase has been a regular Benjamin
Franklin's kite to draw thunderbolts. It appears
that people with incomes of $1,000 or less, bitterly
28 Increasing Home Efficiency
resent being classed with the socially inefficient;
and people who pay wages of less than ^i,ooo
gnash their epistolary teeth at the imputation of
grinding the faces of their employes below the
point of possible efficiency.
A western college president writes in a state of
mind. Says he:
"Dr. Scott Nearing concludes that three-fourths
of the adult males in the industrial sections of the
United States earn less than ^600 a year. Accord-
ing to the last report of the Interstate Commerce
Commission (even though there is a large percen-
tage of highly paid manual and salaried workers),
the average income of the nearly two million rail-
road employes during the year preceding was $662.
Most ministers of all denominations receive less
than $1,000 a year. Shall we conclude that the
great majority of families in this country cannot
possibly reach social efficiency?"
Writes the wife of a United States Civil Service
employe from Massachusetts:
"As I finished the ironing and prepared dinner,
I thought what you said seemed mighty discourag-
ing. Are discussions of Home Efficiency truly
broad and helpful when more than half the homes,
indeed, isn't it many more than half.^ are ruled
out? If it is a hard job, isn't the manager on $800
and $1,000 especially entitled to all the assistance
that home scientists can give? I have never writ-
ten in reply to anything I ever read before, but
this did rouse me sol"
The college president and the employe's wife
The Basis of Efficiency 29
are alike in assuming that because so many fam-
iUes do Hve on incomes below ^1,000, it must be
possible for them to do It efficiently if somebody
would only show them how.
It isn't.
And $1,200 is more nearly correct than $1,000
a year as the financial minimum for social effi-
ciency.
It seems necessary to go Into definitions. A
"typical" family Is not just a collection of related
people living together. It Is a definite number of
persons having a definite consuming power. The
International Statistical Congress which met In
Brussels In 1855 defined it as a father, mother, and
four children ranging In age from sixteen to two
years. The typical American family today is
smaller than this. It consists of five members,
father, mother, and three children under working
age. Two people living in a boarding-house, or a
man and eight children on a farm, or sixty children
in an orphan asylum, do not, for the purposes of
economic Inquiry, constitute a family, although
from the standpoint of sentiment or biology they
may do so.
"I support my family, which consists of my
wife, two children and a servant on $1,100 a year,"
writes a business man, and proceeds to give his
budget.
Now If he consulted the servant. It Is probable
she would think she supported herself quite as
much as his paid clerks and bookkeepers. A serv-
ant is not a part of the family In any but a physical
30 Increasing Home Efficiency
sense, — she is one of the tools by which the house
is operated. She is not supported by the family;
she is paid by the family just as the grocer and
the butcher are. She accepts board and room as
part payment for her work. As a basis of inquiry,
you have to understand what your family is.
Also you have to know what your income is — it
may be something more than the amount of money
that passes through your hands in a year; to that
must be added the value of the necessaries you
have without buying them, to say nothing of the
unpaid services of a wife and growing children.
A gentleman from Massachusetts is certain that
his home is efficient though his income is only $900
a year. He has a wife and three children, and
sends the following budget:
Tithes $ 92.00
Clothing 120.00
Shoes and rubbers 14.00
Lectures and entertainment 12.00
Medical and dental 16.00
Books, papers and stationery 8.00
Gifts 12.00
Groceries and provisions 254.00
Rent at $14 168.00
Light and fuel 66.00
Miscellaneous expense 41.00
Insurance 37-00
Cooperative bank 60.00
$900.00
The Basis of Efficiency 31
"A small garden helps to reduce the provision
account," he says, "and berries for eating and
canning are to be found for the picking on the hills,
two miles out of the city."
Now, according to the estimate of the American
School of Home Economics, that family requires
about ^360 a year for food to keep Its members -k
In good health, and as the doctor's and dentist's
bills combined amount to only ^16 a year, — in-
dicating that the family Is sufficiently fed, — It is
fair to estimate that food to the value of more
than $100 raised in the garden and gathered on
the hillside must be added to the ^254's worth
allowed for in the budget. Another source of
income is revealed when he says:
"The children will all work vacations and some
Saturdays, and will earn enough picking fruit,
helping In a grocery store, carrying a paper route,
or by improving several other Important oppor-
tunities which present themselves, to meet their
own growing expenses in the line of clothes and
amusement, as well as to save a little for the
educational account."
The "growing expenses" of three children can-
not well be less than $200. All things considered,
that family has actual resources considerably
above $1,200 a year. It's a wise man that knows
his own income!
Mr. Edgar writes from Michigan that his family
lives efficiently on $600 a year. No doubt they
do live not only efficiently, but greatly to the
advantage of the community as well. This house
32 Increasing Home Efficiency
father modestly gives his account in the third
person, — when he speaks of "they," he means his
wife and himself.
"They had but two children," he writes, "but
have cared for four boys, who were homeless,
during a part or all of their unproductive years.
Their children were college educated; the older
one, a graduate of three colleges, is now a pro-
fessor in one of New York's great colleges. Of
the four boys who felt the influence of their home,
two have stalwart shoulders to the industrial
wheels of a great factory. One is an accountant,
one a floor department manager of a world-wide-
known mercantile house in Chicago. At three
different times their little farm has been mort-
gaged to secure the desired education for their
children. . . . They have met with their brother
farmers in club and social gatherings and have im-
parted something in the spirit of 'Look Up, Lift
Up.' Their influence is felt by the teachers in
their country school, and men crooked in politics
give them a wide berth."
This is Mr. Edgar's budget:
Food ^250.00
Shelter (taxes and insurance) 30.00
Clothes 75-00
Operation:
Light, heat, incidentals $ 50.00
Furnishing 40.00 90.00
The Basis of Efficiency 33
Advancement:
Church and chanty $ 25.00
Books, etc 30.00
For the most good as we see it 100.00 155.00
$600.00
Mr. Edgar's record of achievement is the sort
most of us would be glad to look back upon, but
it was not made on $600 a year by any means;
neither has Mr. Edgar at present a normal family
in the economic sense.
Taking the last objection first. His family now
consists of three adults and five guests for a short
time in summer. As nearly as one can calculate
from their ages and the government tables, the
amount spent for food to keep them in health would
necessarily be about ^400 a year. That is $38 less
than the normal family requires, and therefore
reduces their necessary income by that much. But
the allowance in the budget for food is only $250,
so that it is fair to suppose that at least $150 worth
of food is raised on the farm. Indeed, Mr. Edgar
writes :
"There is no profit-taking between 'them' and
the producer for the staples of life."
This puts their actual at least ^150 above their
money income. There is no outlay for rent be-
cause Mr. Edgar owns his farm. It is a little diffi-
cult to calculate the rental value of such a place,
but since it produces a yearly surplus of ^600, be-
sides at least $150 worth of food and probably a
34 Increasing Home EflSciency
good deal of fuel in the way of fire-wood, — the
^50 a year entered in the budget for fuel, light and
incidentals could not possibly be enough, — it seems
that ^30 a month is not too high an estimate. At
least $360 must be added to the given income,
bringing it up to ^1,110 a year, not counting the
extra fuel which he does not have to buy. Be-
sides this, there is the farm itself which represents
invested capital and is therefore a potential addi-
tion to the income, as the mortgages for the educa-
tion of the children show. So that this less than
normal family has at least the minimum income of
a normal family — a sufficient financial basis for
their very evident social efficiency.
Again, the $1,200 decency minimum which we
believe is more nearly correct than the $1,000
minimum, applies only to the United States of
America and to the present time. In Smyrna, we
are told, it is possible for a family of five to live
a year on $157. Twenty-five years ago one could
live in the United States as comfortably on $500
a year as he can now on $1,200. A good many
people write us that because the mother of Abra-
ham Lincoln brought up so great a son on an al-
most invisible income, the amount of money one
has is no measure of one's efficiency. We are not
considering the exception, but the average, nor
any time but our own. Not many people bring
up Abraham Lincolns under the most favorable
circumstances, but no one knows how many Lin-
colns society may have missed through lack of food
and clothes and education. Privations are not as-
The Basis of Efficiency 35
sets because some people have succeeded in spite
of them.
We must differentiate very carefully between
being able to survive, and living efficiently; and
we must also realize that society, and not our-
selves, is the ultimate judge of whether we are
living efficiently or not. The Home must submit
to be judged by its social output.
Now, being "able to meet the most urgent de-
mands of decency" does not imply enough for
efficiency by any means. The investigations of
Dr. Chapin show that nine per cent of the families
with incomes between $900 and ^1,100 are under-
fed, eighteen per cent underclothed, and thirty-six
per cent overcrowded. The family budgets In our
possession indicate that a margin of at least ^200
a year beyond the "demands of decency" is ab-
solutely required to make the average family effi-
cient.
But of course this ^1,200 efficiency minimum
was established by Dr. Chapin only for New York
City. Is not the cost of living much less in other
places .? The investigation of John R. Howard, Jr.,
into the conditions of living of one hundred
working-men's families In Buffalo shows that,
except In the matter of rent, the cost of necessaries
is as high in that city as In New York. And In-
vestigations into conditions in seven other New
York State towns and cities, varying In size from
Rochester, a great manufacturing center, to
Honeoye Falls, a town so tiny that the train just
pauses there on occasion, show a significant uni-
36 Increasing Home Efficiency
formity except in the matter of rent, which is
higher in New York than elsewhere, and clothing,
which costs less in New York City than in most
other places.
In 1910 the United States Commissioner of
Labor published the results of an inquiry into the
reasons why children leave school to go to work.
This inquiry covers a number of small manufac-
turing towns in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania,
Georgia, and South Carolina, and tends to show
that the cost of living in these scattered com-
munities closely parallels that in New York City.
With the increased price of commodities it is fair
to assume that families, even in the country and
small towns, need a minimum income of $1,000
a year to live in bare decency, although the
entire income need not be entered in the form of
cash.
Lest we should allow ourselves to consider this
minimum of $1,000 for decency enough to live on
efficiently also, let us see just what it covers. It
takes for granted that the family contains no
children over fourteen; that between $12 and $13
a year only will be spent for furniture and utensils
and dishes; that between $15 and $20 will cover
the charges for doctor, dentist, or oculist; that
there will be no vacations; that not more than $25
a year can go into insurance or savings; and that
from $S to $10 a year must serve for all extra
education, books, newspapers, stamps and station-
ery.
Of course none of us believes that it is for the
The Basis of Eflficiency 37
advantage of the community that children should
go to work as soon as the law allows; and the cost
of keeping a middle-class child between fourteen
and sixteen years, as nearly as one can estimate it,
is ^212 a year. So that one child above fourteen
kept In school, instead of sent to work, requires
an extra ^200 above the minimum Income neces-
sary to keep a family decently alive. Besides, we
admit that recreation Is to the advantage of us all.
Let us not fall Into the fallacy of thinking that a
family can be efficient without It. If vacations are
good for some of us, why are they not good for the
rest? On the face of It, a home that provides only
clothes and food and shelter cannot attend to its
job, cannot be socially efficient.
But families do live on less than $1,200 a year In
many parts of the country? Undoubtedly; but
they usually sacrifice something from their effi-
ciency to do it, — something that It would be for
the advantage of society for them to have.
"This Is my fourth year of teaching In the high
school," says a man from an Eastern town of
about 50,000 inhabitants. "I am receiving a
salary of $1,000 a year, and at present writing I can
look forward to a maximum salary of $1,125 ^
year. You will notice by my expense account that
I include $90 for summer school, and that I have
fallen short In my Income almost exactly that
amount. This is an absolutely necessary expense
if I am to be efficient as a teacher. If any teacher
with a family In this part of the country Is saving
money, It means that he Is saving what should be
38 Increasing Home Efficiency
spent on self-improvement. Of course I could do
what many teachers are obliged to do, — that is,
engage in some gainful occupation during my vaca-
tion, and forego professional improvement, — but
that would mean stagnation."
This teacher has chosen between living within
his $1,000 a year with deterioration into the sort
of inefficiency that would be reflected by every
pupil he taught, and carrying a load of debt like
an old man of the sea to mar his efficiency in an-
other way.
A high school principal in the West has chosen
differently:
"My salary since married has been $85, $95,
$110 (for nine months). Our monthly expenses
average around $50, and we think we are living
high." He writes: "We have nothing to pay to
wages, being able-bodied. The laundry for the
two years' total was $4.17. Neither are we misers,
as we believe in living good. In 191 1 we spent for
candy, $5.15; social and church dinners, $7.25;
olives, $1.80. We buy food in small amounts as
needed, and my wife is not wasteful. Two is
cheaper than one. We have a piano and a cozy
home. So long, till I have time to make up my
accounts for you."
This high school principal's accounts show no
expenditures for books, lectures, or extra study of
any kind ! He is making a different sacrifice of his
efficiency from the Eastern teacher, — he is living
within his income.
An income below $1,200 a year eliminates
The Basis of Efficiency 39
people from many things besides the possibility of
having efficient homes. It forces them out of pro-
fessions where they are needed, and sometimes out
of existence altogether.
The wife of a teacher now in the Northwest
writes:
"My husband is a public school teacher whose
salary has ranged from $600 to $765 a year. Some-
times he has been able to earn our summer ex-
penses, and sometimes not. We became convinced
that the East held nothing In store for old age ex-
cept poverty, so determined to come to .
After paying the moving expenses, we had about
$400, the result of eleven years of labor." They in-
vested their savings in a few acres set to young
apple trees, and, by combining teaching with
farming, are beginning to make things pay. "In
two years more," writes this teacher's wife, "our
trees will bring In an income, and then we hope
this hand-to-mouth existence will cease." Then
they are planning to cut out teaching altogether,
which at present is merely a makeshift to keep the
pot boiling. "After a lifetime spent as a teacher
and a teacher's wife," she concludes, "I believe
that no one can hope to save anything for old age
in that profession, and, while the sentimentalists
love to prate of the 'future reward of the faithful
teacher' and 'the noblest profession on earth,' that
does not provide his family with the necessaries of
life."
A letter In a delicate Spencerlan hand came from
an Idaho town so small that we have been unable
40 Increasing Home Efficiency
to detect it on any available map. It was from a
man who had been in the Congregational ministry
on a salary of ^500 a year.
"Since there was no possible show to lay up a
few dollars for the rainy day, I left the vocation
and devoted myself to agriculture, and made good
in less than ten years. But I had to exert myself
to do it," he writes. " I cannot make much money,
but I don't need much. I have a $3,000 house, a
few cows, about 1 50 chickens, and a couple of good
horses. The farm brings in $500 a year profit, and
I and my little family live in comfort. We raise
almost everything we need, and what few things
we must buy in groceries and clothes and books
we can well afford."
This minister has been eliminated from his pro-
fession by the inability of his family to subsist on
$500 a year.
Here is word from another minister who is in the
process of elimination. He is trying to live in a
New England village on a salary of $800 and a
tumble-down parsonage.
"I cheerfully agree that I and others should be
eliminated because of our lack of social efficiency.
I confess that the thought is not new; I have in-
deed thought of the river nearby the parsonage —
but I dislike water in that form.
"I send my list of living expenses because I am
not only living on an income below the suggested
$1,000, but because the balance is on the debit side.
This debit balance is perhaps a common expe-
rience among my kind. I dub the mistress of the
The Basis of Efficiency 41
manse a * Peculiarly Capable Person/ yet she needs
help; usually some one who is in need of a tem-
porary home, or a school-girl working for board, is
employed. We were trained to enjoy raisins and
nuts, but are living on baked beans and codfish."
This minister has no illusions as to his exact
position in the world and the reasons for it. He
puts down ^115 a year for heat and light, with
significant comments on the state of the parsonage
and the fact that the congregation do not think
it honorable to incur debt to have it repaired;
leaves an ominous blank after "advancement,"
and two exclamation points only after "books."
His budget shows a moderate and well-balanced
expenditure in which the only possible reductions
might be the $25 a year he gives to charity and the
$80 he pays for insurance. The ghastly significant
thing is the debit balance of ^371. Think of such
a debt hanging over a man with no other resources
than an ^800 salary and a tumble-down parson-
age! How can any minister preach the Gospel
adequately to a congregation that ignores the fun-
damental doctrine that the laborer is worthy of his
hire, and drives its pastor to the verge of suicide.'*
The air is full of the irrellglon of the times and
the lack of able men in the ministry. Some proc-
esses of elimination may be hard to understand,
but for the explanation of this one we have only
to look to the Census of 1900, which says:
The average salary of all ministers of all denomina-
tions in the United States Is $1,223 for cities over
42 Increasing Home Efficiency
300,000 population; $1,1 10 for cities of 100,000; $1,063
for cities from 50,000 to 100,000; $972 for cities of
25,000 to 50,000; and $573 for all other places.
Is any comment needed on that? The facts
blow their own trumpets.
A college professor writes that he abhors the
declaration that we should eliminate from our
consideration all families with incomes below
$1,000 a year, because their "social efficiency, con-
sidered from the standpoint of general usefulness,
exceeds that of any other class." He asks, with
consternation, who would perform a whole page
of useful occupations ranging from preaching in
our smaller churches to delivering the groceries.^
** Eliminate them, and you eliminate society it-
self 1" he cries in anguish, taking it for granted that
no man would continue to plow and sow, to weave
or carry or buy or sell, to teach or preach, if he
were well paid for it. For what but the great joy
of poverty should lure a man into such occupa-
tions .f* That it is conceivable we should have a
better class of plowmen on $1,200 a year, that a
well-fed preacher might exemplify the grace of
God as well as a hungry one, has not occurred to
this agitated professor; but then he is not in the
economics department!
There is another sort of protest against the idea
that efficiency has any relation to income, which,
for want of a better name, we call the religious pro-
test. It usually backs up its own lack of insight by
quoting the Bible. From many such we select one :
The Basis of EflBciency 43
"If society should be Imbued with the spirit of
Christian brotherhood; should find ways and means
to enlighten the youth in those families with in-
comes of less than $1,000 per annum as to the op-
portunities in life for those who aspire and with
zeal strive toward perfecting themselves, the truth
conveyed by the words of Christ, * Blessed are the
meek: for they shall inherit the earth,' would be
more obvious than it now appears. ... It seems
to me that it is wholly wrong to fix a wage as the
index of possible social efficiency. The spirit of
hope, the ambition to succeed, may be nourished
in those families if they grasp the Christ idea of
hope for better things beyond."
Why, in the spirit of all that is humane, should
not "a society imbued with the spirit of Christian
brotherhood," do something more than cultivate
hope! Cannot the imaginative mind picture it as
rolling up its sleeves and throwing the stones of
not-enough-food, and not-enough-clothes, and not-
enough-shelter, or enough education or rest or
amusement, out of the path that leads to attain-
ment.^ Is there any authority. Biblical or other-
wise, for substituting hope in the future for food
in the stomach.^ And why, of all things, should
these advocates of the Spirit of Brotherhood take
it for granted that the things necessary to the effi-
ciency of their own households are not necessary
for the rest of the race ^
As Mr. Frank Tucker, of the New York Provi-
dent Loan Society, says:
"Society, which pays the bill for poverty, has
44 Increasing Home Efficiency
the right to say whether poverty that is prevent-
able shall continue to exist. . . . We shall be
led to inquire the price that society pays when the
work of women and children is necessary to sup-
plement the wages of the father. We shall be led
to inquire the price that society pays when a por-
tion of it is housed below the standard, is fed below
the standard, is clothed, is warmed, has its rest
and pleasures, is protected against sickness and
accident, below the standard; is ignorant through
lack of education, because its services are exploited
for the selfish purposes of others, or because of the
unenlightened attitude of some who conscien-
tiously (perhaps) maintain that labor is a com-
modity to be paid for according to supply and
demand, without regard to the essentials of a
normal standard of living and the cost of those
essentials."
In reorganizing certain factories the efficiency
experts have found that better conditions in the
way of light, comfort, sanitation, and shorter
hours result in an increased output. The social
output of the home can be increased in the same
way only by increasing the income of the wage-
earners, teachers, preachers, civil service employes,
to the level of a "normal standard of living."
We have no wish to discourage the energetic,
conscientous housewife who is valiantly trying to
make the best of less than enough for social effi-
ciency; far from it. We do want to make her lift
up her eyes from the narrow round of petty striv-
ings that mean individual survival only, to the
The Basis of Efficiency 45
wider strivings that mean progress for all. Yes-
terday, when the menace of famine was on every
hand, it was a triumph to keep alive. Today we
have learned as a race to produce more than enough
for bare existence; we have attained what Pro-
fessor Simon Patten, of the University of Penn-
sylvania, describes as the civilization of a surplus.
The great duty of our generation is the wise dis-
tribution of this surplus. Our triumph must be
the elevation of the entire race to a worthy plane
of living. And this we shall not accomplish until
a righteous discontent enters Into the hearts of the
democratic masses, until they demand for them-
selves and their children, not survival only, but
the nobler advantages of a spiritually enlightened
civilization. Is It not flying In the face of Provi-
dence to remain satisfied with less than enough
for social efliclency In a world blessed with plenty.^
CHAPTER IV
Chance vs. The Budget
UP in the attic of grandfather's farm house,
packed between the barege dresses, deep
brimmed bonnets and folded wedding
gowns in which we children used to masquerade
whenever we could elude our vigilant aunts, was
an old account book. It had been kept by great-
great-Aunt Serepta, whose husband was a revolu-
tionary soldier, and was a marvel of accounting,
although the shillings and pence, and the queer
"s's" which looked like "fs" made it hard to
decipher. There is a family tradition of Aunt
Serepta's good housekeeping, her frugality and
neatness, and some of the linen which she wove
and marked with her initials in delicate cross-
stitch is now on our own table. Aunt Serepta was
the perfect housekeeper of her time.
And there is another set of account books in
our possession — books kept twenty-five years ago
which are complete records of the family costs
down to the mending of the harness and the var-
nishing of the carriage. Like great-great-Aunt
Serepta, the maker of these books knew where
every dollar had gone — afterward.
Most of us have inherited the idea that this
same sort of historical record of the family dis-
bursements is all that can be expected of us. We
46
Chance vs. The Budget 47
do not realize that since those days of detached '
business men, whose incomes depended on their
own enterprise and exertion, times have changed;
that we are — most of us — living on salaries or in-
comes which are about as elastic as New Bedford
granite, and that only by deciding beforehand
just what proportion shall be eaten and worn,
lived in and burned up, can we avoid the rough
edges of bankruptcy and carry our families se-
curely toward their particular goals.
We do not want the same things out of life;
some of us do not care to be pillars of society but
long to go about "for to admire and for to see,"
and the few who have learned to plan beforehand,
how to keep house on the budget system, seem to
be attaining their diverse ends more successfully
than the rest of us, for the simple reason that a
family budget is the most effective instrument in
the efficient running of a household. It is to the
housekeeper what a set of blue prints is to the
builder.
The family needs fall naturally into five divl- ^
sions. Beginning in the order of necessity, they/ /
are: food; shelter; clothing; operating costs, which
include heat, light, furnishing, repairs, service and
general running expenses; all the diverse needs
which it Is hard to label, such as education, savings,
recreation and the pleasures which make for social
advancement; and incidentals. To make a family
budget along these lines is still unusual, but it is
by no means unknown,— the measure of our civil-
ization is the distance we plan ahead.'
48 Increasing Home Efficiency
The Millars, a family living in a New York sub-
urb on a salary of ^3,000 a year, have worked
out a budget fitted to their particular needs.
"What a hard time I've had,'' Mrs. Millar says,
"to learn that it isn't by tight-lacing the dollar
bill that one is comfortable, but by making one's
needs an easy fit to one's income! For sometimes,
no matter if I'd scraped the soup bones and boiled
the coffee grounds twice, I never knew, even after
rd seen the bills, whether I hadn't spent more
than I ought to have spent.
"And just think," she went on, "when I was
first married, I began by bucking the accepted
fallacy that it is cheaper to own your own home
than to pay rent! I've kept the advertisement
which lured us into it as a reminder."
She opened her account book and there it was,
pasted in the debit column.
"Tasteful, commodious and well-built House, beauti-
fully situated, in Montrose; 34x36 feet in Dimensions,
Eight Rooms; attic has space for one or more additional
rooms. Lot 150x150. Less than Five Minutes' Walk
from the Montrose Station of the Erie Railroad. Com-
manding view. Elevation about 100 feet above tide
water. Locality Healthful. Streets Macadamized and
lighted by Electricity. Property restricted. Running
Water, Modern Plumbing; Furnace and Range; bath-
room; stationary Yorkshire Tubs.
"Price $6,000. Small Cash Payment. Balance on
Bond and Mortgage.
"Price subject to change without notice."
Chance vs. The Budget 49
"That was what caught us: Trice subject to
change without notice.' We saw it soaring like a
bird, snatched at it, and caught it on the fly! We
thought we'd be better citizens if we owned our
own home, and I had read a book on housekeeping
which assured me that one could safely spend
one-fifth of one's income on rent. But if we only
spent one-sixth, that would be ^500, and we fig-
ured that the interest on the ^6,000 we owed on the
house would be $140 a year less than that, and that
we'd gradually pay ofl" the mortgage out of the
money we'd saved. Not until we had moved in
and settled did I sit down with pencil and paper to
find out just how soon it could be paid for. Then
I discovered that if we waited until we got all the
$6,000 together, it would take forty-two years
and 3i2f days, exactly; and that if we paid some
on it every five years, it would take twenty-three
years and nearly 308 days; but that by reducing it
every year, we could get all but $8.02 paid in
twenty years. I never figured out how long it would
take us to pay that $8.02, but I found that it wasn't
just paying the mortgage that ran up the cost.
"We picked out the house with reference to the
view of New York twinkling like a diamond neck-
lace in the distance and the sort of people we
thought would be living next door; but we hadn't
noticed that the mahogany finish and white enamel
paint and the mirrors we liked so much really
needed two servants to keep them clean. Two
servants would mean $600 a year. I saw that I'd
have to be the other servant. Next we found
50 Increasing Home Efficiency
that we couldn't afford to give pretty little dinners,
nor have things in the chafing dish when people
dropped in, nor do any of the things we had
planned when we bought the house. It was only
useful to eat and sleep in.
"And then Jane was born. We were so happy
that I think John would have hemmed her little
flannel jackets himself, if he had known how. We
never thought of her as a financial responsibility,
but there was a lump sum of a hundred dollars to
Dr. Arnold, and I understand now that he must
have given us reduced rates, because he knew
John; the trained nurse cost twenty-five dollars a
week for three weeks, and the price of those same
little flannel jackets ran the whole cost up to some-
thing like three hundred dollars. Of course I
hired a nurse-maid. I took it for granted that she
was as much a part of a baby as coats and trousers
are of a boy; but after the first month I discharged
her. I found she cost just eighteen dollars a month
that I didn't have. But you notice that I hired
her first and found out afterward that I couldn't
afford her.
"I began to see that just paying the bills after
the things are bought doesn't fit the modern situ-
ation at all. You've got to know beforehand,
because a salary of three thousand dollars will
not stretch to order. There was nothing John or
^ I could do to earn any more money, and if we
wanted more things, it was up to me to manage
so we could get them. It was necessary to know
just where I could turn if I needed an extra, where
Chance vs. The Budget
SI
the budget could be squeezed, and where it was
likely to expand without warning. And, more-
over, I had to keep things in proportion. So I
began to live on a budget, and it has picked more
thorns from our pathway than any unknown un-
cle who ever left a fortune to his relatives. I based
my estimates on past experience and I apportioned
our income as follows:
Mrs. Millar's Monthly Budget
(Father, mother and three children.)
Annual income, ^3,000. Monthly income, ^250.
By per cent
Rent $50.00 20 %
Food 70.00
Heat and light 7.50
Clothes 43.34
Insurance, savings, church 20.00
4.16
2.52
28
3
17-336
8
1.664
1.008
Carfare
Dr. and dentist
Laundry (John's) per week 62c.
4 shirts with attached cuffs
7 collars 2.48 .992
Recreation:
Club dues (Mrs. M.) $10 per
year; children's dancing school,
$20 per year; books, papers,
theaters, etc lo.oo 4
Repairs and replenishing 10.00 4
Lunches (John) i5-00 6
Help 15.00 6
$250.00 100 %
52 Increasing Home Eflficieney
"I don't think my table has the self-denying
flavor which clings about the eating of beef-heart
and fish. There are six to feed now, counting the
maid, though William doesn't do much but run
up the milk bill — bless him!"
Mrs. Millar's Daily Food Budget
(Mr. Millar, Mrs. Millar, three children and
a maid.)
Meat, 3 lbs. at 20c $ .60
Bread, 2 loaves, made at home .16
Cereal and rice or macaroni .05
Vegetables .25
Butter .15
Fruit .30
Coffee (4 lbs. a month at 30c.) $1.20
Tea (K lb. a month at 70c.) 35
Cocoa (twice a week instead of milk) . . . .20
Sugar, 18 lbs. at 6c 1.08
$2.83 .09
Eggs .20
Milk (2 qts. at lOc, i pt. cream at 12c.) .32
Desserts, cheese, condiments, pickles. . . . .20
$2.32
The three pounds of meat a day which Mrs. Mil-
lar bought were distributed through the week
about as follows:
Chance vs. The Budget 53
Roast of beef (6 lbs. at 26c.,
2 dinners) $1
Sirloin steak (2 lbs. at 26c.)
Fish (3 lbs. at loc.)
Fowl (2J/2 lbs. at 21C.)
Cutlet (2 lbs. at 20c.)
Ham (2 lbs. at 22c.)
Soup meat at 9c
56
52
30
74
40
44
36
$4.32
Her daily expenditure for meat
being 61 5-7 cents.
In the weeks when she bought a mutton or pork
roast instead of beef, her expenses would drop a
little below her allowance.
"I pay Mary $15 a month and board," resumed
Mrs. Millar. "She's just the sort of prehistoric
drudge to be satisfied with the isolation and the
pay. She can't speak English, but she can clean
and wash and bake bread and is too homely to
marry the butcher. One of the hardest things I
have to do is to keep my light and heat bill down
to $250 a year, for there's no way of keeping tab
on how much I'm using, if it is gas; and I must
keep the house warm and cook the food, no matter
how much coal it takes.
"John has to have a chop or a slice of roast and
vegetables for lunch, and he needs the rest which
comes from eating in a comparatively quiet place,
so, with the tip, he rarely gets off with less than
sixty cents; $15 a month he counts his luncheons.
54 Increasing Home Efficiency
Here is John's personal budget. He isn't a ready-
made man, but he's had to get himself stand-
ardized.
Mr. Millar's Clothes Budget
2 suits at $45.00 $ 90.00
2 extra trousers at $8.00 16.00
2 hats at $3.00 6.00
3 prs. shoes at $5.00 15.00
6 shirts at $1.50 9.00
Overcoat 35-00
2 suits winter underwear at $2.00 4.00
2 suits summer underwear at $1.00 2.00
12 socks at 25c 3.00
Ties, gloves, collars, etc 10.00
$190.00
"Of course he doesn't need a new overcoat
every year, but there is always something to take
its place; new evening clothes every few years,
or a frock- or a rain-coat, or new flannels, or some-
thing. John has to have clothes up to a certain
grade as a business proposition. There is a cash
value in the cut of his shoes and in his being able to
invite a man out to lunch.
"My own clothes' budget runs like this:
Chance vs. The Budget 55
Mrs. Millar^s Own Clothes
Tailor suit (made after the season) $ 50.OO
Waist to match 12.00
4 shirt-waists at $1.50 6.00
Fancy white waist 5.00
2 prs. street shoes at $5.00 lo.oo
Pr. house slippers 2.00
Pr. dress shoes 5.00
Pr. rubbers .75
White duck skirt 6.00
Muslin dress lo.oo
Silk petticoat 5.00
House dress (made at home) 10.00
Half evening dress (worn two years) 25.00
2 hats at ^8.00 16.00
Pr. evening gloves 2.00
Pr. silk gloves 1. 00
2 prs. street gloves at ^1.50 3.00
Stockings, material for underwear (made at
home), ruchings, veils, etc 11.25
$180.00
"I learned to buy out of season and stick to one
or two colors. By having my tailor suits made in
the slack season, I get $75 ones for $50; and $15
hats marked down to $y. There is a lot in never
wearing your street suits or gowns in the house,
and I learned to pick up at sales pretty house
slippers and ready-made muslins to wear evenings.
I manage to dress the children for $150 a year —
56 Increasing Home Efficiency
$70 for Jane, $50 for John, Jr., and ^20 for William,
with $10 ^scattering.'
*'I never want to feel again the sensation of curl-
ing up my toes inside my shoes when the financial
automobile slews around a corner. I'm content
to go slow and get back a little of the blessed se-
curity of my childhood when I didn't know there
was such a beast as Financial Anxiety. And I
know that if I hadn't learned to live within a budg-
et, I might be breaking Jane in as a second house-
maid instead of planning to introduce her into
society.
"Mr. MIcawber was right. Do you remember
what he said ?
"* Annual income twenty pounds; annual ex-
penditure nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and
six — result, happiness! Annual income twenty
pounds; annual expenditure twenty pounds, ought
and six — result, misery!'"
But Mrs. Avon living in the center of a North
Dakota wheat ranch, and Mrs. Fairfax Randolph
of the trucking section of Virginia, and all the
other people living on the capricious incomes from
the soil will probably say:
"This budget-making is all right if you are living
on a salary, but it doesn't work when you depend
on a farm."
Yes it does!
A telephone bell was ringing in the front hall,
the postman's wagon came ambling up the road, a
rasped trolley wire hummed warningly below the
hill, a succession of automobiles whisked by — and
Chance vs. The Budget 57
we were in the very heart of the farming district
of western New York, where Mr. and Mrs. Elbert
Lewis live in financial security on a budget — with
a steadily swelling surplus. Two things had
brought the surplus about — on Mr. Lewis's part,
the adoption of scientific methods of agriculture,
which reduced to a minimum the tyranny of para- /
sites and weather; and on that of Mrs. Lewis, the ^
scientific management of the household, which she
runs within a budget as carefully laid out as that
of any billion dollar corporation, and as strictly ad-
heres to.
"I came to my budget in the most natural way,"
said Mrs. Lewis. "I had kept expense accounts
in an unsystematic fashion for three years, and
though Elbert worked hard, and I tried to be
economical, it looked as though we were headed
straight for a mortgage. To be sure, the farm had
cleared an annual average of ^1,800 — enough to
live and save on — but the fluctuations from year
to year had been so unreasonable that we never
could reckon on our income with any certainty.
We had followed piously in the footsteps of father
Lewis, whose staple crop had always been wheat,
with enough corn for his horses, and some rye and
barley as incidentals. Hadn't he been a prosperous
farmer.^ But he flourished in the days before the
fresh fields of the Dakotas and Canada had cap-
tured the market — his prices didn't depend upon
the size of their competing crops. Somehow, we'd
got to get out of the range of their competition,
we'd got to take advantage of our eastern location
58 Increasing Home EiBBciency
and our nearness to the city markets, and, in-
cidentally, we'd got to circumvent chance and keep
our income steady. This was Elbert's part of our
problem, and he's been solving it by balancing the
crops against each other, so that no matter what
sort of a season comes, we have a good yield of
something, and the fluctuations in our income are
all on the safe side of $1,800."
Here is the list of their net profits for 1909:
Wheat $150.94
Potatoes 1 10.00
Apples 255.33
Beans 44975
Miscellaneous garden stuff 140.64
Sheep 30475
Poultry 78.32
Cows and milk 239.21
Fat stock 140.64
Total $1,869.58
"As you see, the potatoes went back on us; but
then the apples and the beans did splendidly. We
raised corn for the stock only. Next year we shall
probably put clover or some other forage crop in
place of the potatoes. Or if the market indications
are good, we may put some acres to onions. We've
got things fixed like a teeter-board — one side can't
go down without the other going up. If the lambs
drop short in March, or June goes dry, or there
are extra doctor bills, we are not scared blue by the
growl of the wolf at the door.
Chance vs. The Budget 59
"Unless Elbert had been able to establish a rea-
sonably steady Income/' Mrs. Lewis went on in-
tently, "I could never have done my end of the
job — which is to plan our expenses beforehand
and to run the home within my estimates on a busi-
ness basis so as to get the utmost for our money.
I don't like to throw dice with nature. I tried that
nerve-racking pastime before I devised a budget.
I used to figure my expenditures on the basis of
what the crop had brought the year before. If
we had come short, I scrimped; and if we had had
a bumper crop, I plunged. We didn't get the cu-
mulative value of the money we spent; we started
and stopped like an old-time engine. Now we run
on this schedule:
Farm: 150 acres. Average Net Income, $1,800.
Family: Father, Mother, Margaret. Two
Hired Men and a Maid in Summer — None in
Winter.
Budget Actual In
as planned expenses per cent
Groceries $ loo.oo $ 81.60 4.36+%
Meat 20.00 10.09 -54+ "
Medical aid 25.00 26.70 .14+"
Church 15.00 15.79 .84+"
Hired men 280.00 280.60 14.98+ "
Hired girl 62.00 41-52 2.22+"
Clothes;
Elbert 70.00 36.60 1.96-f "
Grace 75-oo 67.40 3.60+ "
Margaret (age 2) 25.00 26.95 1-44+ "
Refurnishing 80.00 79-29 4.24+ "
Amusements 20.00 19.80 1.05+ "
6o Increasing Home Efficiency
Budget Actual In
Insurance: as planned expenses per cent
Fire $ 33-8o $ 33.80 1.88+ %
Life 95.00 95.00 5.08+ "
Running expenses 100.00 123.50 6.65+ "
Taxes 48.00 48.00 2.56+ "
Magazines and papers. 24.00 24.00 1.28+ "
Books 15.00 22.00 1.174- "
Postage and express 16.00 19.80 1.05+ "
Vacation trip 100.00 113.25 6.05+"
Club dues 20.00 20.00 1.07+ "
Charity 25.00 25.00 1.34+ "
Christmas gifts 40.00 45.00 2.46+ "
Margaret's bank account 25.00 25.00 1.34+ "
Improvements to place 15.00 16.80 .98+ "
Coal 120.00 120.00 6.42+"
Miscellaneous 51.00 49-98 2.66+ "
Total $1,499.80 $1,466.87
Estimated income 1,800.00
Actual income 1,869.58
Estimated savings $ 300.20
Actual savings $ 402.71 21.54+%
We put a doubting finger on the ^91.69 charged
to groceries and meat. "This," said we, "is a
mistake."
"No," she said, with an air of superb assurance,
"it's good management."
When meat, propelled by the tender hands of
the interests, registered its gentle upward curve,
Mrs. Lewis considered with some feeling what was
likely to happen to the savings allowance in her
budget. So she made a little every-man-his-own-
packer agreement with Elbert, and re-opened the
Chance vs. The Budget 6i
smoke-house on the edge of the orchard that
Mrs. Lewis, Sr., had abandoned twenty years be-
fore. They began to use their own fresh beef, mut-
ton and pork in winter, and corned and smoked
and salted down a supply for summer. With these
meats and eggs and chickens, they got satisfacto-
rily through last year from November to April
without buying any meat, and even last summer,
when they had two men and a hired girl, they
bought meat only twice a week.
"I don't pretend," said Mrs. Lewis, "that the
meat we kill ourselves and eat without having it
hung in cold storage is either as delicious or as
tender as that we used to get from Chicago; but
that is a luxury of civilization which I can only get
by tipping the ice companies, the railroads, and
the meat trust, in addition to paying their legiti-
mate profits. Some day we'll own them or put
them on a maximum wage, so that they'll do what
they're paid for and we can attend strictly to our
own special business. Until then we've simply got
to make the very most of what we have."
It is Mrs. Lewis's keen mind that substitutes
fresh vegetables and souffles and salads for the
"wholesome, plain diet and good old-fashioned
cooking" of Grandmother Lewis's day. In her
garden, the beet, the carrot, the turnip, and the
onion form only a remote background, against
which shines the "Great White Butter Lettuce,"
recommended by the seed books, every leaf of
which curls by nature into a little cup to hold
French dressing. There are Brussels sprouts like
62 Increasing Home Eflfieiency
luscious green beads on their stiff stalks, artichokes
ready for the boiling, and asparagus thrusting up
green fingers to be grasped. Peas and beans are
planted every two weeks so as to furnish a per-
petually fresh crop while the season lasts; and no
one ever tasted such melons as those from the
sunny slope below the wood lot, nor such grapes
as are left on the vines till just before the frost.
"You see, vegetables which cost so much in the
city are no harder than any other sort to raise,''
she explained. "It isn't half so hard to make
French pastries as doughnuts, and I like them
better. Only, to set a varied table, keeps your
imagination working overtime."
Living within a budget is the answer of a clever,
well-trained woman to the problem of rural isola-
tion, uncertainty, and debt. The simple solution
of Grace Lewis is to take business methods over
into agriculture and home management; to take
the fewest risks for the biggest returns; to cut down
the middleman's profits to the utmost; to have a
large, steadily growing junk-heap on which to
throw every tradition or method that begins to
creak at the joints; and to gear up to a new speed-
limit, where the methods of a certified public ac-
countant are applied to the raising of cabbages,
and double-entry bookkeeping keeps tab on the
syrup that Elbert eats on his griddle-cakes.
In the hither side of Nebraska, surrounded by
German and Norwegian immigrants, live an
American farmer and his wife, who are running
their farm on the same business methods by which
Chance vs. The Budget 63
the city of Milwaukee ran Its affairs under the
SociaHst administration. That is, at the beginning
of each year they arrange a budget of their esti-
mated expenses, determining beforehand not only
how their income is to be spent, but just what
that income must be.
David and Elizabeth Eaton began their house-
keeping with no more definite plan than to work
hard, spend little and pay off the mortgage on their
farm. It was only after their second child came
that Mrs. Eaton got a clear view of their situa-
tion. She was trying to build without her blue-
prints.
"As I lay looking at Enid's little soft head on
the pillow beside me," she said, "I saw her grown
up to a slender girl, and I thought of the pretty
clothes I would give her and the good times she
should have. I was just wavering between sending
her to Vassar or Wisconsin, when I happened to
ask myself how I knew what we would be able to
do when she was eighteen, or ten, or what indeed
we were able to do at that very moment. Wasn't it
just as probable that I should have to put my
daughter out to service as that I could send her to
college.^ So far David and I had been just happy
and industrious and had let it go at that; I began
to see that we must be businesslike as well."
That was nine years ago. Since then Mrs.
Eaton has so systematized the income and outgo
of the farm that when her third child was born,
less than a year ago, she could have told how many
neckties he could have at fifteen. Not a shoe
64 Increasing Home Efficiency
factory manager in all New England knows better
the profits on Oxford ties than Elizabeth Eaton
knows the profits on her husband's corn crop of
191 2. She knows her financial position to the
point of deciding whether it is wise for her to buy
a new rubber rattle for the baby or not.
The only definite figures Mrs. Eaton had when
she decided to begin her business system were the
interest on the mortgage and the taxes on their
land. She proceeded to add to them other charges
which she considered just as imperative — the cost
of giving her family what they ought to have to
make them the sort of people they ought to be.
She put herself in the position of a board of mana-
gers, decided upon her plans and then looked about
for her capital. It was as though she sat down and
cut out an ample dress pattern, allowing for the
cloth to shrink and the child to grow, and then
demanded material enough to make it without
scrimping and without waste. She found that a
pleasant, easy-fitting pattern for her family life
could be cut out of ^2,000 a year. Two thousand
a year is what she required her husband to earn.
Then she apportioned her resources so as to enable
her to put her plans into effect.
This is her budget, worked out through a series
of years, during which she ran into great boulders
of unexpected expenses that had to be got over,
sloughs where she just could not drag enough out
of the soil to meet the bills, and barren spots
where, having spent her income foolishly, she had
to scrape along on nothing:
Chance vs. The Budget 65
Nebraska Farm Budget
Farm 160 acres. Income ^2,000 a year.
Family: father, mother and three children.
Mortgage: In per cent
Interest $ 360.00 18 %
Principal (payment on) 300.00 15 "
Operating Expenses:
Taxes 3i-20 1.56 "
Wages (man — 6 months at^^30.oo) 180.00 9 "
woman( — 26 weeks at ^4.00) . . 104.00 5.2 "
Refurnishing 50.00 2.5 "
Running Expenses:
Fuel, Light, Repairs, etc.. . . 198.00 9.9 "
Clothes:
David 70.00 3.5 "
Mrs. Eaton 90.00 4.5 "
Junior (aged 12) 40.00 2 "
Enid (aged 9) 30.00 1.5 "
Baby Louie (aged 10 months) 10.00 .5 "
Food:
Groceries 120.00 6 "
Meat 40.00 2 "
Fruit 25.00 1.25 "
Insurance:
Fire 40.00 2 "
Life (Mr. & Mrs. Eaton) 120.00 6 "
Health 35-oo 1.75 "
Club dues (Mrs. Eaton) 10.00 .5 "
Books, papers, magazines 30.00 1.5 "
Sundries 116.80 5.81 "
$2,000.00 100 %
66 Increasing Home Eflficiency
Of course, to some of the city-bound, it may seem
that it is worth more than $2,000 a year not to
live in Nebraska, where you can't always buy what
you want with your money after you have it; but
to Mrs. Eaton, creating the things she is going to
buy is the most interesting part of her work. It is
like playing Robinson Crusoe, and take it by and
large, R. C. had a pretty good time. He had a
wonderful chance to grow up with the country,
and could choose between adapting himself to his
environment, like a dandelion, and sinking to the
mental level of his man Friday; or pulling the
whole desert island up to his grade of civilization.
It is the same thing that General Gorgas did in
forcing Anglo-Saxon sanitation on Spanish Havana
and exactly what Mrs. Eaton is doing in pushing
the peasantry of her part of Nebraska out into
the stream of American advancement.
For the things that a highly civilized, foresighted
woman like Mrs. Eaton demands of life are not just
the food and drink and clothes and shelter that any
one State can supply; they are the intangible neces-
sities. She would as soon think of going without her
monthly magazine as without her shoes, and if cir-
cumstances presume to step in between her and her
acquired needs — why, it is a dangerous position for
circumstances that care about self-preservation!
"There must be somebody for me to neighbor
with," she writes. "Not just to run out and bor-
row a drawing of tea from, as our grandmothers
would have said, but some one to help me pass the
change of life back and forth; to talk over the new
Chance vs. The Budget 67
sleeves as they are understood in Nebraska, and
the county fair and the neighbor's children — to
gossip with, if you like to call it that. These little
social scallops break the straight edge of life;
they're for the health of my soul and David's, too.
You may not see how talk about the fashions will
help David, but it is all part of my effort to keep a
sort of newness in our lives, even if we have been
married fourteen years and have three children.
I have an awful dread of the silence that has fallen
between some of the married people I know. It
isn't that they have quarreled or even had any mis-
understanding. Life has just slid onto a dull gray
plain, where each of them knows everything the
other one knows and there's nothing to talk about.
I will have something to say to David even if it's
only that Mrs. Olsen's Plymouth Rocks are laying
better than my white Wyandottes. So I am allow-
ing myself real money out of the little we have and
time out of my busy life to make things happen
in the way of clubs and institutes and cooperative
enterprises that a tired farmer and his tired wife
can get rested in talking about."
The Eatons have fixed a minimum income —
which must be the basis of budget building —
with as much certainty as anything can be fixed in
this capricious world; they have proved that farm-
ing can be standardized like any other business,
and that taking a number of years together, so
much land plus so much seed, fertilizer, work, and
brains will produce such and such an income. It
is almost as sure as Government bonds.
68 Increasing Home Eflficiency
Out on the Pacific Coast is a young couple try-
ing to keep safely between the hedges which shut
out the sea of debt on the one hand and the crags
of killing hard work on the other.
Mr. Allison is a teacher — a good one, in a good
school, with a salary of ^i,8oo a year. He has be-
fore him the possibility of a college position and
the probability of a long and useful life, with plenty
of work so long as he is able to do it. Mrs. Allison
brews and bakes, and sews and gardens, and runs
the whirligig of her little household in accord with
the dancing of the happy world about the sun.
The real life of the Allisons is before them — intel-
lectual achievement, children, the chance to push
the race ahead. But their financial outlook is very
limited, for the average pay of the men teachers
in the United States is not large, and only a few
college positions go into the thousands. Neither
Mr. nor Mrs. Allison has any illusion about fortu-
nate speculation, or a specially created "chair" in
a university with a vast salary. They believe that
their prosperity depends on what they can save
out of their small but reasonably certain income.
Now, Mrs. Allison has a lot of business sense,
and she began her housekeeping by organizing
it on the basis of the least that they could effi-
ciently live on, put their expenses almost at the
level of subsistence, as you may say, and then
made every outlay beyond that tell for their busi-
ness and social advantage. Mrs. Allison didn't
begin the budget plan consciously, but her system
of accounting developed naturally into a habit of
Chance vs. The Budget 69
forecasting her expenses, and that grew into the
carefully planned schedule that follows:
Mrs. Allison^ s Budget
Income: ^1,800 ^150.00 a month
Location: California Occupation: Teacher
Family: Husband and wife
Per
Month
Mortgage on house. ... $ 30.00
Carfare 5.85
Food 18.00
Wages 4.95
Gas 1.95
Electricity 1.50
Laundry 1.20
Clothes 18.75
Telephone 1.95
Insurance 7.65
Church .90
Books, etc 5.40
Amusements 4.20
Incidentals 4.20
Savings 43.50
Per
By
Year
per cent
$ 360.00
20
70.20
3-9
216.00
12
59.40
3-3
23.40
1.3
18.00
I
14.40
.8
225.00
12.5
23.40
1.3
91.80
5-1
10.80
.6
64.80
3.6
50.40
2.8
50.40
2.8
522.00
29
$150.00 $1,800.00 100
Mrs. Allison presents her problem and its solu-
tion in a letter which runs, in part:
"People having only $1,200 a year could live as well
as we do; but, you see, we want to pay for our house,
and are saving money for that. We thought it wise to
70 Increasing Home Efficiency
build because, aside from living in the kind of house
and location which we like, we have our rent; and when
we want to sell, we expect to make about fifty per cent
on our money invested. Of course, this Is very unusual;
but we bought our lot about three years ago, when
property was much lower, and in what has proved to
be a very good location. Generally speaking, here in
California, we expect to at least come out even in
owning a house.
"Literally our income should be stated as * eighteen
hundred a year — and a garden.' That shows out es-
pecially when you notice that here, in this land of high
meats, I need only allow $i8 a month for my table.
We eat a great deal of fruit and vegetables, both of
which we raise; in fact, aside from potatoes, we do not
buy more than five cents' worth of vegetables a day.
I seldom buy any fruit except berries. I absent-
mindedly forgot to have berry-bushes planted in our
garden at first, and the ones we put in later won't bear
for another year. But buying berries isn't a great ex-
pense here, for boxes holding enough for two dishes sell
for five cents in the season — sometimes three for ten
cents. We always have peaches, plums, apricots,
oranges and pears in abundance, and we have a big
apple tree in the back yard. I never have to buy fruit
to can, for out of my garden I put up more than we
need. I think one reason living costs so much is that
people think they must have what they want to eat
regardless of cost; they buy things out of season, and
fancy canned goods because it is easier than preparing
fresh food at home.
"My regular milk bill is $1.50 a month; that is for
Chance vs. The Budget 71
one pint of Jersey milk a day; and then I buy a little
cream extra. But we do not drink coffee, and, unless
we have company, our milk gives enough cream for
our breakfast food, and for desserts. Ice costs five
cents a day for the seven or eight months in the year
when we need it. The rate here Is 40 cents a hundred
pounds, and my Ice-chest Is a dandy. Henry made it,
otherwise we might need more ice. We live simply
because Henry does not care for fancy cooking.
"Servants are hard to get here, and they are mostly
Chinese when you do get them. They get ^30 to $4.0
a month, and that does not Include laundry work. I
can't afford one at that rate, and besides I feel sure it
would cost us fully as much again for food, and maybe
more. You know I was brought up to waste nothing.
I do have a woman come in to wash and clean at
25 cents an hour. I plan to have her half a day a week,
but usually It is a little more, and I count on nearly
five dollars a month for that. I send Henry's collars
and cuffs to the laundry, and all the "flat work" be-
sides; sheets, table-cloths, pillow-slips and the like —
all except the embroideries, which I do myself. But it
is cheaper to have our underwear and my dresses and
shirt-waists done at home.
"We allow ourselves $225 a year for clothes, and
mine cost twice as much as Henry's. He keeps a
couple of good tailor-made suits going all the time, but
he is very careful of them, and has them cleaned and
pressed often. He wears a lot of clean linen, and we
have been fortunate In getting his shirts at sales, some-
times getting $1.50 and $2.50 shirts for 75 cents. I am
careful of my things too. I never pretend to get a meal
72 Increasing Home Efficiency
In a street suit. If I have been out and come In just In
time to get dinner, I put on the teakettle and change
my dress while it is getting ready to boil. I consider
that another reason why people living In moderate
circumstances find living so high Is that they take no
care of things after they get them. The best clothes
are worn on any and all occasions, Instead of sometimes
wearing second-best, and so saving the best. They
think It Is too much bother to change their clothes, and
then wonder to find they are soiled. I plan to have a
few good things rather than a lot of cheaper ones. For
instance, I have a broadcloth suit that I have worn
three years; not for best last year, and I shall still wear
It In the rain this year. It was so well made that it has
kept Its shape. Then I have a white lingerie dress,
made by the best dressmaker here. I have had it three
years, but I shall feel entirely happy In It this afternoon
when I wear it to a party where all the other women
will have this year's dresses.
"Henry does not smoke, or spend money for any
such luxuries, but he has so far to go for his classes that
his carfare bill is just twice what It would naturally be.
"I know no other young people who spend so much on
books and periodicals as we do; but you see It Is a mat-
ter of business — a part of Henry's equipment for his
work. Really, we have more magazines than we pay
for, because Henry contributes to some which are sent
him free. I feel that these books are sort of educational
whetstones for his brains, and that we can't afford to
do without a single one.
"I guess I've analyzed everything In this list but
incidentals. I wasn't going to tell you about them,
Chance vs. The Budget 73
but I will. They are mostly violets, lilies of the valley
and candy which my husband gets for me. I can't
seem to break him of the habit, but, really, I don't
object very much.
"You ask how we save if we want anything extra.
We don't believe in spending all that we earn; so if we
want anything extra, we just write checks for it. We
plan ahead for the extra by saving some all the time.
"Do you know it's very saucy to inquire into
people's private affairs like this!"
As yet the Allisons have not had to meet the
problems of a family, and the extra time and care
and expense as well as the extra joy that children
bring.
Whether this policy of "saving all the time" is
socially advantageous, is not in question here.
The important thing is that Mrs. Allison is likely
to accomplish what she sets out to do, because she
plans beforehand how she is going to spend her
money. Of course, she might get on by the simple,
old-fashioned method of trusting to chance and
then scrimping when expenses outrun income,
but a budget is the modern improvement on that
way. A budget is merely a machine to convert
the raw material of an income into whatever one \/
plans to get out of life; and if you get the right
sort of a light-running budget, you can make it
turn out savings, or a chance to write, or profes-
sional opportunities, as you choose. Whether you
are living on a salary or the profits of a modest
business, whether like the Millars you decide to
74 Increasing Home Efficiency
rent or like the Allisons to own your own home,
you need a budget of your own as much as a city
or great industrial corporation. You can't take
any other person's budget unless you have the
same income, the same sized family, live in the
same locality and are aiming at the same goal.
Budgets don't come ready-made, a dozen in the
box; you've got to work one out for yourself, adapt-
ing it to your particular circumstances and aspira-
tions. These families, — the Millars in the Metro-
politan suburb, the Lewises and the Eatons on their
New York and Nebraska farms, the Allisons in
their small California city, know what they want
out of life and are using their budgets to get it.
That is really the basis of all budget building, —
and therefore the basis of efficient home manage-
ment,— to know what your home is for.
CHAPTER V
First Aid to the Budget-Maker
I HAVE three thousand a year," writes a man
from Wisconsin. "How ought I to spend
it?"
A woman from New Hampshire duplicates this
question, and men and women everywhere cry
out for a schedule on which to drop their money
and see it run, Hke marbles on a bagatelle board,
into the proper pockets.
When these questioning ones are financially at
the lower edge of the middle class — that is, have
about $1,200 a year income and the average family
of three children — such a schedule is not hard to
make, because it involves only the expenditures
that are essential to physical efficiency. At the
rate of thirty-five cents per adult man per day, they
must spend $447.15 for food; shelter will cost
about $144; clothes, a minimum of $100; light,
heat and other operating expenses, $1 50; insurance,
savings, recreation, health, and the cost of keeping
a child of fourteen in school instead of sending it
to work, approximately $312; while about $46.85
must go for incidentals. This we believe to be the
average minima for maintaining an average family
in health ancj decency in the United States today.
75
76 Increasing Home Efficiency
During the last four years some two hundred
accounts of the expenditures of middle-class
families have come to us. It is obvious that the
general level of instruction in mathematics is
pretty low. Sometimes the accounts don't balance
within $300; sometimes people state frankly that
they spend their incomes "probably about such
and such a way." One man says naively:
"I notice that this account adds up $211 more
than my salary, so I suppose there is a mistake
somewhere."
There is!
But, in spite of the popular inadequacy in the
presence of figures, seventy-six of these budgetary
accounts are mathematically correct and bear the
stamp of truth. These seventy-six are from every
part of the United States, cover practically every
occupation of the middle class, and concern no in-
come of over ^5,000 a year. That seventy-six
records of this character furnish slight basis for
elaborate generalization, we fully realize; but the
conclusions to which they lead are valuable as
indicating the truth. These budgets show that
families with incomes of $1,000 or below, from
whatever part of the country they come or in what-
ever work they are engaged, average less than the
minimum expenditure for health in every item. Al-
though they average only one and a third children
to the family, and therefore could meet the condi-
tions of health by spending as little as $332.15 a
year for food, they do not actually reach this food
minimum by $66.75, ^^^ ^^^7 average a deficit of
First Aid to the Budget-Maker 77
$72.97 on their total annual account. Obviously,
families with Incomes near $1,200 a year — the line
of decency which marks the entrance to the middle
class — have little choice as to how they shall spend
their money If they are to remain physically effi-
cient. It is possible to say how their family budg-
et ought to be made. No budget will make an
income of less than $1,000 enough for bare health
and decency; It cannot spend one dollar twice.
For Instance, take the expense account of the Cald-
well family — father, mother, two children under
seven — living In Chicago on an Income of $1,079.50
a year, with a deficit of $191.18; the expenditures
for such a family, on such an income. In such a place,
according to the minima for health, should be:
Minima
Food $ 344.93
Shelter 144.00
Clothing 100.00
Operation 150.00
Advancement 312.00
Incidentals 46.85
$1,097.78
Mr. Caldwell spends:
Food $ 304.26
Shelter 307.50
Clothes 1 15-25
Operation 185.36
Advancement 288.20
Incidentals 70.1 1
$1,270.68
78 Increasing Home Efficiency
The most a budget can do for Mr. Caldwell is
to show him how to reduce his deficit to ^18.28, —
the difference between $1,097.78 and his income
of $1,079.50 — and pointout his three lines of action:
earn $18.28 more a year, work out some coopera-
tive scheme by which the things he must have will
cost him less, or give away the baby. People in his
dilemma have tried all three. Mr. Caldwell, being
on the ragged edge, can take a budget ready made.
When the income is over $1,200, the family
has passed the line of decency and entered the
realm of choice. Whether the surplus is wasted
or saved need not affect their physical efficiency.
Their budget need not say how the entire income
must be spent, but will show how it may be spent to
gain whatever special end the family has in view.
It is a philosopher's stone to transmute a mere
money surplus into opportunity.
For instance, Mr. French, a teacher, with a wife
and two children, having an income of $3,311 a
year, and living in a large Massachusetts town,
sends his expense account and asks how he can
save $1,000 a year. Now it is perfectly evident
that he can do this, because the $2,311 he would
have left is enough to maintain his family in health.
Here is a digest of his expense account:
Food $ 386.76
Shelter 484.32
Clothes 413-25
Operation 439-46
Advancement 1,587.21
$3,311.00
First Aid to the Budget-Maker 79
Mr. French's children are so nearly grown that
the minimum cost of feeding them is, according to
our standard, $434.35, which is $47.59 more than
he spends now; but this dlflference is accounted for
by the vegetables he raises in his garden. Prob-
ably he cannot reduce his food cost further. He
pays $340.32 over the minimum for shelter,
$313.25 over for clothes, $289.46 over for opera-
tion, and $1,275.21 over for advancement. But
in his case these minimum expenditures must be
modified by the consideration of what is custom-
ary in his profession. Our collection of budgets show
that teachers with families average $256.76 for
shelter, $206.86 for clothes, $251.22 for operation,
$754.34 for advancement, and $150.50 for inci-
dentals, with a deficit of $12.20. Mr. French
already puts Into savings and Insurance $337.34;
to Increase this to $1,000 he might reduce the
shelter and clothing to what Is normal for his class,
and garner the $228.71 he would still need from the
operating expenses of his household, or anywhere
along the line of advancement, from charity or the
church, recreation, travel, or gifts, or by keeping
his daughter home from college.
Whether that $1,000 a year will not cost the
community and himself a price he is unwilling to
pay, no budget can show him. Will not his
daughter's college training bring In a higher rate of
interest than the bank would pay.^ Are not good
clothes for the advantage of his family.^ The cost
of operation might be cut if Mrs. French would
do all of her own work instead of only part of it,
8o Increasing Home Efficiency
as she does now. No budget will tell him whether
it is wise for him to make these retrenchments or
not. But if he considers the saving of ^i,ooo the
most important thing he can do, the surplus above
what is necessary for health, even according to the
standards of his class, is there, and the budget will
guide him to it.
It is a more delicate matter to adjust a family
budget so that it will wipe out a deficit in happi-
ness and social usefulness, but it can at least be
made to show where the trouble lies in the case of
such a family as the Wilsons of St. Paul. Mr.
Wilson is a professional man, earning ^3,000 a
year, and there are two small children in the fam-
ily. They are not trying to save more than they
do and they run no deficit; but, as Mrs. Wilson
writes :
"As for advancement, you see, it is small. We
have sacrificed it to the physical care of the babies.
I belong to a college and study club, and my hus-
band to a club or two of his profession, but we
rarely attend, and have dropped from regular to
occasional church-goers. The children are the
reason for everything we do, and the excuse for all
we do not do. We have sacrificed community to
individual efficiency. Is it worth while .^ I think
so, though I sometimes chafe under it."
This is the Wilsons' budget compared with the
minimum schedule, and the average expenditures
of their group:
First Aid to the Budget-Maker 8i
Average for
Minima Prof. Group Actual
Food ^332.15 ^463-27 $ 44S-00
Shelter 144.00 489.29 1,000.00
Clothes 100.00 252.43 400.00
Operation 150.00 393-72 550.00
Advancement 312.00 803.04 455 -oo
Incidentals 46.85 196.57 150.00
The Wilsons have a margin above the decency
line of ^1,800. Why should the responsibility of
the way it is spent be put upon two small children
without their knowledge or consent? Why should
it be necessary for Mrs. Wilson to spend a lifetime
chafing for things it would be for her social advan-
tage to have.^ Does chafing make her a better
mother? Would not ^700 or $800 deducted from
the cost of shelter and operation give freedom and
other valuable things in exchange? If the com-
munity were consulted, wouldn't it rather have
some other return from the Wilsons than that they
should live in even the most superior of houses?
If the spending of the surplus of a single family
is a social problem, much more is the spending of
the surplus of a group or profession. To deter-
mine how these group surpluses are spent we have
averaged the cost of the different items of ex-
penditure in the budgets we have collected both
with regard to the size of the incomes, to the
occupation of the father, the number of children
in the family, and to the locality in which they
live.
82
Increasing Home Efficiency
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First Aid to the Budget-Maker 85
It must be remembered that the families with
a thousand a year or less at the top of this table
of budgets are not the immigrant families with the
traditionally large number of children and the
correspondingly high death rate; they are families
that by tradition, feeling, association and intent
belong to the middle class.
These tables show that the amount spent on food
increases from $265.40 a year for incomes of
$1,000 or less, to $572.57 for incomes from $4,000
to $5,000, but that the proportion of the income
spent on food drops 4^/2 P^r cent for every $1,000
increase in income. The percentage spent for
food is highest in the families of mechanics and
clergymen, presumably because mechanics need
a larger amount of food to replace their physical
wear, and because the clergymen are compelled
by the tradition of their calling to entertain many
guests.
It is interesting to find the lowest average for
food in cities of from fifty to one hundred thousand
inhabitants — that is, in cities large enough to have
adequate transportation facilities for bringing in
provisions, and not so large as to force up prices
through an excessive demand. Food costs most
in the smaller cities which are either metropolitan
suburbs with transportation charges in addition
to city prices, or which are aside from the main
lines of transportation and have to pay abnormal
freight rates. In other words, the cost of food
above the price paid the farmer who raises it and
the butcher who slaughters it and the grocer
86* Increasing Home Efficiency
who brings it to the door, is the tax paid the
railways.
The average amounts spent for shelter show that
people with incomes under a thousand dollars have
got to be content with tenement conditions if
they live in the city, or similar inadequate housing
in the country, and that such shelter can be had
for eleven per cent of their incomes. A sudden
jump to twenty per cent takes place with an income
between ^i,ooo and $1,200 which is the point of
breaking into the middle class, and shows how much
the middle class value a decent place to live in.
From this twenty per cent there is a drop of three
per cent with each thousand dollar increase in
income. Clergymen average the lowest for shelter,
because a parsonage is often part of their salary,
and the small capitalist spends the largest percent-
age; but the salaried employe and the struggling
professional man spend the next highest, because
respectable shelter marks their place in the middle
class. The percentage spent for shelter is highest
in cities of over one hundred thousand inhabitants,
where the high taxes and crowding send up the
rents.
The cost of clothing shows the most stable per-
centage of all the six heads of expenditure. It
varies from nine to twelve per cent for all places,
incomes, and occupations, with the exception of
clergymen and physicians, whose professions re-
quire disproportionate expenditure on clothes.
The minimum expenditure on clothes In New York
City is $100 a year, and this is less than in most
First Aid to the Budget-Maker 87
other places. All the accounts we have received
from families with incomes of less than ^1,000 a
year show less than this health minimum for
clothes, the average for this group being ^86.87.
It appears that the middle-class standard of
living, whether in city or country, in whatever
profession, and with whatever income, implies be-
tween $200 and ^400 a year spent for the operation
of the household. The farm budgets do show a
higher expenditure than this, but this is because
the cost of farm labor, which should be counted
as a business charge, is included under household
operation. Though there is a minimum below
which the charges for food and shelter and clothes
dare not go, operating costs can go down indefi-
nitely. But where people have even a little leeway
they appear willing to sacrifice a good deal for com-
fort and convenience, for light enough, and heat
enough, and a chance to substitute the work of
the laundry and the bakeshop and the clothing
factory for the work of their hands. The amount
of the operating costs which goes for personal serv-
ice varies from ^22.56 for families with Incomes of
$1,000 and under, to $259.09 for families with from
$4,000 to $5,000, showing that only after the in-
come passes $4,000 does the average family hire
an average servant at the average price of $5.00 a
week.
It is under Advancement^ however, that we get
the real significance of an increased income. This
rises from $286.06 on a $1,000 Income to $2,683.15
on a $5,000 Income. The curve develops unbroken
88 Increasing Home Efficiency
from the low-paid occupations to the higher, ex-
cept in the case of educators, who are forced by
the necessities of their work to spend a large
amount on their own improvement.
The expenditure for Incidentals is a question of
accurate accounting as much as anything, but the
inability of people with less than $i,ooo to live
within their Incomes, as shown by their average
deficit of nine per cent, and the way this deficit
shades to the disappearing point at ^3,000 a year,
is a significant answer to those people who Insist
that ability to live within one's income is purely a
matter of good management, quite unrelated to the
size of the income. Is there any reason to believe
that men earning more than $3,000 a year are more
likely to select wives with reference to their house-
keeping ability than those with Incomes under that
sum? What other explanation can there be for the
fact that ill-paid clergymen In small towns run
the highest percentage of deficit, while capitalists,
business men, and successful physicians run none
at all?
But, after all, it is the surplus, — that is, the
margin above the decency line, — and not the
deficit, that Is Important in these middle-class
budgets. Do the various groups give an adequate
social return for the extra amount of money they
receive ? To mechanics society gives $503 .97 above
the minimum for health, and It goes mostly Into
better housing, savings, charity, and the church.
Their average of two and a half children is high
for the middle class, but low for the wage-working
First Aid to the Budget-Maker 89
class. The salaried employes have a surplus of
$747.63, and they distribute it quite differently
from the mechanics. They eat nearly $yo better,
they increase their housing cost nearly $100 above
the mechanics, they spend more than double what
the mechanics do on clothes — the difference be-
tween the requirements of shop and office — but
they also, like the mechanics, put most of their sur-
plus into savings and insurance, even though they
run an average deficit of $16.68, — or eight-tenths
of one per cent of their average income — to do It.
None of their surplus goes into increasing their
number of children; on the contrary, they average
about a child less to the family than the mechanics.
In the professions, where the surplus Is $1,178.98,
the average number of children goes up to nearly
two In the family, and the bulk of the surplus of
the professional group goes Into better clothes —
which might be called a professional requisite —
and Into savings and charity. In proportion, the
professional men are more generous than any other
group, although they, too, run an average deficit
of $15.41, — seven-tenths of one per cent of their
incomes, — and spend only $243.98 for vacations,
travel, education, books, and professional Improve-
ment— not an excessive amount surely, when
one considers how much we need better service in
medicine, law, education, and from the clergy.
As a sharp contrast to the generosity of the
professional men comes the niggardliness of the
farmers, who give away less than three per cent of
their Incomes, although they average a surplus of
go Increasing Home Efficiency
$1,012.34. The farmers put $267.38 into savings
and insurance, $15.43 '^^^^ health, and $156.88
into books, education, recreation, and travel. Ob-
viously the farmers choose money in the bank
rather than college for their average of two and
three-fourths children; or improvement or pleasure
for themselves.
The business men have a larger surplus above
the demands of decency than any other group of
the middle class — $2,251.20. And $1,358.12 goes
into advancement, while the remainder is dis-
tributed fairly evenly over the general cost of
living. Now would it not appear that $1,358.12
worth of advancement is a social gain ^ An analy-
sis of this item shows that nearly 38 per cent of it
goes for savings and insurance, 16 per cent for
church and charity, while only 34 per cent ($570.41)
is spent for education, books, and recreation.
Business men have the choice between running an
automobile and sending a child to college, and
they have, on the average, 1.7 children to send.
Altogether they have sufficient leeway, so that
neither illness nor another mouth to feed need
strike them with panic.
The small capitalists present an Interesting
phenomenon. They seem to be people who have
backed out of life — people with small incomes,
averaging $2,266.66, derived from Investments, on
which they prefer to live without exertion rather
than enter any gainful occupation. Certainly
they make sacrifices to follow their fancies. They
have fewer children than any other group, spend
First Aid to the Budget-Maker 91
only ^102.66 a year on service, showing that they
either underpay their servants or do without them;
they spend four per cent less on advancement
than even mechanics and a higher per cent on food
and shelter than people who are earning approxi-
mately the same incomes; they travel little, en-
tertain little, give little; they simply continue to
exist. As one of them says:
"It has seemed to us that college-bred Ameri-
cans of the Eastern States were becoming stand-
ardized, were growing into a race of clerks. . . .
We honored their sturdy sense of duty, their
long-enduring rectitude, the patience with which
they carried a heavy load. But we had no wish
to be like them. . . . We saw the people of
our own age losing health year by year through
over-work, under sedentary life and lack of daily
exercise. We saw them growing yellow and
flabby and unfit, and the spectacle didn't attract
us. . . . We have dreaded the tyranny of accus-
tomed things, the settling down of habits, the
getting rooted in one place so deeply that it would
cause pain to shake loose, so at intervals we have
flavored life with change. . . . We have waged
a running fight on monotony and routine. We
dread them more than we dread sin or mistakes of
judgment, for we believe that they slay the inner
beauty. When they interweave themselves with
the human spirit and sap it, they destroy the only
living thing within us, the only gift that can create
and communicate joy. . . . By knowing many
sorts of persons we have hoped that we have cut a
92 Increasing Home Efficiency
larger piece out of life than if we had stayed well
sheltered in our own environment of family and
education. Realization is only for personal ex-
perience, and that we were denied because of the
fortunate accident of birth."
Temperamental no end! But where does it
get to ? It might have dropped from the lips of the
eloquent vagabond in Galsworthy's "Pigeon,"
or be heard rising from any benchload of the un-
employed in Washington Square. Shall man re-
turn to the world the good he gets from it by
preserving an attitude of mind.^
There are a few who, writing more in sorrow
than in anger, ask how the church and the minis-
try are to be supported when people contribute so
little to them. It is significant that all but nineteen
of these seventy-six budgets class church and char-
ity as one, as though they did not give to religion
for value received, but as a gratuity to a mendicant.
Only six of the families that put the church under
a separate heading give to it as much as they do to
charity, and three of these six are the families of
clergymen.
It appears from these average budgets that
society is getting a very mixed product from the
middle-class homes. There ought to be a valuable
contribution from them because most of them
have a financial surplus with which to make it.
A surprising amount they are putting into sav-
ings and insurance — ^300.58 per family per year
— equal to almost thirteen per cent of their incomes.
The question whether this really represents a
First Aid to the Budget-Maker 93
social gain or not can only be answered by an intri-
cate balancing of probabilities. The money they
save is not idle; it is in the hands of bankers and
insurance companies. Are these agents making a
better social use of it than the people themselves
would if they spent it wisely.^ Could the old age,
sickness, and death which this ^300.58 per family
per year is designed to meet be provided at a less
social cost than the present sacrifices that are being
made in order to hoard it.f* Is there a relation
between the fact that the middle class contribute
less than two children per family and this zeal to
save.^ Would they be willing to launch a larger
proportion of children into a world that assured
them a comfortable old age?
Just as the making of an individual budget is
indispensable to the efficiency of the individual
household, so the collection and interpretation of
the budgets of large groups is essential to the dis-
covery of our social mistakes and the means of
their correction. This is a task for a governmental
department, and its social importance is equalled
only by the collection and practical use of vitality
and morbidity statistics. For society needs a plan
as much as the individual household, and perhaps
the most important result of all budget-making
will prove to be the harmonizing of our individual
plans with a program of social welfare.
CHAPTER VI
Home Administration
ALICE Morse Earle quotes from the diary
of Abigail Foote who lived in Connecticut
L in 1775, as follows:
"Fix'd gown for Prude, — Mend Mother's Riding
hood, — Spun short thread, — Carded tow, — Worked
on Cheese-basket, — Hatchel's flax with Hannah,
we did 51 lbs. apiece, — Pleated and ironed, — Read a
Sermon of Doldridge's, — Spooled a piece, — Milked
the cows, — Spun linen, did 50 knots, — Made a
Broom of Guinea wheat straw, — Spun thread to
whiten, — Set a Red dye, — Had two scholars from
Mrs. Taylor's, — I carded two pounds of whole
wool and felt Nationly, — Spun harness twine, —
Scoured the pewter."
Besides these chores, Abigail Foote washed,
cooked, knitted, weeded the garden, picked the
geese, dipped candles in the spring, and made
soap and sausages in the autumn.
The efficient administration of her home, once
required these duties from every American house-
wife. In the time when steam was merely a swirl-
ing mist out of a tea-kettle, and electricity only a
menacing adjunct of thunder storms, before the
factory system or public utilities had been dreamed
94
Home Administration 95
of, the burden of manufacture was on the house-
keeper, and if she shifted it at all it was to the
shoulders of another woman. The servant was
her one labor-saving device.
The following advertisement appeared in the
Pennsylvania Packet of September 23 rd, 1780:
"Wanted at a Seat about half a day's journey from
Philadelphia a single Woman of unsullied Reputation,
an affable, cheerful, active and amiable Disposition;
cleanly, industrious, perfectly qualified to direct and
manage the female Concerns of country business as
raising small stock, dairying, marketing, combing,
carding, spinning, knitting, sewing, pickling, preserv-
ing, etc. . . . Such a person will be treated with re-
spect and esteem, and meet with every encouragement
due to such a character."
This was the ideal of the servant, — the female
Jack-of-All-Trades, the unspecialized factory hand,
the only means such a mistress as Abigail Foote
could find to lighten her labors.
We can find the time when the home was not a
manufacturing plant, only by peering up into our
family tree to where our arboreal ancestress, dim,
brown and hairy, grins back at us from the leafy
green. Her refuge of intertwined boughs and
branches was really an independent home, and
no factory. It passed with her, but it is coming
again, — the home which is not the seat of any
productive industry. It will not be a self-sufficient
home as hers was, — that is gone forever. But it
will be as free from the obligation to make the
96 Increasing Home Efficiency
things it consumes, as a power machine in a cloth-
ing factory is to make its own parts, though, like
the power machine, this new home will be driven
by the rods and belts of our new social life, and be
held firmly in place by our social needs. To run
this social machine properly is our present-day
problem of home administration.
In reality, this non-manufacturing home Is still
in the future for most of us, and much further off
for some than for others, because our homes are
not all at the same stage of civilization, nor are all
parts of the same homes at the same stage. What
is efficiency for one may be inexcusable slackness
for another. Most of our homes are stuck fast in the
slough of the manorial tradition, — the pernicious
and generally unfounded idea that each family
commands a supply of the necessaries of life from
its own fields and pastures, and that the way to
free itself from the burden of manufacturing these
into useful forms is to hire a servant to do it. In
pursuance of this superstition, we use the servant
as a labor-saving device, quite regardless of the
fact that It is not labor-saving in general that she
promotes, but merely the saving of her particular
mistress.
We are not finding, however, that It Is an easy
thing to shift the household burden to the servant,
for the simple reason that, being human, like our-
selves, and having had a taste of education and
culture, she declines to receive It. She doesn't
have to assume It, and as she doesn't like it any
better than her mistress, — she won't. As one
Home Administration 97
woman writes from an eastern manufacturing
town of eighty thousand Inhabitants:
"My problem Is complicated in two ways; the
big industrial concerns offer a variety of employ-
ment for girls at good wages and short hours, —
that Is a holiday on Sunday, and a half holiday on
Saturday; and on the other hand, the presence of a
large number of salaried officials and engineers,
creates a large demand for capable servants, so
that a wage for a competent maid, even in a very
small family, is forced up to what is in our case
prohibitive."
This situation exists everywhere. The middle-
class servant Is obsolescent, being In the reprehen-
sible act of vanishing into her own home, on the
one hand, and into the factory, on the other. It
may look as though we were confusing the problem
of home administration with the servant problem;
but how one shall administer one's home depends
largely upon what tools one has, and the servant
is a tool, the vanishing of which leaves us in a linger-
ing emergency. To be sure, people do not ordina-
rily realize that the servant Is a tool. "The scar-
city of good servant girls Is breaking up the homes
of America," writes a despairing gentleman from
Pennsylvania, as though she were corn or meat,
water or air. There was probably a time when
primitive man cried out that stone axes were
vanlshlng,-"and how could civilization go on with-
out theml But civilization wasn't parasitic upon
the stone ax, any more than the home is parasitic
upon the cook. The need was for a new tool to
98 Increasing Home Efficiency
take the place of the old one, — a bow and arrows in
place of the ax, — ^just as today there is need for
mechanical labor-saving devices to replace the
maid-of-all-work.
A man with an annual income of three thousand
writes :
"We used to have a woman come in by the day.
When she stopped coming, we just purchased a
vacuum cleaner for a hundred-and-twenty dol-
lars, which the women folk now prefer to outside
help. . . . We have also a motor-operated washing
machine, two electric sad-irons, and one gas
iron."
The wife of a New England physician, whose
income ranges from three to four thousand dollars
a year, says:
"In the last year, I have kept no maid, having
discharged my last one after nearly six years of
service, and have enjoyed the year more than any
previous one. I never hesitate to expend money
for any labor-saving device. I use a gas range, a
fireless cooker, have an excellent vacuum cleaner,
and an adequate supply of all kitchen utensils and
conveniences. My household expenses have been
cut down about five hundred dollars a year, and I
know of no easier way of saving that amount than
by being free from the care and annoyance of a
maid. I am surprised to find how small our total
for food has been this last year."
"Our house," writes a man with an income of
five thousand dollars a year, "is arranged all on
one floor, and all unnecessary rooms and partitions
Home Administration 99
are eliminated. Our efforts are directed towards
keeping down the accumulation of 'things,' so
that we will not be crowded, and dusting and clean-
ing will be simplified. Electric current costs us
twelve cents per kw. hour, and is used rather
freely, — as fuel only in the flat iron and a small
heater for the dining-room table; for power, in the
vacuum cleaner and washer and wringer; and for
light. For light and power, we do not find the
electric current expensive, but for heating it is
very much so. It is not possible to figure how
much we save in using electrical energy. We are
content to know that there is a saving of labor,
which, were we deprived of help, would not make
us fare so badly."
A well-to-do minister answers our question:
"With reference to labor-saving appliances,
the vacuum carpet cleaner cost one hundred-and-
thirty-five dollars. It costs about two cents an
hour for electricity. Eight cents a week will give
the house of two halls and nine rooms a thorough
sweeping. The electric washer and wringer is
sold on the guarantee that it will do the washing
for a family of six persons in one hour and a half
at three cents for electricity. We bought the ma-
chine on that guarantee, and find that it will do
the work in the given time at the given cost. Our
gas iron cost three dollars and a half, and does not
consume any more gas than an ordinary lighting
jet. We use about fifteen barrels of water per
week in the house. The hot air pump will pump
that amount of water in a hundred minutes, using
loo Increasing Home Efficiency
about as much gas as five or six open gas jets
would consume in that time. The engine cost a
hundred dollars. In five years I have spent only
fifty-five cents on repairs, and that was for new
leather valves. The electric heat regulator, which
controls the flow of natural gas into the furnace,
cost twenty-eight dollars, and is operated by dry
batteries which need to be replaced every year at a
cost of fifty cents for the two. You will notice
that the wages of an ordinary maid, who is willing
to do any kind of work about the house, would, in
a year and a half, amount to more than the cost and
operation of all my labor-saving appliances."
In none of these families is it lack of money
that has supplanted servants with labor-saving
devices; these housekeepers think them better
tools with which to run their homes.
People write about the care and responsibility
of servants as a major reason for using labor-saving
appliances in their stead. Women have tacitly
accepted the responsibility for the conditions
under which their domestics live and work. They
no longer question that it is their duty to see
that their servants have proper food, a comforta-
ble room, and sufficient wages. Mostly house-
wives consider that their responsibilities extend
beyond these things to the point of seeing that
their servants have recreation, opportunities for
improvement, and time to rest and see their
friends. One of their great objects in substitut-
ing mechanical devices for housemaids, is to
relieve themselves of this pressing responsibility.
Home Administration loi
Have they got to consider whether the vacuum
cleaner is tired or not? Whether the electric
washer and wringer has a headache? If the gas
iron desires a day off to visit its aunt? No! They
can overwork steel and leather and wood, steam
and gas and electricity with a conscience free from
concern for anything but their own pocket-books.
They can be light-heartedly free from moral re-
sponsibility toward the thermostat that controls
the furnace, — Its back never aches!
But besides being satisfactory substitutes for
servants, labor-saving appliances can be so re-
duced In cost that people who couldn't possibly
afford a servant might well afford them. As Mr.
H. F. Stimson, chief engineer of the Universal
Audit Company, says:
"At present, the amount of physical energy
known as a kilowatt hour, which can be purchased
In large quantities in the form of electrical mechan-
ical energy for two cents, would cost about two
dollars and twenty-eight cents If purchased In the
form of human physical energy at the rate of
twenty cents an hour."
According to this, It costs less than one per cent
as much to clean house by electricity as it does by
hand, — theoretically. Practically, it isn't so cheap
as that, because, as one of the householders who
has just been quoted says, "electric current costs
us twelve cents per kw. hour," which is a wide
spread between the wholesale cost and the retail
selling price. It is the same with practically every
commodity the home administrator uses, from beef
I02 Increasing Home Efficiency
to biscuits, from gas to denatured alcohol, from de-
natured alcohol to electricity.
Now if the highest efficiency of the home re-
quires the use of electric appliances, and if the cost
of them to the retail buyer puts them out of the
question, what is the home administrator to do ?
Decide to go without them? Never in the world
did we get a good thing which we were content to
go without. Isn't the Ideal manager of the ideal
home going to insist on having this ideal power?
But you can't raise a private crop of it in the back
yard, you can't get it at wholesale and store it up
for future use, you can't discover a mine of it or a
place where it grows wild; you can't do any of the
things by which you are prone to think you can
circumvent high prices. You have to buy it of a
corporation. Evidently, the housewife, in trying
to make her administration efficient will run
head-on into a public service corporation, — a pub-
lic utility. Is it true that in order to control her
kitchen, she has got to control the public service
corporations ?
"But aren't you galloping unnecessarily far
afield?" cries a perturbed critic, who abhors the
notion that women should enter practical politics
and who clings with the tenacity of ancestor wor-
ship to the superstition that the only proper sphere
of woman is inside the walls of a house. "I admit
the great value of labor-saving appliances," says
this irate gentleman; "now if in addition to using
these, housewives could be taught to apply the
principles of scientific management to domestic
Home Administration 103
processes, wouldn't the problem of wasteful house-
hold drudgery be happily solved?"
Unfortunately, the moment we resort to motion
studies and the other practices of scientific manage-
ment, the moment we attempt to apply the same
principles to household operations, — cooking, wash-
ing, cleaning, serving, — that are being adopted in
the modern manufacturing plant, we find ourselves
in the position of a man trying to run the village
smithy under the spreading chestnut tree as if it
were the plant of the United States Steel Corpo-
ration. The very nature of the" conditions, — and
their apparent inevitableness, — makes any high
degree of operating efficiency impossible. In his
famous experiment in loading pig iron, Mr. Taylor
was careful to select men who were peculiarly
fitted for the particular job in hand. He had
plenty of men to select from, — he had only to pick
and choose. The supply of potential pig iron han-
dlers appears to be unlimited. But in the case of
domestic servants, the demand is said to exceed
the supply by sixty thousand. Selection is prac-
tically impossible; the housewife has got to take
what she can get. Besides, servants are not a
stable group. By the time they have been taught
efficient methods of operation, they are gone. The
schools of domestic science have failed to reach
wage earners in the kitchen effectively. They have
only just begun to reach the housewives them-
selves. And for an intelligent woman to spend
years in learning to save three minutes in boiling
an egg or brewing a cup of tea is a good deal like
/
I04 Increasing Home Efficiency
installing a trip-hammer to drive the occasional
tack. Moreover, the value of standardized proc-
esses depends largely upon uniformity of product,
— and how shall the human product of the home be
standardized ?
But In spite of these considerations, some value
there no doubt is In experiments in scientific man-
agement In the home, though there Is danger of
disillusionment In a faddish exaggeration of it.
Professor Charles and Mary Barnard ran a House-
keeping Experiment Station at Darien, Connecti-
cut, where they showed what can be done In
the way of simplification and efficiency in house-
hold operations without the modern helps of
either gas or electricity. Among other things,
they made elaborate studies In motion saving.
Take for Instance the cooking of the matutinal
^gg' ...
This Is their chart for the cooking of three eggs.
In the first case, the eggs were boiled with the com-
paratively Inefficient utensils, stove, saucepan,
spoon, etc. In the second case they were coddled
with the efficient fireless coddler.
1. Place the three eggs in I. With the right hand
boiling water. lift the cover from
the coddler.
2. Watch the clock. Af- 2. Omit.
ter three minutes,
3. Take serving dish in 3. Place cover on table.
left,
(3 a) spoon in right hand.
Home Administration
105
4. Lift one egg out of 4.
water.
5. Place In serving dish. 5.
6. Place spoon on stove. 6.
7. Carry service dish to 7
breakfast room.
8. Place egg in cup before 8. Omit
right person.
9. Return to stove. 9
10. Place serving dish on 10
stove.
11. Look at clock. After 11
one minute,
12. Lift second egg from 12
water with spoon,
with same motions
as 3, 4, 5 and 6.
13. Repeat No. 7. 13
14. Repeat No. 8. 14,
With left lift kettle of
hot water at same
time.
Lift egg rack from cod-
dler with right hand.
Pour a little hot water
into the coddler.
Omit.
Omit.
Omit.
Omit.
Rinse out coddler.
Pour water in sink.
15. Repeat No. 9.
16. Repeat No. 10.
17. Look at clock.
one minute,
18. Repeat 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
19. Repeat No. 8.
Return coddler to table.
With right hand place
eggs in rack.
15. Place rack in coddler.
16. With left hand lift ket-
tle. Fill coddler to
three-egg mark.
After 17. Omit.
18. Place kettle on stove.
19. With right hand put
cover on coddler.
io6 Increasing Home Efficiency
20. Return to kitchen. 20. Carry coddler to break-
fast table.
21. 21. Place before mistress.
22. 22. Return to kitchen.
Total motions, 27. Total motions, 15.
Trips to breakfast room, 3. Trips to breakfast room, I.
Time, six minutes. Time, 50 seconds.
This schedule is based upon the requirements of
a family of three persons, each of whom wants
his eggs cooked with a different degree of hard-
ness. Where the efficient coddler is used, the eggs
are simply removed from it at the appropriate
moment on the table.
Now, there is no question that Professor and
Mrs. Barnard have worked out an efficient way
to cook eggs, nor is there any question that the
eggs for six or nine or twelve people could be
cooked as well as the eggs for three with only the
additional motions of putting more eggs into and
taking them out of the coddler, and with no
increased equipment either material or intellectual.
Mrs Mary Pattison, who has established a
Housekeeping Experiment Station at Colonia,
New Jersey, with all the facilities of gas and elec-
tricity, tested out an electric washer and wringer
with which she believes she can do the washing
for twelve ordinary families in a day. Of course
she does not do the washing for these twelve fam-
ilies a day — seventy-two families per week — be-
cause she is concerned with the small uneconomic
Home Administration 107
unit of the individual home. To do the washing of
these seventy-two would require no more equip-
ment and only the slight added expense of more
electric current to run the machine.
As Professor and Mrs. Barnard say: "At the
very foundation of the science of domestic admin-
istration lies the conservation of human energy."
From the standpoint of society as a whole, more
energy can be conserved by bunching the home
units into larger groups and operating them on
the wholesale plan. That money should be con-
served is a secondary consideration because money
is of less value than human brain or muscle, but
it is sufficiently worth while, and it too can more
easily be conserved in the larger unit, by co-
operative effort — by putting the labor-saving de-
vice, the economy of motion, the planning and
routing of the work, Into the hands of the willing
public utility, whether privately or publicly owned.
But it is quite out of the question to coddle eggs
for six people when there are only three to eat
them. There is no special object In doing the wash-
ing for seventy-two families a week in the presence
of the obvious fact that there is only the work of
one family to be done. Although homes which
are detached and isolated have much in common
with homes in the close proximity of apartment
buildings, hotels or compact city blocks, there
are matters in which they cannot be brought on a
common footing; but any household function that
can be taken outside the four walls of the home,
such as the washing and making of clothes, the
io8 Increasing Home Efficiency
canning and preserving of foods and a hundred
other detachable functions, can be solved in the
same way for both of them. In the cooperative
use of such things as vacuum cleaners by a coun-
try neighborhood, the isolated homes are securing
the advantages of city life. But our civilization, —
as far as we have got with it, — has left a good many
functions that must be performed at short range,
and in such things as the broiling of beefsteaks
and the making of beds, the farm home and the
city flat are a whole world apart. These short
range problems must be solved in entirely different
ways for the two conditions of living. Where the
public utility cannot yet step in and become the
family servant, the smaller caliber efficiency of
simplified living, motion saving, and the labor-
saving device, must be used. It is for these fam-
ilies that housekeeping experiment stations are
run and individual labor-saving devices invented.
But it isn't as though each family, having its
own set of light-running, labor-saving devices cor-
ralled on its own premises, so to speak, had solved
the problem of efficient home administration. Be-
cause a thing can be done easily and well in the
home is no possible reason why it should be done
there. In these days of wonders, it is conceivable
that a machine might be invented for the home
manufacture of shoes, — paper patterns being
furnished, and instructions how to feed in a little
raw leather, a few buttons, and a bit of thread at
one end, turn a crank and take out a pair of shoes
at the other. But do we want to bring shoe-making
Home Administration log
back into the home on that account? No labor-
saving device that made this possible would be in
the direction of real efficiency.
For, after all, the labor-saving device is but a
temporary host for the parasitic home. Almost as
soon as it has successfully supplanted the servant,
it slides away and leaves us grafted upon the pub-
lic utility. We've been gradually growing depend-
ent upon the public utility ever since we dispensed
with the individual cow and the individual pig,
and put our trust in consolidated milk companies
and the gentlemen's agreement of the beef combine.
We don't call them public utilities, of course; we
call them Petersen's Butcher Shop and Frank's
Grocery Emporium. We think we are "dealing ;
with our tradesmen"; but we are no more inde- |
pendent of the public utilities that control them
than we are of the corporation back of the tele-
phone girl. It's a pretty straight road to the pub-
lic utility, — the hedges on either side are too high
to jump, — and we are rushing along it whenever we f
send our wash to the laundry, use electric power, ;
or have a caterer when we entertain.
A Canadian woman writes of a firm that supplies
a vacuum cleaner at a dollar a day, thus saving
her the expense of the original Investment and the
labor of operating her own. A woman from con-
servative Maine says:
"I was the first In our city to have an electric
iron, but experience has taught me that the best
way is to put your whole washing into the laundry
to be done. Select the right laundry and manage
no Increasing Home Efficiency
right, and the clothes are not worn out or lost more
than any other way. At the best, a washing in the
house is disorganizing, no matter how it is done.
I was one of the first to have an electric cleaner in
my home, but I think now it is better to have a
man come with one, and use it whenever you need,
than to put out your own strength to use one."
These housewives are by no means exceptional;
their experiences show the labor-saving device,
modern as it is, in the act of being absorbed into
general industry like the maid-of-all-work before
it. And they're only doing what the rest of us do
whenever we buy a ready-made dress, or a loaf of
bread, or for the matter of that, a bound book or a
china dish. If for no other reason, this grafting
of the home upon the public utility will go on be-
cause it pays. It isn't a question of whether we
individually can afford the greater expense of home
production; it is the community that cannot let
any of us waste money or muscle or brain. For
whether we intend it or not, whether we see it or
not, what one wastes, either in labor or intelligence,
is taken from all the rest of us. And though each
of the industries has to be packed out of the home
separately, there is no manner of use in trying to
derail the train that is thundering them to the
eager corporation; for they have heard the call of
economy and they will go.
But if we are forced to let the actual industries
on which the home depends become public utilities,
we cannot in that way escape from personal re-
sponsibility toward those who serve us. The girls
Home Administration iii
who make our pastry in the bake-shop, the women
who wash our clothes in the laundry, the men who
work sixteen hours a day at the machine when it
is "rush season by ladies cloaks" on the East
Side of New York, the mill operatives in France
who starve when women choose to reduce the
amount of cloth in their gowns by half, are all our
domestic servants once removed.
Take the family wash. In the days when it was
all done at home, the wife had it under short-range
control and accepted the responsibility of its being
well done under decent conditions. The long-
range modern responsibility of having it done in
the outside laundry is just as binding and far
harder to meet. This new responsibility is of two
kinds: that toward the housewife's own family who
are consumers of clean clothes and household linen;
and that toward the girls who work in the laundry,
the producers, the household servants once re-
moved. Suppose the housewife lives in New York
City, or Chicago, or San Francisco, or Boston, and
sends her clothes to some clean and modest little
shop with a "Hand Work Only" sign in the
window, a realistic clothes-line in the rear, and a
genuine shirt ironer before her eyes. It looks all
right; but the chances are overwhelmingly in favor
of the real washing being done by the "rough
drier" whose wagon calls twice a day for the cus-
tomers' bundles of soiled clothes and returns them
damp and unlroned twenty-four hours later.
These "rough-dry" establishments are called the
"sweaters" of the trade, and those who patronize
112 * Increasing Home Efficiency
them run the risk of all who use sweated goods —
uncleanliness. Their particular form of unclean-
liness is due to the custom of packing the unwashed
clothes from different households into nets to-
gether, and washing them in bulk. Where colored
clothes are included, sterilizing agents cannot be
applied; warm water only is used and the danger of
contagion and the spread of vermin is great.
Is it efficient housekeeping to allow this ?
The recent laundry strike in New York City
brought to light the facts that the girls work in in-
tensely heated rooms, insufficiently ventilated,
artificially lit and for periods reaching as high as
seventy-five hours a week in defiance of the New
York labor law which then * limited the hours of
women's work to sixty a week; and that while a
few skilled washers are paid as much as ^30.00 a
week, a large proportion of the workers get as
little as ^4.00, and this without the board and
lodging which adds to the wages of the home laun-
dress.
From society's point of view, is it efficient house-
keeping to allow such conditions to exist.''
The time is not past by any means when it is a
personal reproach to the housewife to serve her
family unwholesome bread, to let her wash be
badly done, to wear shoddy clothes, to starve the
people who work for her. These things are and
always were a sign of inefficiency, and their char-
acter isn't altered because the housewife's servants
* A law limiting the hours for women to 54 a week was passed
by the N. Y. Legislature in 191 2.
Home Administration 113
do their work away from her immediate oversight.
We can't bring the prodigal spinning-wheel home
again — can we regulate the woolen mill ?
It's idle to try and back out of this extended
responsibility by saying that every woman ought
to do the work of her own household. Suppose
she could, (which she can't), and suppose she
would, (which she won't), could the community
afford to let her? So long as we have got labor-
saving devices invented and have developed public
utilities, the piece-meal work of the human hand in
the home has become wasteful. And in economics,
it is affably recognized, though for the most part
reluctantly stated, that wasteful work is only a
form of idleness, a nervous fluttering of the drone,
so to speak. Professor Frank Tracy Carlton, of
Albion College, puts it in this way:
"When an old art is dying out in consequence of
being superseded by a new art, attempts are in-
variably made to complicate needlessly the proc-
esses of work employed in the old art, — to make
work. The efforts of the various housekeeping
magazines point to the decline and decay of house-
hold industry as a separate and unified form of
industry. One of the important functions of these
numerous journals is that of earnestly striving to
dignify useless work through the introduction of
various and sundry complications."
We may as well face the fact cheerfully that
industry in the home is doomed; that a home ad-
ministration that tries to hang on to the coat-tails
of home manufacture in a sentimental frenzy to
114 Increasing Home Efficiency ;
deter its flight, instead of cheerfully handing out '
its hat and cane and opening the front door, is no
efficient administration. All the flutteration to
put handsewing, and home-baking, and preserv- i
ing, and the making of Christmas mincemeat on I
a plane of what might be called moral elegance is i
just a bracing back against tomorrow. For right i
on the face of it, a home can be inefficient in having I
too much muscle and brains put into it in propor- |
tion to the output, just as it can be inefficient !
through having too much money put into it. It j
is possible to pay too much even for perfection. If i
three women can do the work of five households i
sufiiciently well, can society afford to take five \
women to do it in a world that still needs so much '
to be done — it being remembered always that the ,
home is not a thing to be produced regardless of !
cost or consequences, but a means to civilization? ,
This chapter is not trying to do anything but ;
show how the wind blows. It isn't meant to be a ,
stone sign-post, but a well oiled weather vane. '■
And so it points directly away from the time to i
which Charlotte Perkins Gilman referred when she \
said: !
"Six hours a day the woman spends on food, j
Six mortal hours! |
Till the slow finger of heredity writes on the forehead
of each living man,
Strive as he may: 'His mother was a cook!'"
Home Administration 115
Not a desirable motto for the human brow to
bear, and only slightly less distressing than that
written all over dyspepsia-ridden frames: "His
mother couldn't cook." For the horrid truth is
that the majority of women cannot cook. Take
Vermont, a nice, backward, domestic state, with
no cities of the first-class, and therefore not es-
pecially addicted to delicatessen stores or foreign
restaurants. Ten and one-tenth per cent of its
inhabitants die of digestive troubles!
Apparently women will not stand for these six
hours a day spent on food, resulting in the death
of ten per cent of those fed. Whenever they can,
they save themselves by handing the six hours of
work over to another woman. But there aren't
enough detached women to go around; and any
way, hiring a servant isn't labor-saving, but labor-
shifting. So housewives are catching at the mod-
ern labor-saving device, even when it is not a
money-saving device, as it should be. And be-
cause the labor of operating labor-saving devices
is in itself a thing to be saved, they are reaching
out to the corporation which can distribute the
cost of these new inventions among a score or a
hundred households.
The manufacturer of an electric motor for a
sewing machine recently wrote a plaintive letter
asking why women are so reluctant to buy a device
that is so cunningly designed to lighten their
labors. It appears that women are not anxious
to make sewing easier to do; they want to get rid
of it altogether, — to make it an industry and put
ii6 Increasing Home EflSciency
it out of the house. From all over the country they
write :
"We buy ready-made clothes because they are
cheaper and better."
This is right in line with the civic associations
which in the South are buying themselves vacuum
cleaners to be used by a whole township; with the
cooperative laundries in the farmside villages;
with the hundred other public utilities that are
beginning to do our chores. There is no use getting
sentimental when some favorite industry bursts
out of the front gate!
In Vassar College some fifteen years ago, the
girls had a song in which the hero asked his be-
loved :
"Can you brew, can you bake,
Good bread and cake?"
Before my love I utter.
"Can you sew a seam?
Can you churn the cream?
And bring the golden butter?
What use is refraction,
Chemical reaction, biologic protoplasm,
Psychologic microcosm?
"Would you be my weal.
You must cook the meal, —
"You shake your head,—
You ril not wed, —
And so. Farewell!"
Home Administration 117
If that song were rewritten and brought up to
date, the lover's questions would be much harder
to answer, and yet they might not be so disconcert-
ing. They would run something like this:
"Are you up on the pure food laws affecting the manu-
facture of canned soup?
"Can you assure me that you know the conditions
governing the sanitary production of pastry?
"Can you bring enough influence to bear on public
opinion so that the family clothing will not have
to be made in a sweat-shop?
"Do you know how to get honest government in-
spectors appointed, to assure me of the purity of
the milk and meat and butter you promise to
serve me?
"What use in your knowing
Everything of sewing.
All of pickling and preserving,
All of washing and of serving?
** Would you be my weal,
Do not cook the meal, —
"You shake your head, —
You I'll not wed, —
And so, Farewell!"
CHAPTER VII
The Home and the Market
MRS. FRANK WATROUS is the conserva-
tive wife of a high-salaried man living
in New Jersey. She is the mother of
four, and not socially rebellious. But the other
day she cried:
"These high prices make me so angry! I can't
afford to have anything but the very best for my
family — it doesn't pay. Besides, I've a right to
the best!"
And when asked why she thought she had a
right to anything she couldn't pay for, she con-
tinued:
"I'm not pretending to be able to pay for the
best in money, but I'm paying society in four able-
bodied, able-brained children, each trained to a
useful profession; by keeping Frank in health and
temper to do his work; and by what I'm doing on
the school committee. I'm furnishing society with
the best product in the way of citizens. Don't I
need the best raw material to make it with ? Can
I make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.^*"
Ever since the Children of Israel tried to make
bricks without straw, the generations of man have
been struggling with that problem — especially in
ii8
The Home and the Market 119
the home, where we have been handicapped by
the belief that an alchemy in the atmosphere will
transform second-rate material into first-rate prod-
uct; transmute base metal into gold. It is cer-
tainly to the advantage of society that the home
should turn out the very best product; why, then,
do we continue to buy poor raw materials when we
have, as Mrs. Watrous insists, a right to the best?
We have asked this question of some scores of
men and women living widely apart on the map,
and their reasons, differently stated, shake down
into three:
"There isn't enough of the best to go round."
"We don't know the best when we see it."
"The best costs so much that we can't afford it."
All of them good, truthful reasons for putting
up with substitutes!
Now of course there have been many thousand
generations — all through the time which Professor
Simon Patten, of the University of Pennsylvania,
describes as the Civilization of a Deficit — when
some of us starved because nowhere within reach
was there food enough, when some of us froze be-
cause there were neither houses nor clothes enough,
when we stood for lack of chairs, walked for lack
of wagons, and died for lack of medicines; when
there was not enough of anything — let alone the
best — to go around. But we have reached the
Civilization of a Surplus now, and it's only a step
farther to where there will not only be enough, but
enough of the best, for us all. Already storekeepers,
manufacturers, builders, tell us we can have what
I20 Increasing Home Efficiency
we demand, but that we don't get the best because
we don't demand it.
Now, not for a moment must we confuse the
best with the most expensive — they do not have to
be the same, though often they are.
"This," said a manufacturer of colored calen-
dars, Christmas cards, and valentines, as he held
up a scalloped square showing a green and brown
castle against a cerise sky and covered with dia-
mond dust to represent snow — "this is what sells.
I don't make such things for my own pleasure. I
make them because people want them. I'm ready
to make anything they demand — it costs no
more."
But cards might perhaps be relegated to the
realm of taste, so let's get down to food. We spent
a summer in a small village where the vegetable
supply ran the appetizing cycle of beets, turnips,
carrots, parsnips, onions, and then "repeat"
indefinitely. A neighboring hotel absorbed all
the lettuce and peas and sweet corn that were
raised.
"Can't you grow enough salad for the rest of
us?" we desperately asked a peddling farmer.
"I dunno. Mebbe I might put in more green
things if anybody'd buy 'em. They's room
enough; mebbe I might. I dunno but what I will."
We were looking through some new apartment
buildings overlooking the park — large, gaudy, ex-
pensive.
"Why do you put in such shallow fireplaces.'^"
we asked the agent. "They won't draw. And
The Home and the Market 121
those ice-boxes will melt the ice almost as fast as
one puts it in; and the bathroom door opens the
wrong way, — and — "
"Well, you see," he mterrupted hastily, ** no-
body who comes to rent them knows how they
ought to be."
Now, if the home-maker who ought to have the
best for his home doesn't know what the best is,
what is going to be done? The natural answer is
that he had better find out. "Let every man be
his own expert!"
But how would that be wiser than having every
man be his own shoemaker.^
"By getting acquainted with the butcher we buy
very desirable cuts of meat for from five to ten
cents a pound. Any one can do the same who
knows the ropes," writes a man from Massachu-
setts, under the evident delusion that he has solved
the problem of intelligent marketing. This is —
let us say it as gently as we can — a sort of gentle
graft on the community. Somebody undoubtedly
pays the extra price which he is spared. It is like
a political "pull," and does not help the rest of us
at all.
Suppose, as he suggests, that we all knew the
ropes, would we all buy butcher's meat at five to
ten cents? Suppose our tradesmen are stand-
offish and won't get acquainted? Let us be ill fed!
Suppose we ourselves are crabbed and unsociable?
Let us be ill fed! Suppose we are not sharp, and
can't learn the ropes? Let us be ill fed, and our
anaemic children after us!
122 Increasing Home Efficiency
But still the schools and the cook books and the
magazines insist that each buyer shall learn to tell
the quality of the thing he buys, and except in a
very few of our commodities, such as serums and
medicine, where not to be expert may mean sum-
mary death, it is taken for granted that if the pur-
chaser gets cheated it is nobody's affair but his
own. Business cries, ^^ Caveat emptor^ or take the
consequences!" That might be all right if we our-
selves could take the consequences. Besides, our
buying covers so many commodities that it is not
in our individual power to be expert about them
all. How can we tell all-wool goods except by the
label — till afterward.^ How shall we know butter
from its substitutes .f* What coloring is used in
canned beans? Whether our ginghams are fast
colors, or our gas and oil up to standard.^ Only
through experts on whose word we can depend,
only through a trustworthy guarantee. The pure
food laws, the milk inspectors, the city. State, and
National laboratories, are cooperative efforts to
take from our individual shoulders the onus of
knowing the best when we see it. Isn't it a shorter
road to home efficiency to have the products guar-
anteed at their source, bottled in bond, as it were, so
that every home will be insured the best, than it is
to produce a generation of amateur experts ? Isn't
it possible that efficient marketing includes not
necessarily a knowledge of quality, but ability to
get an official guarantee that will protect the ig-
norant buyer as well as the wise one ? Can we af-
ford to have our homes put out an inferior product
The Home and the Market 123
either in health, in happiness, in taste or in civic
usefulness, just because the buyer of the family
doesn't know good from bad? Society is the con-
sumer of the products of the home. It suffers if
these products are below grade. Hasn't Mrs.
Watrous a right to the best, after all?
There's another attribute that the best things
must have besides their own inherent quality;
that is, convenience. It must be possible to buy
them conveniently, and they must be convenient
to use. We don't usually think of this element of
convenience when we consider good marketing
because we do not think of our time and trouble
as part of the cost of what we buy. But the effi-
cient manufacturer or dealer doesn't forget it for
a moment. He makes his chief profit by appealing
to our convenience. He does crackers up in pack-
ages and delivers them at our door at a telephone
call, or on the receipt of a postal. He knows that
this is far easier for us than to walk a mile, buy
them out of a barrel, and escort them home in a
paper bag. He makes it easier for us to buy jelly
than to make it, to buy our hats than to make
them, to get everything as nearly as possible in the
form and place where we are going to use it.
But things cost so much that way! Of course
they do — in money. Says one* Western mother:
"If you will consult the items of how I dressed
my daughter on fifty dollars a year during her
college course, you will find that I had to go
bargain-hunting, leave early in the morning and
be at the store when it opened. Many a time I
124 Increasing Home Efficiency
came home again without having found a bargain,
but everything I did buy was a bargain."
Was her daughter cheaply dressed in anything
but the money cost? And yet this would generally
be considered as good, efficient buying. What
more is there to it than to get a good thing for as
little money as possible.'*
Those who do not hold with this bargain-hunting
view cry out that we must get rid of the middleman
and keep his profits ourselves. Perhaps so. The
man who grows a turnip and then eats it himself
has eliminated the middleman so far as that turnip
is concerned and gets his turnip at the mere cost
of his own exertions. If that is a cheap price to
pay, let us proceed to the extermination of the
middleman. There is a movement in New York
City toward efficient housekeeping, whose presi-
dent is quoted as saying:
"There will be an eifort on the part of house-
wives to buy direct from the farmers. It will bene-
fit them both. The housewives will revive the
public markets. Please be sure of that."
Now, these women do not mean a market that
is necessarily publicly owned and operated — they
mean a place set aside by the community where
buyer and producer can come together. There is
just one point in favor of such markets — the de-
crease in money cost to the consumer. And it's
no new thing to try to save money by patronizing
them. Away back in the sixteenth century the
Bishop of Lincoln advised his widowed kinswoman
to save herself of her income by going twice in the
The Home and the Market 125
year to the great public fairs to make the chief of
her purchases — her wine, her wax, and her ward-
robe— because she could get them at a less price
than from the traveling peddlars, who were the
middlemen of her day. It was good advice — in
sixteenth century England, a primitive community.
A few weeks ago Mrs. North, the wife of a pro-
fessional man in Ontario, wrote us:
"We have a large garden, for which the head of
the family cares, where we raise all vegetables
needed and a number of small fruits.
"I believe that the explanation of the cheapness
of foods here is that we have an old-fashioned
market. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Satur-
day farmers from miles around drive into the city
to market. The market-house is reserved for
dealers in butter, eggs and poultry, cream and
cheese. We have splendid displays of each com-
modity. The middlemen are absent altogether.
My lady and my lord as well as those of humbler
origin wend their way to market, and on Saturday
mornings especially there are great crowds of
buyers and sellers. Meat is sold in stalls around
the market square, and some people buy by the
quarter. In this climate It is possible to buy In
large quantities if desired. Everywhere you look
you will see people carrying fowls by the legs, and
no one scorns to carry a market-basket."
Mrs. North is taking the best way in a primitive
community in Ontario which she says is "seventy
miles from a trolley car." If we reduce time to
terms of industrial progress, most of us look back
126 Increasing Home Eflfieiency
as far to Mrs. North living in Ontario today as we
do to the Bishop of Lincoln, dead four hundred
years. But only in buying green vegetables, dairy
products, and fruit grown in the neighborhood can
Mrs. North use the public market. She cannot
buy her summer dresses direct from the cotton-
growers of Texas, her crackers from the wheat
farms of Dakota, her shoes from the ranchmen of
Arizona, or her books from either the men that
gather the stuff that makes paper or from us who
write. The reductio ad absurdum is easy.
Of course it might be worth while reviving the
public market just for the sale of provisions if the
saving were great enough, but the money saving
has got to be balanced against the cost in conven-
ience and labor.
Dubuque, Iowa, has a much talked of pubHc
market. On every Saturday from three hundred
to four hundred teams bring produce into the city
and a space of six linear blocks is given up to the
sale of it. On Saturday, September i6th, 191 1,
Apples sold at 25 to 35 cents per bushel.
Butter at 27>^ cents per pound.
Sweetcorn at 10 cents per dozen ears.
Dressed chickens at 90 cents to $1.00 a pair.
Small cucumbers for pickHng at 75 to 90 cents a
bushel.
Eggs at 20 cents per dozen.
Grapes at 2 cents per pound.
New potatoes at 60 cents per bushel.
Tomatoes at 35 cents per bushel.
The Home and the Market 127
But the other side of this pleasing picture comes
from a woman in a similar part of the country.
"I should like to give you the country woman's
view of the public market and the problem of sup-
plying *Mrs. Watrous' with food," she writes.
"I should like to relieve my mind. No doubt you
have seen laudatory articles on the Des Moines
Public Market and how they are slaughtering high
prices. My father owns a farm about twelve miles
south of Des Moines which he rents. Last summer
there were some fine apples going to waste in the
orchard, and our tenant thought he would sell
them in the much advertised public market. He
and his wife and four children worked a day, hand-
picking the apples and loading them. He started
for Des Moines at one o'clock in the morning so as
to be there when the market opened at 6.00 a. m.
He sat in the broiling sun, dickering out apples a
peck at a time. Every woman who came to buy
took all the time she wanted to pick out her ap-
ples and beat him down in the price. When the
market closed at 4:30 p. m., his load was not half
sold and he had taken in but $2.30, small change.
Not even a day's wages for himself and team, be-
sides his night travel and the work of his wife and
children! The Commission Houses would not
bother with half a load of apples. He was utterly
disgusted. He drove out of the city, backed his
wagon down a ditch by the roadside, dumped his
apples into it and drove home. You may be sure
that neither he nor his neighbors will ever take
anything to the market again. Whatever the
128 Increasing Home Efficiency
citizens of Des Moines may think, the wide awake
Iowa farmer, — the kind who plows with a six-
horse team or a gas engine, — has not time to bother
with it."
If the time the farmer takes to sell his stuff, and
the time the buyer takes to select and dicker for
the goods, is of no value, then a public market may
be a community economy. But in a developed
society in which labor is specialized, the time of a
trained truck gardener or agriculturist is too pre-
cious to be taken from his job, and the time of the
amateur buyer might be better spent at his pro-
fession or trade. With our growing specialization
of labor, time has become too precious for such
primitive traffic.
When people deplore the passing of this form of
public market, they act as though it had gone
through somebody's fault. But nobody can forci-
bly amputate an industrial institution from so-
ciety as though it were an arm or a leg; such in-
stitutions disappear, like our ancestral gill-slits
and swimming-bladders, because they have be-
come useless. Nobody went out and feloniously
slaughtered the unprotected public market; civil-
ization simply stole away and left it to starve,
as is the inhuman habit of advancement gen-
erally.
Of course we do still have a kind of public market
even in some of our great cities, like Baltimore and
Washington and New York, but they are not
haunts of the producer by any means; they shelter
the middleman just as truly as the great wholesale
The Home and the Market 129
grocery does, and yet, even so, they are sometimes
an economy — in money.
"We save a good deal of money by buying our
meats, fish, eggs, butter, and vegetables in Wash-
ington Market" (a public market in lower Man-
hattan), writes a Brooklyn gentleman. "We there
get the benefit of cash purchases, but, as they do
not deliver, we are obliged to carry our purchases
home ourselves. I generally meet my wife after
office hours for this purpose. How much we save
was shown the other day when we had unexpected
company to dinner. I was sent to the nearest
butcher for eight lamb chops. They cost eighty-
three cents. We could have bought them for half
that in Washington Market."
This Brooklyn gentleman and his wife must
spend at least twenty cents carfare each time they
go to Washington Market, probably twice that,
unless they are good walkers; they must spend an
hour apiece, at a minimum, and they must carry
their stuff home. All these are part of the cost of
their purchases. They have eliminated the cost of
delivery boys, and telephones, by becoming delivery
boys themselves. If the time of the delivery boy
is more valuable than their own, then they are
buying economically.
Baltimore is trying to get rid of its public mar-
ket, and Washington ought to, because they are
unsanitary. The horses that bring in the produce
to be sold and wait in the neighborhood to haul
the profits home provide meanwhile the best breed-
ing-ground for the "typhoid fly," which crawls
130^ Increasing Home EflSeiency
delightedly over the food exposed for our buying;
waste accumulates, and perfect cleaning is diffi-
cult. It is significant that the typhoid prevalence
and death rates of Baltimore and Washington have
been and are exceptionally high, and that the re-
cent investigations of the United States Hygienic
Laboratory into the Origin and Prevalence of
Typhoid Fever in the District of Columbia trace
the source of typhoid not primarily to the water
supply, but to food stuffs, — milk, green vege-
tables and shell fish, — that are exposed to con-
tamination through excessive human contact and
excessive exposure to the typhoid fly.
Mr. Paul C. Wilson of the New York Bureau of
Municipal Research has made a special investiga-
tion of the public markets of New York City. He
says that five of them were abolished in 1903 by a
resolution of the Board of Aldermen because the
Health Department reported their condition as
unsanitary, the Borough President reported that
they needed large expenditures for repairs, and
the Comptroller reported that they were being
run at a considerable deficit. Of the six that re-
main he says:
"The great bulk of the business in these public
markets is wholesale in character, therefore they
afford only slight convenience or economic advan-
tage to the consumer. While two of the six appeal
to patrons who are not compelled to practice
economy, the other four are devoted practically
exclusively to wholesale trade in so far as they sell
food stuffs at all. The consumer is prevented or
The Home and the Market 131
discouraged from purchasing. A large number of
stalls are rented by the large packing interests
for the preparation and distribution of meat to
retail butchers. Last summer the so-called poul-
try trust rented five stalls in West Washington
Market which it actually did not use for business
purposes other than to prevent the use of that
space by its competitors. The stalls were rented
from the city, paid for by the poultry trust and
left locked, vacant and unused."
These public markets, like our public utilities
generally, — gas, oil, electricity, transportation, —
have been used not to the advantage of the con-
sumer, but by the large business organizations
against the consumer and for their own extortion-
ate profit. The net annual average deficit in the
city treasury for these markets in the ten years
preceding 1910 was ^92,569.09.
In considering the question whether markets
could be established in New York where the
farmers and consumers would really deal directly
with each other, Mr. Wilson says :
*It seems doubtful whether the farmer would
willingly lose the additional time required In mak-
ing sales to the consumer when he can sell his en-
tire daily produce to a wholesaler. Likewise it
is doubtful whether large numbers of the consumers
in New York City would frequent such markets
at the expense of personal inconvenience and loss
of time."
In view of this expert opinion, it is evident that
even if we did buy cheaply at the public market,
132 Increasing Home Efficiency
it would be at the cost of cleanliness and conven-
ience, the things for which we pay the private
dealer; that we do not get rid, either of the middle-
man or the controlling trusts, but only of the
delivery boy; and that we are individually profit-
ing by a big deficit in the city treasury.
To have the cities maintain public markets in
order to bring the middlemen together for the
sake of substituting our time and labor and that
of the farmer for that of the delivery boy is a
doubtful social economy. Rather we want the
grocer and butcher in our block, so that the man
of the house can leave the order on his way to
work, or so that the tradesman can still further
save our time by sending his boy for orders. There7
fore, small stores multiply, even though we pay
an excessive price for their convenience. We pay
the small grocer excessively for the excessive risk
he takes, for his ignorance of the best methods of
handling (because he is not always' an expert),
and for the cost of his competition with the next
grocer up the street.
Let us show how great this excess is by compar-
ing what * Mrs. North, of Ontario, spends to feed
her family, with what Mr. Calvert, of Pittsburg,
pays to feed his. Both Mr. North and Mr. Cal-
vert are professional men. Their families do not
differ materially in their ideals of comfort or
pleasure or clothes. Both use vacuum cleaners
and electric irons, both have dispensed with a
resident maid and depend on outside help, and
* See page 125.
The Home and the Market 133
yet, In spite of these similarities, one family spends
$900 a year for food and the other $240. This is
at the rate of nearly seventy-five cents a day for
an adult man in one case, and less than twenty-
six cents in the other. Mrs. North raises part of
her food and buys the rest at the public market,
without paying big or little middleman's profits
for most of it.
"Anything free in Pittsburg?" writes Mr. Cal-
vert. "No. It takes hard cash in every case to
get what we want. Nine hundred dollars seems
a lot for food, but wife Is saving. Nothing is
wasted. We procure the best the market affords,
but do not entertain much, and are as plain in our
eating as in our dress."
Now, Mr. Calvert would find it neither possible
nor profitable to follow Mrs. North's example.
Even if he could buy direct from the producer —
which he can't — it would cost more inconvenience,
time, and labor than he could afford to pay. How
many million years a day would be wasted if we all
went to market and brought home our purchases!
Next to buying direct from the producer, the
favorite road to economy seems to be to buy every-
thing at wholesale — nothing in small quantities.
A good many people advocate this course. They
say:
"Flour should be bought by the barrel and kept
in a warm, dry place" (or a cool, dry place — opin-
ions differ).
"Buy your soap by the box and stand the bars
on the shelf to harden."
134 Increasing Home Efficiency
"Buy your winter supply of potatoes in the fall
and store them in a cool, dark cellar."
"I find it economical to buy coffee in twenty-
four-pound boxes; keep it dry and warm, and
grind it as needed."
"By buying the muslin for underwear by the
piece, I save many yards in the bolt."
"Several barrels of apples should be bought in
the late summer and kept in the fruit cellar till
wanted."
"Keep your carrots, turnips, and other winter
vegetables under a light layer of earth in the cel-
lar." (In New York earth even for flowers costs
fifty cents a bucket, and cellars are rented by the
square foot for sleeping purposes.)
"Store your old pieces of carpet in the attic.
When you have a quantity on hand, they may be
woven into presentable rag rugs."
"I have found that I save money by putting
down several cases of eggs in water glass for winter
use. By buying them last summer we have had
eggs all winter at twenty-three cents a dozen,
while other people have been paying twice that
much."
A cellar, an attic, cool fruit closets, warm store-
rooms, barrels of apples and of flour, of sugar and
potatoes, shelves full of breakfast food and soap
and sheeting, boxes of coffee, crates of fruit, cases
of eggs, gallons of oil — in a modern flat where
would the people stay.^
What this limitation of space means to the city
buyer we know from experience. We lived for a
The Home and the Market 135
year on the fourth floor of a tenement in the
crowded East Side of New York. Our only source
of heat was a coal stove. We had to choose be-
tween the laundry tub and the bathtub for a coal-
bin. Necessarily we had to buy it by the sack,
which, elevated to our flat by foot power, cost us
eighteen dollars a ton for the same quality that
the dealers were selling at six dollars and seventy-
five cents. We had the wide choice between pay-
ing this price and going without heat. Of course
part of the trouble was that a flat with no store-
room was allowed to be built. We were up against
the city building laws, and there was no way of
efficiently buying coal in that place without chang-
ing them.
But of course not everybody lives in flats. Lack
of space ought not to prevent the thousands of
middle-class housewives, especially in the suburbs
or country, from buying at wholesale. It doesn't
— they have other dragons to fight. A Stamford,
Connecticut, woman, very anxious to make her
housekeeping a smooth-running machine, said to
us:
"I've tried out this buying in quantity idea.
I estimated how much breakfast food and flour
and sugar and canned goods and dried fruits and
winter vegetables we would need, mentally fitted
them into our cellar and storeroom, took a day to
go to New York and order them from a wholesale
place. They came, and of course we had to pay
the freight charges to Stamford, which were high.
As they couldn't walk up from the depot them-
136 Increasing Home Eflficiency
selves, we had to pay express charges, which were
higher yet. But even after I had spent a day get-
ting them stored safely away, I figured out that
I had saved a good sum of money on the deal.
But who shall guarantee the staying power of a
beet! Things spoiled if I kept the cellar too warm,
and froze if I let it get cold — you know we have
real weather in Stamford! Mice appeared in the
house, and the paper wrappers around cereals were
just appetizers to them, and what the mice didn't
spoil the mildew did. A musty taste came into the
flour, and something happened to the sugar. Only
the things in cans kept. By spring I had thrown
away so much that what we had actually eaten
had cost far more than as if we had bought it in
the highest market."
"Perhaps you didn't take proper care of the
things?" we suggested.
"Obviously!" she answered, with a magnificent
scorn born of money loss.
We talked with a man who once lived in a big
country house with ample cellars and attics.
"You used to buy your vegetables and fruits
in large quantities. Did it pay?"
"Well," he said, doubtfully, "it paid, because
there wasn't anything else to do. The markets
were some distance away, and not very good at
that. But we had to go through the cellar occa-
sionally and pick out the things that were rotting.
There were a good many of them, and we seemed
to be always eating specked apples to save them."
When you buy from the retail grocer, you don't
The Home and the Market 137
have to take specked apples, nor moldy cereal,
nor damaged flour. You can demand and get
supplies in good condition. The labor of storing
things properly and the risk of deterioration are
upon him. You pay him for this in profits instead
of standing the risk yourself. And from the stand-
point of the community, isn't it a saving of work
to let him as an expert (which he should be, though
he often isn't) do well what you as an ill-equipped
amateur would probably do badly .^ From the
facts, not the theories, which we have come at, it
appears that wholesale buying by the individual
home is not an economy where it can be avoided;
that it is easier to let the grocery be our storeroom
once removed; the butcher shop, the refrigerator
of a neighborhood; the department store, our well-
ordered cellar and attic combined. From every
standpoint but that of money saving, it is the
eificient thing to do, and most of us are doing it.
Convenience calls so loudly! But in the matter
of convenience, just as in the matter of quality,
we run head-on into the matter of price. The
best and most convenient things cost more than
we can afford. How is the efficient buyer going
to climb the money wall.^
We sent out a little Noah's dove of a question-
naire, and it brought back (besides accounts of
wholesale buying) the meat boycott, the sales-
man's suggestion of something just as good as the
genuine, the simple old-fashioned device of going
without, and some experiments in cooperation.
Why do we think of cooperation as something we
138 Increasing Home Efficiency
are not already practicing? Why do we seem to
regard it as the social equivalent of a bomb ? The
only difference between a cooperative buying
plant and an ordinary store is that in one case
some man or company says:
"Go to; let me establish the Great A. B. C.
Emporium. I will furnish the neighborhood with
supplies and repay myself with profits."
And in the other case the neighborhood says:
"Go to; let us establish the Great A. B. C.
Emporium. We will furnish ourselves with sup-
plies and pay a man wages to run it for us."
From almost every State come accounts of these
cooperative buying clubs. Now they deal in
farm implements, now in eggs, now in dry goods
and general merchandise. The little towns of
Michigan and Minnesota and Kansas and Oregon
are leaving provincial New York City behind.
"As to cooperation," writes a Minnesota wo-
man, "the farmers in the State frequently form
corporations under the State laws to own stores.
It takes from four to five years to make these
enterprises pay, but most of them do pay eventu-
ally, and the middleman's profit is cut out. I
know of two cooperative stores. The farmers
who own them aim to keep everything needed on a
farm, not dealing in the finer kinds of dry goods,
shoes, etc. They are general or department stores,
and are well patronized not only by the stock-
holders who own them, but by their friends and
neighbors."
The English cooperatives pay, and the Belgian,
The Home and the Market 139
and so do many more, and for the simple reason
that the middleman is made a household steward,
once removed, and put on wages. He manages the
cooperative at a fixed rate, which is sometimes
less than the profits he was getting, sometimes
more, but in either case he has the advantage of
certainty.
Is the cooperative buying club, then, the solu-
tion of efficient marketing? In Panama they have
worked out a step beyond it.
In 1894 the high officials of the Panama Railroad
organized a cooperative buying club, because the
Panama merchants not only charged exorbitant
prices, but did not carry such things as were
wanted. There were twenty families in the orig-
inal undertaking. It succeeded, and was bought
by the United States Government ten years later
with the Panama Railroad and put under the Com-
missary Department. The annual report of the
Canal Commission for 1907 says:
"Supplies are furnished to the hotels, messes,
kitchens, and employes by the Commissary De-
partment, which has developed into a modern de-
partment store."
The report for the next year says :
"Through thirteen branch stores along the line
of work the Commissary supplies ice, meats, bread,
pies, cakes, ice-cream, and groceries of all kinds,
as well as laundry service."
Mr. Albert Edwards, who has recently lived in
Panama, writes:
"In one respect the Commissary is not like a
I40 Increasing Home EflSciency
department store. It does not sell shoddy cloth
nor adulterated food."
No need in Panama for every woman to be her
own expert!
"This does not sound like good business," he
continues. "Nevertheless, the price of beefsteaks
has gone steadily down — and other things in pro-
portion— just at the time when the cost of living
has been aeroplaning most dizzily in the States."
In 1910 the "Canal Record" said:
"In the United States at present the average
price of live cattle is higher than at any time since
1882, and the average price of hogs is higher than
at any time since the Civil War. The reduction
of the price of meat in the face of these high prices
in the States is possible because of economies that
have been effected in running the Commissary
system. The reduction in the price of meat has
been gradual but constant during the past year.
On January 17, 1909, porterhouse steak cost
twenty-nine cents a pound at the Commissary; on
February first the price was reduced to twenty-
seven cents; on May 30, it was selling at twenty-
five cents a pound, but as soon as the new meat
contract went into effect the price was reduced to
twenty-two cents, and it remained at twenty-two
cents till February i, 1910, when it was reduced
to twenty-one cents."
"Despite the hoary tradition of our political
economy," says Mr. Edwards, "hardly a month
passes when the 'Canal Record' does not note
some new economy which has been developed —
The Home and the Market 141
"some new nail driven into the coffin of middle-
men's profits."
This is probably the only instance where a co-
operative marketing association is being run by
the American Government. Some of the army
officers are organizing such an association in New
York State, but only as members of any other pro-
fession might do it. The significant thing is that
the government-operated market of Panama is
giving the whole community a combination of
quality, convenience, and cheapness that so far
we have been unable to get in any other way. And
the people of the United States are doing this be-
cause they have recognized that this great social
enterprise, the Panama Canal, cannot be carried
through unless the best is brought within the reach
of every worker — the best^ as Mrs. Watrous insists,
is his right and our advantage.
The function of the home marketer Is a much
bigger one than just to go out and buy things. It
isn't to get something better than somebody else
because you know quality, to get something
cheaper than somebody else because you have a
pull, to buy a poorer quality than somebody else
because you can make it do.
What Is it, then.?
Obviously, to get the best thing because nothing
else will do, and to get it for the least outlay of
brains and muscle and money, and to get it not
only for yourself but for all the community. Not
to go without, not to substitute Inferior quality
for good, not to step back Into individual produc-
142 Increasing Home Efficiency
tion or in any way substitute the work of the hand
for the work of the brain and dollar; but through
the most convenient channels to get the things we
need, in order that we may give to society the
best possible output in manhood and womanhood
from all our homes.
CHAPTER VIII
A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts
ON the 15th of May, 191 1, Ellis Howe, our
next door neighbor, came swinging down
the road from the station with a smile that
looked as if the company had doubled his salary.
"Well, it's out, and they've soaked 'em!" he
shouted to his wife as soon as he got within ear-shot
of the veranda.
" Out ? What's out ? " she called back pleasantly.
"Why, the oil decision, of course; the govern-
ment won, the trust is dissolved, we'll get our
chance yet!"
Ellis Howe was much excited. We knew that
there was an old feud between his family and the
oil trust which had got away with his father's wells
some twenty years before, and now as his voice
boomed across the lawn that separated our houses,
we realized that this oil decision was a personal
matter with him. The Supreme Court had smitten
Ellis Howe's enemy hip and thigh, and might de-
liver his father's oil wells into his hand.
"Isn't it great!" he cried, holding up the big
black headlines for his wife to see.
But Mrs. Howe met her husband's enthusiasm
calmly. We knew that her father had been a
143
144 Increasing Home EflBcieney
dashing speculator and had made and lost a dozen
fortunes. She was used to big expectations and
small returns, and didn't think them a fair ex-
change for a steady salary when there was a young
family to consider. Also, she had ideas of her
own.
"What do you think this decision will do?" she
asked rather vaguely.
"Do?" he repeated with surprise. "Do? Why,
it'll do a whole lot! It isn't the oil trust only; it's
the meat trust, and the wool trust, and the steel
trust, and the lumber and sugar trusts, and the
whole leechy lot of them! They'll all be busted!
Trade'll be free again, we'll have competition, and
prices will get down where they belong. It ought
to cut the cost of living in half. Do? It'll do
everything!"
About a month later we ran into the Howes' for
an after-dinner cup of coffee. Things had been
moving fast in the world. The Sherman law,
people said, was making good. Another Supreme
Court decision had been handed down, the steel
and sugar trusts had been under the probe of a
Congressional committee, and Judge Gary had
startled business with his famous suggestion for
the government regulation of industrial monop-
olies. Ellis Howe was sitting under an electric
lamp, reading the Tobacco Decision as though it
were a new novel.
"This," said he, slapping the document ap-
provingly, "is the greatest thing since the Emanci-
pation Proclamation! It means the liberation of
A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 145
the entire community from economic slavery. It
means the return of prosperity. It means — "
But Mrs. Howe, who had paused at her desk
where our practiced and shrinking eyes discerned
a pile of household bills, checked what promised to
be a splendid flight of his oratorical aeroplane.
"Ellis," she said, "I wish you could manage to
have a date fixed when we might expect the prom-
ised benefits of restored competition to flood In
upon us. I have failed to observe any of them In
active operation."
Howe looked at his wife as one floundering after
an unexpected descent.
"My dear, you don't seem to understand," he
said patronizingly. "The courts — "
"I understand these! ^^ She flourished aloft a
handful of bills. "There's no drop In the price of
provisions visible to the naked eye. Kerosene
flows tranquilly on at thirteen cents a gallon, the
grocer's bill, the butcher's bill, and the dry-goods
bill grow like Jack's bean stalk, and the milk has
got elephantiasis, though I understand that the
milk trust was * busted' fifteen years ago. Be-
sides," she added somewhat Irrelevantly, "haven't
I heard you say, time and time again, that the big
modern business combinations could give us better
and cheaper things than the small dealers.^ I
certainly get better dress goods at the big stores
than at Miss Wade's Notion Bazaar. If it's the
trusts that do this, why bust them.^"
Howe looked at his wife In despair.
"My dear," he said, "you're a wonder! Where
146 Increasing Home Efficiency
would the small business man come in if all the
business worth doing were monopolized. Can't
you see that it's a plain business proposition?"
"Business proposition! Well, what is business
for, then?" came the feminine question. "Is it
just to keep the world occupied doing and undoing
things as I used to keep Clara quiet stringing
beads ? Or is it to get the world's larder into shape
so that the children of men may have food and
clothing and shelter in the easiest and most
scientific way? I don't really see that it's to the
advantage of any one but the small business man
himself to keep him going. Why even the New
York Times lifts its cherubic voice to heaven one
day In praise of the * trust-busting' decisions that
have * brought back competition' and saved the
country, and the next day informs us that we
needn't expect any reduction in prices. Now can
you tell me what good it does to 'bust trusts' If
we've got to spend as much to live afterward as
we did before?"
We found ourselves laughing.
"Do you mean, Mrs. Howe," one of us asked,
"that we have these 'trust-busting' campaigns to
distract people just as the Romans used to have
gladiatorial contests to take people's minds off the
high price of bread?"
"Exactly! And we can't afford such expensive
amusements as that. What's the use of having
these two telephone bills, for Instance?" shaking
them wrathfully. "It's a lot of bother to find
out which line anybody's on, and an extra check to
A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 147
write! Oh, Vm not for having these combinations
broken up — not at all! Why, when the street car
lines in New York were all in one company, I could
transfer almost anywhere and ride all over the city
for five cents, but now that they've got separated
into their original companies again, I have to pay
several fares instead of one. You men may fight
the trusts as though you thought they were orig-
inal sin, but I find it very inconvenient and ex-
pensive to have them busted. If it's only a ques-
tion of their making too much money, why not
keep them working and pay them less.'^"
"Now listen to that!" laughed Ellis Howe.
"You talk as if the trusts were your washwoman
and you could put them on wages. Do you think
they'd stand for it.^"
"The New York Gas Company had to," replied
his wife. "I know about that fight, because I was
doing settlement work down on the East Side when
it was on."
And she told how the gas combine had actually
charged more than the trafiic would bear; how in
spite of the new meters, where they could buy gas
by dropping a quarter in the slot, instead of mak-
ing a five dollar deposit, the people who had to use
gas for fuel because their flats were too small to
have storage room for coal, simply got to the point
where they neither could nor would pay a dollar
a thousand feet for gas.
"They made eighty-cent gas a political slogan,"
said she. "I used to lean out of my window on
Rivington Street, and listen night after night to
148 Increasing Home EflSciency
men speaking from soap boxes on the corner.
Whenever they said 'eighty-cent gas,' the crowd
cheered. There may have been other political
issues in other parts of the city — I don't know.
But down there in the Ghetto nobody seemed to
care who the various candidates were, or what they
promised; all they wanted was eighty-cent gas,
and they would have it."
Everybody knows now how the people got what
they wanted. They put through a law fixing the
price at eighty cents, and the Consolidated Gas
Company, which was a legalized combination of
six smaller companies, immediately began to fight.
They claimed that they could not manufacture
and sell gas at eighty cents, and that a law re-
quiring them to do so was confiscatory, and there-
fore unconstitutional. The case turned on the
point of just what part of their capitalization was
water and what was legitimate investment. In
the process of squeezing out the water, the Su-
preme Court disposed of eight million dollars'
worth of good-will and twelve million dollars' worth
of franchise. Yet after leaving in gift franchises
as worth $7,781,000 — because in 1884, when the
consolidation was made, watered stock was legally
issued to that amount and the holders of this stock
were entitled to legal protection — the United
States Supreme Court found that eighty-cent
gas would yield just about a six per cent return
and that under the circumstances six per cent was
not confiscatory.
"The really important thing about that deci-
A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 149
slon," one of us ventured, "isn't the fact that the
people got eighty-cent gas, nor even the precedent
of judicially squeezing the water out of over-
capitalized corporations, but the thing on which
the court didn't lay any particular stress — the
establishment of the right of the people to limit
the profits of public service corporations to so
modest a rate as six per cent."
"Just what I said," cried Mrs. Howe triumph-
antly. "Pay the monopolies, put them on a basis
of six per cent, or four! The New York people
didn't try to 'bust' the gas company into its orig-
inal companies, they didn't want a lot of little
firms to furnish gas, any more than I want a lot
of little stoves instead of one big furnace to heat
my house. They simply reduced the wages of their
servant, the gas monopoly. I say let's keep the
trusts; treat them as literal servants of the people.
Don't just regulate them; put them on a Maxi-
mum Wage! And if that won't work, let's own
them."
The more we reflected upon the matter, the more
Mrs. Howe's housekeeper's view of the problem
appealed to us. "What is business for anyway,"
we found ourselves asking, "except to feed and
clothe and house the human race.^ How shall the
real worth of industry be judged except as it aids
or hinders human conservation.^ What other
standard of value can there be than human life?"
To take a concrete example: What is the human
significance of nine-cent-a-quart milk in New York
City and the hundred and twenty per cent dividend
150 Increasing Home Efficiency
recently earned by a member of the milk combine?
Of course, theoretically, the milk combine is
"busted," and the troubles of the city are due to
the greed of the farmer and the eccentricities of
the cow. Theoretically!
For in November, 1909, the milk dealers of
New York, obeying some mysterious common
impulse, raised the price of milk from eight to
nine cents a quart. New York uses two million
quarts a day, so that the one cent increase footed
up to about twenty thousand dollars a day for the
dealers. This happened just after the autumn
rains with plenty of grass in the pastures; but when
the people raised a howl, the dealers put all the
blame on the cow. They said that they had been
compelled to raise the price because there was a
shortage in the supply. The State's Attorney-
General decided to have a look-in on this alleged
queer conduct of our bovine working class. So he
appointed Mr. John B. Coleman, as his special
deputy, to call witnesses and to take testimony.
As the investigation opened, the dealers with-
drew their little joke about the cows, and shifted
the blame to the farmers. They said that they
had been compelled to raise the price because the
farmers had caught the American habit of extrava-
gance and were asking unreasonable prices for their
milk.
Later they shifted the blame again, this time to
the consumer. They said that the people were
demanding such high class service, and the cost of
handling had consequently so increased, that
A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 151
there was nothing in it for them at eight cents a
quart. They had been philanthropists long enough
and now they simply had to increase the price or
go out of business.
Familiar story! We've heard it each time we've
had to go deeper into our pockets for oil, or meat,
or woolen socks, or any of the other things we
absolutely need to keep alive.
Now check off the facts.
Expert evidence showed that the average price
paid by the dealers to the farmers during the year
immediately preceding the raise in price was ac-
tually a little under the price they had paid the
year before, and that for two years the farmers had
been getting on an average from three and a
third to three and a half cents a quart for their
milk, whereas it had actually cost them from
three and a fifth to four cents to produce it. The
farmers had kept on selling to the milk combine,
because they had no other market.
And the luxurious consumers.^ An examination
of the dealers' books by a certified public account-
ant showed that one company, whose total capital
stock in 1909 was twenty-five million dollars, of
which over fifteen millions had been issued against
trade-marks, patents, and good-will (pure water
the experts declared) — showed total net profits
for the year of ^2,617,029.40 representing an
earning of nearly twenty-eight per cent on
the total invested capital, water excluded. An-
other of the dealers, who said he would have to go
out of business if the price continued at eight cents,
152 Increasing Home Efficiency
had his company capitalized at five hundred thou-
sand dollars, of which two hundred thousand dol-
lars had been issued for tangible assets, three hun-
dred thousand dollars representing water. This
company showed net earnings for the eight months
immediately preceding the raise to nine cents of
^257,923.47, which was over one hundred and
twenty per cent in eight months on the original
investment.
When these facts came out in the newspapers,
the dealers put the price back to eight cents, joy-
ously proclaiming with one accord that, though
the month was February, the cows of New York
and vicinity had got back on their jobs and were
running a flush of milk. But as soon as the public
excitement died down and the investigation was
over, in July, when there is usually an abundance
of milk, the combine brought out the old joke
about a shortage and raised the price to nine cents
again, where it has remained ever since.
A word of history. The New York milk com-
bination was organized in 1882. It was "busted"
under the New York anti-monopoly law in the
year 1895, after four years of costly litigation.
Like the Standard Oil and American Tobacco
Companies, it reorganized so as to be in harmony
with the law. Says Deputy Coleman in his report
to the Attorney-General : " It is well-nigh impossi-
ble for any law against combinations, no matter
how stringent, to reach the 'gentlemen's agree-
ment.' It is practically impossible for a prosecut-
ing officer to prove such an agreement. The
A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 153
evidence taken In this investigation shows that
the consumer (like the farmer) is at i\e mercy of the
dealers; he must buy milk at their price or go with-
outy And what is true of milk is true of most
other commodities, — of oil and meat, cotton and
lumber and express service, to mention only a few,
— as any one may learn by consulting the reports of
the United States Bureau of Corporations or the
findings of the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Now for the human significance of this situation.
That year more than sixteen thousand children
less than one year of age died in New York City,
at least one-half of them from preventable causes.
Experts showed that one of the chief causes of this
terrible waste of human life was the economic in-
ability of the mothers to get enough pure milk to
feed themselves and their babies properly. Surely
where a combination exists that can dictate terms
to the producer and the consumer, and for the sake
of unreasonable profits becomes a party to the
sacrifice of eight thousand lives a year, the public
has an interest in that combination. Said Judge
Waite of the United States Supreme Court : *' Prop-
erty does become clothed with a public Interest
when used In a manner to make it of public con-
sequence, and affect the community at large.
When one devotes his property to a use in which
the public has an interest, he grants to the public
an interest In that use, and must submit to be
controlled by the public for the common good."
The milk combine is just as much a monoply as
though it were legalized by statute, and just as
154 Increasing Home Efficiency
much a public service corporation as though it
held a franchise to pipe milk through the streets.
Suppose, now, that the people as a first step
toward the control of the milk monopoly should
push the price back to eight cents a quart, what
possible amount of human conservation would the;
saved twenty thousand dollars a day represent?
Twenty thousand a day is seven million three hun-
dred thousand dollars a year. The New York
Milk Committee has carried on experiments that
indicate that by the expenditure of only three hun-
dred thousand dollars a year for doctors, nurses and
pure milk, practically all of the eight thousand
babies that now die preventable deaths might be
saved. But suppose this done; there remain seven
million dollars a year to be applied to human con-
servation. This at the same per-capita rate required
to save the New York babies would go far to
save all of the one hundred and thirty-seven thou-
sand five hundred babies that now die every year
from preventable economic and social causes in the
country, — a terrible commentary upon the ineffi-
ciency of our American homes, this needless waste
of our most valuable product!
And this calculation still allows the companies
their earnings of from twenty-eight to one hundred
and twenty pe^^cent on their actual investments.
The facts have never been brought together that
would enable us to establish so intimate a con-
nection between the waste of human life and the
steel monopoly, the sugar monopoly, or even the
meat monopoly that has been revealed between
A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 155
the milk monopolies, in the various cities, and the
infant death rate. But who that has followed the
history of these monopolies, both in their relation
to the consumer and to the wage-workers on farm
or in factory can doubt that there is such a connec-
tion between their arbitrary control of the funda-
mental necessaries in the interest of unreasonable
profits and the statement of the National Conserva-
tion Commission that one-half of the three million
persons who are always on the sick list in the
United States are needlessly sick and that the pre-
ventable deaths each year in this country foot up
to the astonishing total of six hundred and thirty
thousand?
This is the greatest fact before the nation today
— the enormous waste of human life that results
from tyrannical private monopoly. For the first
time in the history of the world science has given
us the certainty of plenty; the development of
business organization on a vast scale has enor-
mously cheapened the necessary cost of production
and distribution. Famine and the fear of famine,
have disappeared. Yet while the coal yards are
always filled with coal, the price we have to pay
for coal is outrageous. The cold-storage houses are
packed with meat to their doors, and scientific
cattlemen keep a steady tramp of square-rumped
cattle rattling up the runways of the Chicago
abattoirs; but the price of meat soars beyond all
reason. Last autumn a school boy in Georgia
raised more than two hundred bushels of corn on an
acre where it used to be said that no corn would
156 Increasing Home Efficiency-
grow; but the price of a package of breakfast food
remains ever the same, while the size of the pack-
age diminishes. The certainty of plenty, steadi-
ness of supply, the mastery of the technique of
distribution so that as a race we need never again
fear starvation — these are the great gifts that have
come to us from the evolution of competition into
monopoly. And yet one is inclined to repeat
Mrs. Howe's question: "What is business for when
six hundred and thirty thousand lives are wasted
every year?"
And when one stops to think of it, is there any-
thing so very wild or impracticable in her sugges-
tion of a maximum wage for corporations? We
have some mighty good experience to back it.
While New York was howling for eighty-cent
gas, Boston adopted its "sliding scale," fixing the
dividend its gas monopoly might pay. The people
up there said to their trust: "We'll agree to make
ninety cents the standard price of gas, and seven
per cent the standard rate you may pay on your
legitimate investment. But, to encourage you
to do your level best, we'll allow you an increase
of one per cent on your dividends for every five
cents reduction in the price." In less than two
years they had eighty-cent gas and a good deal
more. Louis Brandeis, who had a hand in draft-
ing the law, says that the officers and employes
of the company now devote themselves strictly to
the business of making and distributing gas, in-
stead of playing the market with their securities
and working the pork barrel at the State House to
A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 157
get special privileges from the legislature. With
the question of price settled, and dividends meas-
ured by service, the trust is keeping out of politi-
cal scandals.
And in Cleveland they've gone Boston one bet-
ter. They have a sort of sliding scale there, too,
but the slide is all on the side of the people. They've
arranged a scale of street car fares running from
four cents cash fare, seven tickets for twenty-
five cents, and one cent for a transfer, down to a
straight two-cent fare. Then they have limited
the earning power of the company to a flat six
per cent on authorized issues of stock. Whenever
the company accumulates a surplus above five
hundred thousand dollars by the amount of two
hundred thousand dollars, the rate of fare drops
automatically one notch in the scale. They are
down to a three-cent fare in Cleveland now.
We dropped these facts into the discussion.
"Of course," Mr. Howe came back at us, "the
people have a right to establish a maximum wage,
as you call it, for such corporations, because they
operate on franchises that give them the right to
use public property. Of course you've a right to
limit their wages, or settle their rates, or make
them all wear pink hair-ribbons or fleece-lined
galoshes or anything the courts will allow to be
reasonable. But have you given any franchise
to the oil trust, or the sugar trust, or the tin-plate
trust, or the rubber trust, or the beef trust, or the
bread trust .^ Of course not! They're not public
service corporations; they're private business, and
158 Increasing Home Efficiency
you have no more right to say what profits they
shall make under the Constitution than you have
to tell me how I shall brush my hair. Such inter-
ference would destroy initiative. That's the great
difference between strictly private business and
public service."
Ellis Howe went up in a pinwheel splutter about
competition. It was evident that he didn't really
expect to rival the busted Standard Oil Company
even if he did miraculously recover his ancestral
wells; but he somehow seemed to have a supersti-
tious feeling that anything that struck at the roots
of free competition struck at the roots of the na-
tional life.
Mrs. Howe, on the other hand, was not inter-
ested in judicial precedent, economic tradition, or
legislative theory. She wanted her house run well,
and her family well fed and clothed, and if the
organization of Big Business could serve her better,
than competition, she had no theoretic or senti-
mental scruples against it.
At the same time, she was equally free from
theoretic scruples about the sacredness of private
ownership in Business, Big or Little. She was one
of those quiet, keen-witted women who have
their mental eyes perpetually open, so that one is
always being surprised by the things they have
seen and know. She was familiar with the Wis-
consin plan of physical valuation and the limitation
of profits under state commission control; she had
studied the Socialist arguments for public owner-
ship and the abolition of profits; she was even
A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 159
familiar with the theories of the French and
Italian Syndicalists who hold that it would be
socially advantageous to intrust the industries to
the workers who operate them. Indeed, she
startled us by quoting a French authority to prove
that the late strike of the French postal clerks had
been mainly a strike for efficiency directed against
the red tape and amateurish bungling of their un-
trained political superiors. But she had looked
into all these matters purely because she had the
intelligence to see their bearing upon the everyday
problems of feeding and clothing and educating
her family.
"You know, Ellis," she said reflectively, "your
pugnacious talk about competition and * busting'
the trusts makes me realize what a crime of omis-
sion we women have been guilty of ever since the
spinning-wheel slipped away and left us sitting
here in semi-idleness. Trusts, and common car-
riers and public utilities, — what are they all but
our old household arts grown large ? By them our
children are clothed and fed, and if our children
sufl'er, it is because we housewives are not attend-
ing to our jobs. The great trouble to day is that
we have too much masculine pugnacity in business
and too little of it in the home, too much feminin-
ity in the home and too little of the women's point
of view in business. We've got to strike a new
balance, — put business efficiency into the home
and socialize business by charging it with the spirit
of equal justice that women have learned in dealing
with their children.
i6o Increasing Home Efficiency
"I doubt whether you will hasten justice or pro-
mote the common good by merely 'busting' the
trusts. We need a far more scientific readjust-
ment than that, — and it is largely up to us women
to get it."
CHAPTER IX
How Shall We Learn to Keep House?
DO you think people should be taught
to keep house? And if so, who and
how and where?"
The young Chicago stock-broker looked up
from his breakfast cereal in mild surprise.
"All women, of course, by their mothers in the
kitchen," he said.
It was an inherited answer. He made it just as
automatically as he digested his food — and just as
inevitably. It was the companion piece to the
idea that all men should be taught a trade by their
fathers in the shop — only it had survived its twin
by two generations. The stock-broker had still
in his mind the old apprentice system of women's
industry, modified by the masculine misapprehen-
sion that housekeeping takes place in the kitchen.
In reality there seem to be four ways to learn
the business of housekeeping; at home from
" mother," at school from " teacher," at college from
"professor," and after marriage through university
work, extension classes, correspondence schools,
and the work offered by the government through
the Agricultural Department.
No, there is another way! One built on Original
Research and Divine Inspiration! This composite
method is based on the theory that housekeeping
i6i
i62 Increasing Home Efficiency
is in the class with aeronautics, a new science In
which the worker has no accumulated information
to draw on, and that women, just by virtue of be-
ing women, will know it any way.
"I don't believe," said one of these original
investigators of the science of housekeeping,
"that there is any way to learn to keep house but
just by doing the work. Everybody is so different,
they've got to learn it their own way."
And then she excused herself long enough to
telephone to the plumber because the kitchen sink
was stopped up with grease and she had never
"originally researched" out the effect of boiling
water and lye on a grease-stopped pipe. Of course,
she might get to that In time, but why should
she go through the whole of the race history for
herself to do it.^*
Even the moderate use of the needle that all
housekeepers need to know is no instinctive or
inherited feminine function.
A Hull House club was preparing to give a
Shakespearean play. From motives of economy
they planned to make the costumes themselves,
but when the members had all assembled with
shears and needles and thread it developed that
not one of the girls could so much as baste two
straight edges together. Some of the boys could
sew; they were working in the garment trades;
but the girls were bookkeepers and clerks, and able
to do the work for which they had been trained.
They were part of the industrial organization, not
housekeepers. Undoubtedly when they married
How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 163
they would be no more inspired by cook-stove and
broom than they were now by needle and thread.
Obviously, that sort of ignorance does not dispose
women to marriage, solve the servant problem,
reduce the cost of living, or increase the birth-rate.
In every other line of work, from wireless teleg-
raphy to spelling, we have turned our backs on
intuition and placed our faith in ordered knowl-
edge, scientifically imparted. And even in house-
keeping, the Original Research-Divine Inspira-
tion school is falling into innocuous desuetude.
The apprentice system, however, in which
"mother" teaches "daughter," survives in every
part of the country and in every class of society.
It is sanctioned by precedent and tradition, but
it is no longer in good working order. This is
partly because "mother" is not always a good
teacher. She neither knows her subject in the best
or most modern way, nor has she the pedagogical
ability to teach what she does know.
A woman from Wigham, Minnesota, writes
how she trained her second daughter by this old
apprentice system. Her schedule of work includes
turning the feather beds, hemming sheets and pil-
low cases, putting up mincemeat, and various other
traditional diversions. Incidentally she remarks
with sorrow that her son died of typhoid and her
eldest daughter went to work in a Minneapolis
store. We asked about the drainage system of
her town, trying to account for the typhoid, but
she didn't know anything about It; and when we
asked what her daughter could have found to do
164 Increasing Home Efficiency
if she had staid in Wigham, she said that her hus-
band was perfectly able to support his family and
that she believed in girls staying at home. A
mother whose mental equipment was coeval with
her feather beds! Isn't it almost inevitable that
if "mother" learned the methods of her own youth,
they, and the equipment on which they depend,
must be antiquated and out of date? That
"mother" sticks to the methods of mother, — not to
say grandmother — and will tend to perpetuate
ways and customs merely because she is used to
them? Moreover she labors under the disadvan-
tage of doing her teaching without ordered lessons
or systematic research.
We have just been talking with the married
daughter of an able housekeeper who prides her-
self on the "practical" training she gives her chil-
dren.
"You see 1 don't know how to keep house very
well," said the bride. "At home mother always
/ did the hard parts. She couldn't bear to see us
spoil things."
But even this apprentice system can be modified
Into something modern and useful. In Savoy, a
tiny town In central Illinois, there Is a rural school
which Is fortunate enough to have Mrs. Nora B.
Dunlap, President of the Department of House-
hold Science of the Farmers' Institute, on Its
Board of Directors. Mrs. Dunlap has succeeded
in putting the apprentice system under the direc-
tion of the school. For housekeeping work done
at home she has Introduced weekly record cards
How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 165
which include cleaning the rooms, making the
beds, setting the table, washing the dishes, laundry
work, sewing, mending, darning and other things
a child might do at home. The instruction in the
best way to do these things is not given by mother
in the home, but by the trained teacher in the
school, who follows her students into the home.
The actual work is done at home, and school credit
is given for it when the weekly record is signed by
the parents. This is a new way of recognizing the
educational value of housework, and of putting
the apprentice system into the hands of the school
teacher. Theoretically it should conserve the
good points of both systems.
For, after all, there is a lot to be said for the ap-
prentice system in housekeeping.
"My brother's wife," said a lady from Bosky-
dale, Wisconsin, "well, she teaches her two daugh-
ters herself right in her own kitchen. They're in
the university in the winter, but in the vacation
one week one of them is cook and the other cham-
bermaid, and the next week they change around.
The girls don't always like it very much, I guess,
but they've got to do it. And of course my brother
doesn't have to hire any help when they're at
home."
The work necessary to learning housekeeping
has a money value, and with the apprentice system .
scientifically conducted, you can earn while you
learn if need be. Besides it is a practical training
that develops manual skill through doing real
things. These home-trained girls would never
1 66 Increasing Home Efficiency
come to their mother and say as a girl did to one of
the Chicago principals:
"I cooked the dinner at home last night, Miss
Lane, — and do you know I had to make seven
omelettes! Why, papa ate three himself I"
Her mind had not bridged the gap between the
practice omelette of the school made with one
egg and the omelette of domesticity made with
many eggs. ,
Miss Mary S. Snow, head of the Domestic
Science Department in the Chicago Public Schools,
would like to bridge this gap by using the German
system. In this system the students are taught
to do their work on the basis of five people, the
number in the average family; the stove they use
is family size, the marketing is family marketing,
the utensils are the regulation store-bought sort.
A real table is set with a meal calculated to feed
five people, and the service is the sort a family
having no servant could command. There is
just one reason why this system is not installed in
the Chicago Public Schools,— it costs fifteen cents
per child per day. At present the school board
has only advanced to the point of spending a cent
and a half per child per day for domestic science
equipment.
But when we remember with what travail that
Board was prevailed upon to permit the nose of the
Domestic Science camel under the flap of the Pub-
lic Education tent, we can hardly believe that
even so much of the good beast is already inside.
That camel's nose was disguised as ^instruction in
How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 167
cooking"; but it was trained and fed and urged
forward by women with sufficient brains to see
that housekeeping is a public concern, and of suffi-
cient social and financial position to get what they
wanted — the women of the Chicago Woman's
Club.
"You see," said a little lady who had been a
member of the first Domestic Science Committee,
"we knew, or we thought we did, that children
needed to know something more than reading,
writing and arithmetic, more even than German,
drawing and music, something that ought to be
very common indeed, but wasn't — how to keep
house.^^ She picked up from an old inlaid table
the blanket she was knitting for a recent grandson.
"We started in with the cooking. We were will-
ing (the Woman's Club, you know) to pay for
everything, but we had to beg and beg and Beg
before the School Board would give the children a
chance." She slid out one needle and began to
knit the great white stitches back onto it again.
"At last they gave us the use of one bare room in
one school to start with. My son here designed
the cooking tables, we bought the stoves and
dishes, paid for the food, hired the teacher and
started in to teach." She slipped a few stitches
along the ivory needles in silence. "Oh, yes, we
met obstacles," she went on. "Mostly from the
people in Kenwood, who were a little toppy at
that time, you remember. They sent word now
and again that the cooking in their homes was
done by servants and they didn't care to have their
1 68 Increasing Home Efficiency
daughters learn it." She pushed a little further
back into the Empire chair that was part of her
inheritance. "They seemed to think, — some of
them, — that their social position would be en-
dangered if their daughters knew how to cook."
She laid her hands in her silken lap to gain em-
phasis, and her black eyes had the determination
of those of her pre-Revolutionary ancestor on the
canvas above. "But, in spite of them," shaking
a small finger, "we have got Household Economics
into practically every school in Chicago!"
And it is true that every girl in Chicago can now
learn housekeeping in the public schools, and
housekeeping as interpreted by Miss Snow covers
a multitude of things. For is it not part of the
work to know how to buy so as to get full value
for a cent.^ Is not the canning of fruit, the hem-
ming of table-cloths, the trimming of hats, as
much a part of it as the baking of bread and the
broiling of chops? That Domestic Science camel
has got so far in that the girls learn how to select
a flat or house with reference to the needs of any
given family, they learn what is and is not ade-
quate plumbing, something of interior decoration
and furnishing, of public as well as domestic
sanitation, and are even beginning to take up
budget-making and the apportionment of the in-
come.
There is a Chicago school where the normal
students practice under the supervision of the
regular teachers — the practical training of experts
by experts. This particular school draws its pupils
How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 169
from two distinct social classes. From west of
State Street, on the one hand, come the daughters
of Jewish, Polish and Greek immigrants and of
colored people; from Englewood and Hyde Park
come the daughters of the well-to-do. Below the
girls' uniform cooking aprons one sometimes sees
silk stockings and custom-made pumps, some-
times darned cotton stockings with dollar shoes
down at the heel. These girls cooked and served a
luncheon to six children of the school. The menu
was:
Goldenrod Eggs on Toast.
Corn-bread Cakes.
Milk.
Cornstarch Pudding.
Sugar Cookies.
One of the two girls who were told to set the
table was a little Russian Jewess. Her fingers were
all thumbs and she didn't know what dishes the
different things required. The other girl was a
brisk little American, who corrected the other's
mistakes.
"The table looks crowded to me," said the Jew-
ish girl to the American girl.
"It looks all right to me," the American girl
answered.
"No wonder she thinks there is too much on the
table," the teacher whispered. "Sophie's people
practically never sit down to a meal. They are
just on the edge of destitution and eat whenever
and wherever they can get the food."
lyo Increasing Home Efficiency
For Sophie, the simple school lunch established
a standard of luxury. To establish home standards
is the most important work the Public School can
do, and these standards can be most directly and
most unconsciously established through the study
of housekeeping. For instance, the girls of this
school had been asked to cook a meal at home dur-
ing the spring vacation and bring an account of it
to the class. A little Greek girl wrote:
"I made a dinner for five people
1. French fried potatoes.
2. Bread.
3. Baking-powder biscuits.
4. Cake.
5. Cocoa.
6. Custard."
and then with a diiferent pencil, straggling hastily
into the center of the page:
iC
7. Sirloin Steak."
"That means," said the teacher, pointing,
"that she didn't really have the steak. I had
them read their menus to the class, and when she
heard that every one else had meat, she wrote that
in. Her family are too poor to have much meat at
any time, or sirloin steak ever."
How long a step is it from surreptitiously writ-
ing "sirloin steak" into a meatless dinner, to in-
sisting loudly that sirloin steak or its equivalent
shall be possible for all dinners .^^ There are inter-
esting social suggestions in these cooking lessons!
How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 171
Besides the standards of food and service, the
standards of equipment are established in the
public schools. These girls are not taught to use
the cheap and laborious coal range, but the expen-
sive and convenient gas stove. They are educated
to labor saving; and Miss Snow has her eyes set
on getting electric equipment into the public
school kitchens. "We needs must love the highest
when we see it" — even in cook-stoves, and it ought
to be worth a good deal to create a demand for the
best in labor-saving devices as well as in grammar.
Certainly if we know what we ought to have, we
have a better chance of getting it than if we don't.
The syllabus of Domestic Science and Domes-
tic Art which the Illinois State University has just
prepared for the high schools that are to carry on
this grade work of establishing standards contains
such significant topics as: the fruit industry; the
cost of fruits; fraudulent and harmful preserva-
tives; adulteration of confectionery; the sugar
industry; factors in the cost of milk; inspection of
dairies and milk wagons; cost of meat and danger
from stale meat poisoning; food requirements for
people of different ages and occupations; exercise
in planning meals for 10, 20, 30 and 40 cents a
day, with special reference to economy of time,
labor and fuel; relation of consumer and dealer to
the pure food laws; house-planning to show conven-
ience, cost, and efficiency; relation of exercise,
fresh air, sleep, diet, and cleanliness to health;
relation of personal hygiene to the public; impor-
tance of leisure; effect of carelessness and bad
172 Increasing Home Efficiency
management at home upon the community; in-
fluence of the community upon the home; sanitary
conditions of clothing factories; laws regulating
child labor and the sweat-shops.
These are only a part of the things that go into
the housekeeping courses in the high schools of
Illinois, — the things that are offered all the girls at
public expense. How long will it be, one wonders,
before that Domestic Science camel draws in the
last tip of his tail; how long before the children who
have learned what they ought to have in shelter,
and food, and clothing, will protest because they
cannot have them.^
To balance the undoubted good that the teach-
ing of this larger housekeeping brings with it,
there is the shadow of a minor evil. If you train
all girls for a housekeeping that implies marriage
as the sole channel through which to practice it,
are you not dangling the wedding ring too insis-
tently before their eyes? Are you not giving new
life to Jane Austen's statement:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a
single man in possession of a good fortune must be
in want of a wife."
Do we want to fit all women for matrimony as
if it were certain, and so make it the duty of all
parents to see that their daughters are married as
a preface to their life's business?
But on the other hand, is it good economics to
have a large number of women avoid marriage
because they don't understand the business side
of it? Or carry on that business badly after they
How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 173
have entered marriage or inadvertently dropped
into it? The absolutely undomesticated woman is
difficult to fit into the sort of civilization we have
worked out, for the reason that housekeeping is
the back-bone of it.
The solution of the problem seems to be to make
housekeeping a cultural study and teach it to
everybody. Why is it not as good a training for
the mind as mathematics or geography or civil
government? Not that it need take the place of
any of these, but that it should be made a setting
for them all. In the School of Education of the
University of Chicago they are teaching the ele-
ments of housekeeping as well as of agriculture
and the manual arts, to all the students, boys and
girls alike.
This course aims to do exactly what Miss
Snow is trying to do for the girls in the Chicago
Public Schools, not to make them full-fledged,
efficient housekeepers, but to give them the prin-
ciples of Domestic Science. They do go out of
school and into industry, they enter a trade or
profession and earn money for themselves; per-
haps there is a ten-year interval between the
time they study Domestic Science and the time
they take up their own skillets in their own matri-
monially acquired four-rooms-and-a-bath; but no
girl who has once made an omelette can ever be
afraid of an egg. She can look any cook-stove
straight in the eye. She may make mistakes,
but she is apt to substitute the use of the brain
for the use of the tear-ducts in emergencies. She
174 Increasing Home Efficiency
has a different attitude of mind toward the whole
problem of housekeeping, views marriage with
more confidence and is less likely to fail in her
share of it through ignorance of the duties involved.
She may forget the things she learned; but she re-
tains the principles, the knowledge of the point
of attack.
And with this underpinning scientifically im-
parted to all children between the ages of eleven
and fourteen, the specific training that every one
needs who practices housekeeping will not be so
hard to acquire. There are a good many ways and
places where It may be had.
At Columbia University we found housekeepers
studying new methods of laundry work so that
their clothes could be perfectly washed; studying
scientific house-planning and dietetics and decora-
tion. One woman was there learning to do per-
sonally what she expects her servants to do as a
first aid In solving the servant problem.
"I see now how difficult It Is to make rolls,"
she said, "and I think I know why Mary makes
them so badly. I know too just hov/ a room ought
to be cleaned and what I have a right to require of
my housemaids."
Of course, only a small proportion of house-
keepers can study In a school. Instruction must
be taken to them by either correspondence schools
or traveling demonstration teachers. Mr. Hatch,
head of the extension work of the Agricultural
Department of the University of Wisconsin, has
planned a car, fitted as a model house, to be
How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 175
dropped at town after town through the State,
with instructors to teach the women who gather
around it. There is no place where this extension
work is more needed or where it receives heartier
welcome than in the isolated homes in the country.
Judging from the seventy-five thousand women
who were reached by the demonstration cars in
California, and the twenty thousand reached in
Oklahoma last year, this sort of a traveling school
of housekeeping should be effective. The house-
keeping departments of the Farmers' Institutes
are crowded, and one of the housekeeping cor-
respondence schools has reached ten thousand
women. Professor Martha Van Rensselaer, in
charge of the Department of Home Economics in
the New York State College of Agriculture, is con-
ducting a most successful campaign for modern
home-making among the farmers' wives of her
State. In many States of the Union and in the
provinces of Canada this extension work is under
way. It might be better if we could adopt the
method introduced by the late Dr. Seaman A.
Knapp Into the Department of Agriculture, which
sends teachers straight to the farms to teach boys
and girls and parents how to handle their home
and agricultural problems under normal conditions.
But these demonstratiqn cars and correspondence
courses are a good beginning.
It may seem strange that we have put the
graded schools ahead of the secondary schools and
colleges, which have such excellent courses in home
economics, in this consideration of the places where
176 Increasing Home Efficiency
one may learn to keep house. The reason is that
these higher schools are not primarily training
housekeepers. Teachers' College, Simmons Col-
lege, the Universities of Wisconsin and Illinois,
teach housekeeping primarily as a profession,
first for teachers of domestic science, but beyond
that for twenty other professions. Professor
Abby L. Marlatt, head of the Department of
Home Economics in the University of Wisconsin,
has given us the following list of professions, with
the demand for workers in each of them and the
pay the workers may expect.
Public lecturers and demonstrators for clubs;
commercial demonstrators for gas and food and
utensil companies; newspaper writers for special
women's columns; dietitians in sanitaria, hospitals,
clubs and dormitories; managers of cafeterias,
tea-rooms, and school lunch-rooms; sanitary in-
spectors; tenement-house supervisors, directors,
and rent-collectors; managers of bakeries; writers
of recipe books for food manufacturing companies;
experts on the utilization of food wasted in fac-
tories; managers of laundries; superintendents of
household aid societies; professional marketers,
house-cleaners, etc.; candy, preserve, and pickle-
makers; modistes and dressmakers; managers of
day nurseries; managers of factories and in-
stitutions; superintendents of nurses; and social
workers.
A list of the graduates of the Department of
Household Science of the University of Illinois
from 1903 to 1910 shows that less than 16 per
How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 177
cent are married, less than 25 per cent are at
home; all the rest are teachers or professional
workers. On the surface it looks as though the
college courses in housekeeping were merely for
the training of teachers, but when one studies the
various catalogues and alumnae reports one finds
that a very large proportion of the domestic
science teachers do marry later and begin prac-
ticing their professions on their own families,
while the students they have trained go on train-
ing others in turn.
One of these ex-domestic science teachers has
given us her story. She had four years of special
training, followed by five years of teaching, and
now her seven-room servantless house and her
two small daughters are no weight on her spirits.
Food comes and goes on her table without anxi-
ety, a vegetable garden seems automatically to
produce green things, and it is as though the
house cleaned itself. The work of housekeeping
is well subordinated to the business of living. It
is a desirable condition, based on knowledge of
housekeeping — ordered knowledge gained from
experts in school, and in startling contrast to the
wisdom of "mother," who was equipped for the
business of teaching with nothing better than
tradition, devotion to her home, humility as to
what she had a right to demand in the way of
mechanical assistance or financial compensation,
and especially with a firm and disastrous convic-
tion that her own experience, however limited,
was an infallible guide. There is no denying that,
178 Increasing Home Efficiency
under these circumstances, "mother" did not
produce a valuable science of housekeeping. But
how could she, since ability to keep house is no
part of the inherited maternal instinct, of marital
affection, respectable conduct, a cultivated mind,
moral grandeur, or any other quality supposed to
be inherent in the human female ? A knowledge of
housekeeping is not a matter of sex, but of science;
and, since it is something that we all ought to
know, men and women alike, isn't the public
school, which we are all forced to attend, the
proper place to learn it? We are all forced to
learn the measurements of land and the principles
of surveying, though few indeed of us ever own a
foot of our own land. We must study longitude
and time, though we are content to set our own
watches by the factory whistle, not by the stars.
Why should we not all learn the principles of
housekeeping, on which we depend three hundred
and sixty-five days in the year.^ Ought they not
to be a part of our race knowledge?
And, in addition to this general knowledge for
us all, should we not insist on a special trade
training for all who are actually engaged in house-
keeping? If we are able to work out a system of
public education that reaches all the children,
surely we can stretch it to include that fraction of
the grown-ups who are housekeepers. For we do
need the two kinds of education — the general
principles for us all, and the special instruction for
those who practice the profession.
"I think there is danger of carrying this rage
How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 179
for domestic science too far," cried the dean of a
woman's college. *'We let it get in the way of
culture."
On the contrary! The whole development of
domestic science is to the one end that housekeep-
ing may get out of the way of culture. We study
it in order to prevent the work of housekeeping,
which, however we may hate to admit it, is the
basis of our civilization, from blighting the things
that are the flower of our civilization. We prefer
the attitude of Virginia's State Superintendent of
Public Instruction, Mr. Joseph D. Eggleston.
"No man believes in cultural education more than
I do," he writes, "or believes more in the vital
necessity of continuing this cultural education in
order to preserve that fine spirit and vision with-
out which we perish. But I take no stock whatever
in that false culture which thinks it degrading to
work with the hands. It is the doing of everyday y
work in a shiftless manner that is degrading and
destructive of culture."
CHAPTER X
Training the Consumer
FROM one of the universities which offers
special courses in Domestic Art and House-
hold Science, we got a pamphlet on The
Principles of Jelly Making. It is an admirable
pamphlet. It covers the subject thoroughly, and
lays out a straight road to the production from a
given amount of fruit of the most jelly of the best
quality at the lowest cost. Besides definite direc-
tions for the making of particular jellies, it gives a
resume of the principles that underlie all jelly mak-
ing, so that one who reads is richer in general cul-
ture as well as specific information. It is a valuable
pamphlet in its place, but its most serviceable place
is not in the training of the housekeeper. To be of
most benefit to her, it would be primarily a pam-
phlet on the Principles of Jelly Eating. For the
modern housekeeper is in the throes of metamor-
phosis from producer to consumer, and the most im-
portant function of real education is to fit her not
for the state she is leaving, but for the state she is
entering into. To make jelly is ceasing to be an
important part of housekeeping — to eat jelly is,
let us hope, the unending privilege of us all.
Now, it has been taken for granted through the
i8o
Training the Consumer 18 1
generations that, since we all do consume things
from the moment we are born until we die, con-
sumption must be instinctive, no more needing to
be taught than breathing. We see, dimly, that
modern housekeeping has let go of production and
concentrated on consumption, but we are, most of
us, a little loath to admit that an education in
housekeeping must be almost entirely an educa-
tion in consumption. This was not true in the
past, it may not be true in the coming ages, but
in the present and the immediate future it is not
to be questioned; for as Mrs. Ellen H. Richards
said, "home economics must stand for the ideal
home life of today unhampered by the traditions
of the past."
Time was when the woman who kept house was
expected to be the high priestess of that dire
goddess How-to-Save-Money, but her metamor-
phosis from producer to consumer has shifted her
worship to the new deity How-to-Spend. From
an all-round producer the American woman has
become the greatest consumer in the world. Of
the ten billion dollars spent annually in the United
States for home maintenance, food, shelter and
clothing, fully ninety per cent is spent by women.
Isn't the science of consumption, then, worthy of
special emphasis in the training for home effi-
ciency.^
Not many schools of Home Economics have
grasped the fact that they should be per se trainers
of consumers. They still tend to over-emphasize
home production; but the best of them are very
1 82 Increasing Home Efficiency
generally swinging toward the first and most im-
portant work of training the consumer — they are
beginning to establish standards.
"I am conscious of a standard," writes a pupil
of a correspondence school from southern Illinois.
"I see it in the way I manage my household, in
my expenditure, my work. I think a change in'
my standards is now going on under the influence
of my household studies. The change will, I sus-
pect, consist largely in a shifting of emphasis, in
delivering me from certain traditional ideas."
The standard of this lady was the inherited
housekeeping standard, the standard which our
ancestors established through the long ages when
they were building up the home as a factory.
Take the matter of food. It is undoubtedly for
the advantage of the community that every in-
dividual stomach should have enough and not too
much inside it. The old standard was to distend
its walls by mere bulk; the new school-set standard
is to furnish it some 2,000 to 3,000 food units
daily. The schools have worked out this stand-
ard of consumption through the study of protein
and starches and fats; of calories and muscle
builders and heat producers, till they have found
the amount and kind of fuel the human machine
needs for the various kinds of work it must do.
To build these standards is a question of labora-
tories and applied mathematics not within the com-
mand of any middle-class home. If all of us are to
have the benefit of them, they must be brought
to us by the universities and the public school
Training the Consumer 183
We met a Pratt Institute graduate on the
Chicago train and led her gently to tell us how
much of her domestic science she found useful in
her housekeeping.
"Well," she confessed, "when the baby is
teething and the cook has left and there is com-
pany to dinner, I don't think much about calories
or a balanced ration, but somehow IVe got the
theory so well digested that I put the right things
together without thinking about it."
Her food standard has become a part of her
unconscious mental furniture, like the gauge by
which we measure the length of our steps and the
focus of our eyes.
We looked over some papers on Housing written
by pupils of the American School of Home Eco-
nomics. Says one of the students who lives in the
country: "In the matter of house sanitation, the
important point is to know exactly what you have
to deal with. There is no use in taking country
plumbing for granted. You have got to get away
not only from the traditional ideas of the man who
built the house, but from your own old ideas as
well."
These old ideas from which she is being freed
by new school-set standards taught that a coun-
try house did not need an indoor bathroom, that
the parlor was a jewel-casket to be opened only
on rare occasions, that the children should be
"bunched" several In a room, that running water
on the second floor was a luxury, that the sanitary
garbage disposal was optional with the individual.
184 Increasing Home Efficiency
Under the influence of her new standard she has
found out where every one of the pipes in her
house are located, what they are for and how
they attend to their job. She has worked out for
herself a system of out-of-the-house drainage, a
new water system, and a method of scientific
ventilation. As a consumer of housing, she has
put her training into practice.
Now, the basis of all these standards must be
the ability to recognize quality when we see it.
This is so important and so difficult that the gov-
ernment tries to make it unnecessary. To estab-
lish standards — minimum standards to be sure —
has come to be the work of sanitary inspectors,
tenement-house imspectors, clean milk commis-
sions, pure food and drug experts, departments of
street cleaning, and a hundred more. Theoreti-
cally, it would be well for the government to es-
tablish standards for the consumption of all things
and so save the schools from the onerous duty of
inculcating them, and the pupils from the travail
of assimilation. But how shall a government that
can reasonably say: "Potatoes below a certain
grade shall not be used for human food," regulate
the number of up-to-grade potatoes a man shall
eat.^ How shall a government that can and does
keep printed matter below a certain grade out of
the mails, say to the voracious consumer of stori-
ettes: "Thus far and no further!".-^
Besides, an efficient government without effi-
cient citizens is not a democracy; we don't want
to revert to a benevolent autocracy or even an
Training the Consumer 185
apron-string bureaucracy. The setting and main-
tenance of standards is a two-handed business, —
the establishment of standards by the government
and the testing and use of these standards by an
enHghtened citizenship. And in matters where
the government has not yet established standards
of quality, the initiative must come from the con-
sumer.
Consider the consumption of textiles, — a job we
have been at ever since we progressed beyond the
wearing of raw skins. But the quality of textiles
is still one of the unguarded frontiers of knowledge.
In fact, the general knowledge of quality in textiles
is decreasing, for though the specialists have grown
wiser, the consumers who used to know a good deal
about cloth they themselves spun and wove,
have grown more ignorant. Have we not, all of
us, seen our mothers place a wet finger under the
table-cloths they were buying to see if they were
pure linen.'' That is a perfectly good test with
hand-spun linen, but it is a dull manufacturer who
can't circumvent a wet finger. We need both the
training of the schools and the government guar-
antee to buy cloth wisely.
The University of Wisconsin is giving a course
for consumers of textiles at the same time that
members of its faculty are working to get through
a law on the standardization of cloth. The stu-
dents study wool from sheep to broadcloth; silk,
from worm to ribbon, and are required to do one
piece of weaving on the hand loom, not for manual
skill, but to make them understand the tests of
1 86 Increasing Home EflBciency
quality. They are not expected to become weavers
but consumers of clothes. With this same end in
view they are taught the processes of dyeing and
the durability of colors, and they study especially
the adulteration of fabrics. We were shown card
after card of cloth sold for all wool which when
tested by the students proved to be practically all
cotton.
But it is no longer enough that cloth should be
all wool and a yard wide — that means little. These
consumers must learn that even pure wool when
it is short and stiff or soft and weak is a poor pur-
chase; that there are qualities of cloth in which the
warp and weft are so uneven in weight that the
heavy threads pull the light ones and the cloth
wears itself out; that there are weaves in which
certain threads are so exposed that they break
and leave a rough surface. All tests of "pure
wool" cloth!
But even this is only a small part of the study of
woolen fabrics, only a preliminary to establishing
the standards of quality and price for the benefit
of the consumer. Into these standards enter con-
ditions of cloth production in the factory, wages
paid operatives, taxes paid the government,
"Schedule K," freight rates, and the costs of sell-
ing the finished product. This training In textiles
is not limited to general principles. It applies
itself to such definite things as blue serge and black
broadcloth, and other standard products. These
classes of consumers have determined that under
existing conditions of wool production, price of
Training the Consumer 187
labor and tariff, the lowest cost for blue serge,
fifty-four inches wide and of efficient quality, is a
dollar and a half a yard, and that the lowest cost of
a similar quality of black broadcloth is nearly
three dollars. Will not the trained consumer who
has thoroughly assimilated these facts realize that
when either blue serge or black broadcloth is
offered for a less price, they are not all wool, or
wool of poor quality, or damaged, or "mill ends"
or remnants? Of course they recognize that both
good and inferior cloths have their legitimate uses
if the consumer is neither deceived as to their
quality nor overcharged. There is no reason why
the law should prohibit their manufacture as it
may well prohibit the manufacture of adulterated
foods and drugs. All the consumer needs is to be
protected by an honest label. How could the
world get along without "shoddy" for instance, a
cloth made from odds and ends of wool fibre,
usually fibre that has been used before, when the
present production of new wool is not nearly equal
to the demand?
But the student has got to be taught that even
these standards of quality are not absolute things.
The perfect buttonhole may be produced at such
a cost of time and labor that it is for the general
advantage to use the commonplace hook and eye.
It is not a question whether we can individually
afford to pay in money for hand-made lingerie, but
whether the community can afford the expenditure
of so much eyesight and time and thought to make
what is perhaps a superior product, but for which
1 88 Increasing Home Efficiency
there is an approximate substitute; for are not
things expensive to the community even when we
make them ourselves?
Besides knowing what it is for the advantage of
the community and being able to recognize quality
when one sees it, it is the work of the consumer to
see that what the community needs is produced.
Can one eat eggs, however wholesome, in a land
where no hens are? We listened to one domestic
science teacher who seemed to set us right between
the covers of Mutual Friend, where Dickens tells
how "Mrs. John Rokesmith who had never been
wont to do too much as Miss Bella Wilfer was
under the constant necessity of referring for advice
and support to a sage volume entitled *The Com-
plete British Family Housewife.' But there was a
coolness on the part of the British Housewife that
Mrs. J. R. found highly exasperating. She would
say *take a salamander,' or casually issue the order
*throw in a handful of — something entirely un-
attainable. In these, the Housewife's glaring
moments of unreason, Bella would shut her up
and knock her on the table, apostrophizing her
with the compliment, 'Oh, you are a stupid old
Donkey! Where am I to get it, do you think?'"
A good many instructors — far be it from us to
call them what "Bella" did — entirely ignore the
difficulties of getting the "salamander"! That is
one place where Teachers' College in New York
City is strong — it teaches the prospective consumer
how to get the "salamander."
Now we know that it is to the advantage of
Training the Consumer 189
society that we should all have clean clothes and
house linen, and we are fairly able to recognize
cleanliness when we see it. But to produce this
cleanliness under modern conditions is quite an-
other matter. We have, thank Heaven, passed,
mentally at least, beyond the stage of mother-at-
the-washtub. We are passing rapidly beyond the
stage of anybody at the washtub anywhere, and
at Teachers' College, the consumers of clean
clothes, prospective and actual, are being taught
how under actual conditions clean clothes can be
produced.
"How people can accept clothes blued with the
old liquid indigo I don't seel" exclaimed an in-
structor at the college.
"Why not?" we inquired, all blueing being more
or less alike to us.
"Why not.^ Don't you know that it makes
rust spots?"
And then and there she took us Into a class that
was making a special study of blueings and we
learned how much waste there was in block and
ball blueings and that the proper thing to use was
a specially prepared analine dye of the proper
shade. We were shown how our Intelligent demand
for clean clothes could be satisfied, how the thing
we wanted could be produced. As part of this
education, the girls at Teachers' College also test
out washing machines and mangles. Irons, and
soaps, bought In the open market, with reference
to their effect on the things washed, their cost to
buy and operate, and the skill, time and strength
I go Increasing Home Efficiency
their use Involves. The college does not, however,
lay down any fiat on blueing, nor on washing ma-
chines, nor on any other laundry appliance; for
may not far better things be Invented In the fu-
ture? It teaches the points In the production of
clean clothes as it might teach the points In judging
fox terriers, — not whether any specific flat Iron or
small dog is good or bad.
Inextricably mixed up with learning how to get
produced the things one wants Is learning how to
secure them after they are produced. The con-
sumer must be trained to remove the obstacles
between himself and the thing he needs. These
obstacles are usually matters of cost — cost and its
contributing causes, transportation, the exploita-
tion of public utilities, the smothering of useful
patents and the arbitrary limiting of useful manu-
facture. From all over the country come letters
full of the same things that are in the contributors'
columns of the papers and magazines. "Eggs
cost 60 cents a dozen, so we use rice instead."
"Electric current for heating Is so expensive that
we still burn coal." "I would like to send Harold
to college but it costs so much that I cannot afford
to." "Do not use butter in making pastry, for
though the flavor Is better, the cost Is very much
more."
The consumer and those who advise him take
prices as final things, as representing the true cost
plus a fair profit, whereas In reality —
Now the trained consumer knows that there is
no fuel like electricity, so clean, so reliable, so
Training the Consumer 191
easily controlled, but the better trained she is, the
more certainly she knows that she is as much cut
off from using it as though it were ambergris.
Why? Because it varies in price from 10 to 19
cents a kilowatt hour. We have just called up the
contract department of the Commonwealth Edison
Company of Chicago, and found that the net rate
for family use is 10 cents, exactly the same as in
New York City. But the people of the region
have taxed themselves to build a drainage canal, a
property now belonging to the people, which has
developed 125,000 horse power, about 100,000
horse power of which is available. This, in the
form of electric current at the very lowest estimate,
is worth about $2,000,000 a year. Some experts
reckon it to be worth ten times that. A small
thing but their own, and what could it not do if
turned into the kitchens of Chicago at cost.^ Does
that 10 cents a kilowatt hour rate have to stand?
Is it wise to teach the consumers that it is a heaven-
fixed obstacle to good housekeeping? They broke
down the $1.00 per 1,000 feet gas limit in New
York City, the carfare rate in Cleveland, and the
freight rate limits in Wisconsin.
We were talking with a woman from Sun Prairie,
a small Wisconsin town in the midst of a dairy
district.
"Oh yes, I cook with electricity," she said.
"It does cost a good deal now, because you see
the plant is just new and we haven't paid for it
yet."
"Paid for it?"
192 Increasing Home Eflficiency
She looked at us for a moment in uncomprehend-
ing surprise, then smiled her amusement.
"Oh, it belongs to the town, you know. We pay
a good price for the current now, almost as much
as they do in a city; but as soon as we have paid
for our plant, we shall get it at cost and then it'll
be the cheapest thing we could use."
This of course is on the basis of a municipally
owned plant — a small one that is supposed to be
more costly to run than a larger one.
The University of Illinois, in a pamphlet
written by Mrs. E. Davenport, has worked out
the cost of equipping a single country house — one
that can be sufficiently lit by thirty tungsten
burners — with an electric plant of its own. The
cost of buying and installing this plant is ap-
proximately ^600, the cost of maintenance from
$S to ^10 a year, and the cost of the electricity
so produced is 5 cents a kilowatt hour. This is on
a scale so small that it is theoretically very ex-
pensive to run! Now of course Mrs. Davenport's
plan involves electricity at a low voltage to be
used for lighting only; but the country consumer
who has refused to consider the kerosene lamp as
final may well refuse to limit herself by the coal
range either. Aren't the problems of electric
light and electric heat Siamese twins ^
Certainly it is part of the consumer's job to
perform an economic steeple-chase over the fences
and the ditches and hedges that are between her
and the things that it is for the advantage of the
community that she should have, and it should be
Training the Consumer 193
part of her education to practice her in economic
hurdle jumping.
We have been talking with Miss Snow, head of
Domestic Science in the Chicago Public Schools.
"If this instruction in housekeeping/' said she,
"were nothing but teaching the children to cook
and clean and wash and do all the other things
that are done in the home, I shouldn't be very
much interested in it. As I see it, Domestic
Science is a training in relations. It takes up gov-
ernment, and politics, and business, and health, and
capital, and labor and the social setting of them
all. It is really training the consumer to /zW."
And to live is to consume!
In the Public Schools, where the courses are
comparatively elementary, the relations between
life and the specific studies are not difficult to
establish, but when the general principles cover
themselves with a mass of detail as they do in the
more elaborate courses of the universities, it
takes a conscious binding together of the threads
to bring them into relation in the students' minds.
This is not very often done for the reason that few
members of the faculties understand it themselves.
"What is the object of all this Home Economics
work.^" we asked the head of a department in a
great State University. "You're supported by
the State funds, what are you giving back to the
people in return.^"
She looked a little vague, and then said, bright-
ening:
"We've five thousand students."
194 Increasing Home Efficiency
"I suppose you're taking such courses as this
one in sewing, on through the commercial produc-
tion of clothes, through factory legislation, and
wages and hours?"
"Oh, we couldn't go into that!" she cried.
The detailed study in that University was good,
but a course in textiles naturally gets itself a long
way from the piece of cloth boiling in caustic
potash to see if it is all wool or not, and a cooking
course a long way from how to make muffins, and
a sewing course from how to make buttonholes,
and all the other courses in a Home Economic
department sprangle away from the ostensible
starting points. It takes not only a big under-
lying idea, but a forceful personality to do the
new work of correlating these things, and feeding
them predigested to the consumer in training.
Both the idea and the personalities they have at
the University of Wisconsin. As Mr. Hatch, head
of the Extension Work of the Agricultural College
told us: "You eastern people who are used to
endowed institutions may not understand it, but
the object of this university that the people have
made, is to be serviceable to the people."
And Professor Abby L. Marlatt, head of the
Department of Home Economics, has had the
force to draw all these diverse activities into a
course in what she has called "Humanics," planned
to link the theories of the class-room to the reali-
ties of life. We heard one lecture in this course.
Its subject was "The Child in Industry — Its Effect
upon State Laws and Necessary Legislation."
Training the Consumer 195
It was a talk backed by government documents
and state investigations, by the reports of chari-
table societies, tariff schedules and the rate-
regulation of railroads, and not a conclusion did it
draw! Quite unemotionally it showed that there
is child labor in quantity, and how much and
where, according to the census; showed the cost
of this in health and intelligence, quoting from
government investigations in the South; on the
death rate, quoting from the report of the Associa-
tion for the Prevention of Infant Mortality;
showed that it is absolute necessity that forces
children to go to work, quoting from the Mas-
sachusetts report on why children go to work;
showed the wages of fathers and mothers in the
woolen mills of Lawrence before the last strike,
and correlated these with the claims that the high
tariff on wool is to protect the standard of wages
of the American working-man; and with the num-
ber of children actually working in these same
mills because their parents cannot support them;
and all these things with the price of woolen cloth
and the profit on it, — Miss Marlatt didn't have
to draw conclusions. The brain of a twenty-year-
old college student after it has been tabulating
chemical and physical experiments in three
columns, — first, the process, as laid down in the
book; second, the result, as observed by the eye;
third, the inference as made by the brain, — draws
conclusions from such a lecture as this of Miss Mar-
latt quite automatically.
Miss Marlatt's students will be among the very
196 Increasing Home Efficiency
few of us who have been trained in the principles
of consumption beyond the narrow individual
principle established by our individual digestions
or complexions, our social aspirations or our
mental appetites. Housekeeping, even the larger
housekeeping which is not production, is but a
small part of this science of consumption which
can operate quite as directly upon a memorial
statue at Washington as upon a can of beans —
consumption is our one universal function, and
through it we have power and happiness and
progress, or retrogression and spiritual and bodily
death. Some of us already know what we indi-
vidually want to consume and how to get it, but
it takes an educated social vision to see the needs
of the whole race and how to satisfy them. Is
there any bigger work for the universities, the
colleges and the public schools than to train con-
sumers to this end?
CHAPTER XI
The Cost of Children
ANEW JERSEY farmer has made a careful
estimate of the cost of raising potatoes.
^ He has considered climate and fertilizer,
cost of land and cost of labor, probabilities of
marketing and dangers of waste on the way,
and the toll to the industrious insect, and has
concluded that every bushel of potatoes costs
him seventy-five cents. Potatoes are a valuable
crop. An Iowa dairyman has figured that each
cow costs twelve and a half cents a day above
the cost of marketing her milk. Milk is a valuable
crop. The cost of production has been standard-
ized for practically every commodity. But no-
body has worked out the cost of children, though
they are the most valuable crop of all.
Children, like every other product, cost three
kinds of things: brains, money, and muscle. The
money cost is the only one of these three that is at
all easy to estimate; obviously there is a minimum
below which the most competent mother, let her
sew and brew and bake ever so incessantly, cannot
rear a child in health. But just what the very
minimum, bargain-counter cost of children is no
one seems to have determined, although from
197
igS Increasing Home Efficiency
every side comes the cry that people do not have
children because they cost so much.
Now, it will not do to put the subject aside with
a Podsnappian wave of the arm; for when the
irresistible tendency to increase the cost of living
meets the immovable conviction that children are
not only the greatest good to the individual but
the most valuable gift to the State, something is
bound to happen.
Up in Mahanoy City, a town in the anthracite
fields, where the coal-breakers stand like giant
toboggan slides against the sky, and the culm piles
are hand-made mountains beside the real hills —
wonderful places for the adventurous young — we
found very few children of the sliding-down-hill
age, and remarked their absence to the driver.
"Oh, the Hunks and Polacks, they ain't got
many children," said he, stolidly. "Three out of
every five of 'em dies. But they don't lose much,"
he reassured us, "they mostly insure 'em for forty
dollars. They say a child costs about eight dollars
a year till it's five years old, and then it can sort
'of scratch 'round for itself. When it's ten, it can
go to work and help the family. So they insure
'em for forty dollars, and if they dies, they get
their money back, and if they lives, they've got
their kids. They don't stand to lose much either
way," and he tapped his whip reflectively on the
dash-board.
Eight dollars a year for five years !
Says Rowntree in his study of York, England:
*' Every (unskilled) laborer who has as many as
The Cost of Children 199
three children must pass through a time — probably
lasting about ten years — when he and his family
will be underfed. ... If he has but two children,
these conditions will be better to the extent of two
shillings tenpence (a week); If he has but one, they
will be better to the extent of five shillings ha'
penny."
According to this. It takes a minimum of two
shillings tenpence a week to keep a child In York,
or a little less than thirty-seven dollars a year.
Of course these coal-miners' and unskilled laborers'
children are distinctly "cheap" children. They
come from families way below the efficiency line,
and the only value of their budgets Is to Indicate
the lowest limit of subsistence for a child — the
limit below which automatic elimination takes
place. No one would seriously hold that It Is for
the advantage of society to rear children In such
shallow economic soil. Taking so much for
granted, what do children cost In homes that have
the money basis at least for social efficiency.^
In the matter of children, It Is not safe to
begin at the beginning, for doctors' bills on the
one hand and generous friends on the other make
the first cost of babies excessively difficult to
determine.
"Our little daughter cost us twenty dollars the
first year — ten for the doctor, ten for clothes — and
I wish you could see what a beauty she Is!" This
from a Nebraska farm.
"It cost precisely six hundred and sixty-seven
dollars to provide my baby's outfit — to get him ^
200 Increasing Home Efficiency
here, to furnish him with crib, go-cart, high chair,
and clothes, and to feed and care for him after he
came." This from the wife of a New England
business man.
Between these two range other first-year middle-
class budgets, with the doctor's bill and the nurse's
salary well in the foreground. The possibility of
the first year's cost stretching suddenly into the
hundreds is a grave thing to face. Suppose you
are living on twelve hundred a year, how many
hundreds could you save In the year before the
child comes .^ The same erratic doctors' bills In-
troduce a wide margin of variation into the dan-
gerous second summer. For these reasons It is
convenient to begin the study of the cost of chil-
dren at a period between three and five, when the
irregular expenses of babyhood are over, and those
of compulsory schooling have not commenced.
The tendency even of the rich Is to dress children
of this age simply, and the cost of food Is kept
pretty well within limits by the rigid requirements
of health. It is the period when the cost of the
child is affected more by the Internal eflftclency
of the home and the capabilities of the parents,
and less by outside influences, than at any other.
What, then, is the yearly cost of children between
three and five.^
Mrs. Ardell, of Wisconsin, Is a capable woman
and a good manager. She stretches her husband's
twelve hundred a year over about as many things
as twelve hundred dollars can be made to cover.
She seems to get a lot of joy out of life, and doesn't
The Cost of Children 201
pay heavily for it In doctor's bills. She lives in a
town with a soon-to-be-reallzed ambition to be a
city, and has a tiny house and a large yard, where
the four-year-old Ardell can disport himself in un-
watched safety. Naturally she keeps no nurse-
maid nor other servant — one can't on twelve hun-
dred.
Sixty-seven dollars and twenty cents a year
Master Ardell costs his parents in money; $43.80
for food, $10 for clothes, $10 for doctor's bills,
$3.40 for Incidentals. According to his mother's
schedule, he gets no store-bought toys; he does not
go to kindergarten; Instead, he spends most of his
waking hours out of doors while his mother keeps
her attention tied to his little romper strings, dur-
ing the six days at least while her husband Is In
his office. She can rest from the cook-stove and
broom by taking care of the baby. Professor
Simon Patten, of the University of Pennsylvania,
seems to have had her in mind when he said:
"Whatever narrows the environment of individ-
uals, or limits their activities, stops their growth
and stops social progress."
It Is perhaps fortunate for the community that
Mrs. Ardell was fairly well educated and well read
before the limiting influence of her small son fell
upon her.
One wonders just how Inevitable It Is that the
world should close in for the parents as it opens
out for the child. Take the Wards, who live in a
Pennsylvania town of about the same size as the
Ardells, and who have the same Income — twelve
202 Increasing Home Efficiency
hundred a year. They, too, have a four-year-old
son, but he costs them $95.17 a year — $28.97 more
than the Ardells pay for theirs. The following is
his list of expenses:
Clothes:
Shoes (3 pairs at $2.00) $6.00
Suits (3 at $1.75) 5.25
Overcoat 4.00
Hat 1. 00
Stockings (8 pairs at \^}4. cts.) .... i.oo
Union suits (2 at 50 cts.) i.oo
Body waist .25 $18.50
Food (estimated) 45-67
Help (a woman to sit with him one night a
week while his parents go to their reading
circle) 13.00
Insurance (to provide for his education) 18.00
$95.17
No doctor's bill stood against Mrs. Ward's son
in 1911.
The extra money spent on this youngster is to
provide for his education and to make it possible
for his parents to promote their present efficiency.
The Wards have set their faces against stagnation.
Mr. Ward writes of concerts and lectures they
attend, of university extension schemes and co-
operative buying experiments in which they are
interested, and Mrs. Ward "keeps up her music.'^
The Cost of Children 203
For these advantages they sacrifice something
from their clothes and something from their sav-
ings, on the principle, as Mr. Ward states it, that
"to save as an end in itself is vicious; the father
and mother must be free to enter into the Larger
Life."
From the standpoint of society as well as that
of the children themselves, it seems important
that they should take as little as possible from the
present efficiency of their parents. Unless they
more than make up to society for what they sup-
press in their parents, are they not a losing proposi-
tion .f* And is it right to place this heavy responsi-
bility upon them.'*
Neither the Ardells nor the Wards celebrated
the advent of their children by keying up their
standard of living; they continued in the houses
they occupied before the children were born, and
generally went their old ways. When even a
slightly improved standard is adopted, the cost of
children goes up with a jump. Take the case of
Mr. Merton, a New England salaried man, with
an income of $1,800. He has two children, one
ten, the other four years old, and with their coming
he raised the entire level of his housekeeping.
"In addition to their direct expenditures," he
writes, "about one hundred dollars should be
reckoned as additional cost of rent, for if we had
not had children, we should have lived in a smaller
house or else have rented enough rooms in our pres-
ent one to bring the annual cost down correspond-
ingly. For the same reason the children should be
204 Increasing Home Efficiency
accounted as adding to the annual cost of fuel —
perhaps $40. I think $20 would be below, rather
than above, the amount chargeable to their ac-
count annually for added expense of washing and
cleaning, replacement of bedding and table linen,
and wear and tear of furniture."
Of this ^160, ^54 is somewhat arbitrarily charged
to the account of the four-year-old daughter, mak-
ing her personal costs as follows:
Food ^35.00
Shelter, fuel, wear and tear 54.00
Clothes, etc 18.70
Doctor 4.00
Attendance (woman occasionally at night) 5.00
Toys 6.00
Sundries 3.00
$125.70
The cost of children not only goes up with a
jump with each modification of the standard of
living, but the jump speeds up at each level. A
larger house means a fuller life for the mother, and
a fuller life for the mother generally means a nurse-
maid. Or, again, if a kindergarten is not available,
or the parents prefer to have the child begin its
education at home, the dancing teacher is likely
to be added to the nurse-maid, and sometimes the
trained kindergartner will supersede the unskilled
attendant. This progression appears in the fol-
lowing group of budgets:
The Cost of Children 205
I. Pennsylvania Family, Annual Income $3,500. Girl
four years old.
Food, etc feo.15
Clothes, etc 24.25
$114.40
II. Maine Family, Annual Income $4,500. Boy four
years old.
Food $104.00
Clothes 60.00
Books, toys, etc 30.00
Nurse-maid 156.00
Dancing lessons 10.00
$360.00
III. New York Family. Annual Income $6,000.
Boy four years old
Food :
Milk (certified) $74.40
Fruit 21.60
Eggs 9.00 $105.00
Clothing:
Suits, etc $48.00
Shoes (made to order) 30.00 78.00
Doctor 24.00
Insurance (for college education and start
in life, etc.) 300.00
Carfare to parks 6.00
Barber i.oo
Incidentals 24.00
Dancing school 20.00
Trained kindergartner 624.00
$1,182.00
2o6 Increasing Home Efficiency
This last budget (III) is about the upper limit
of cost for a perfectly well child in -the middle
class. Stripped of those items which are either un-
usual or in excess of what is generally regarded as
necessary — trained kindergartner, dancing school,
large sum for insurance, made-to-order shoes, cer-
tified milk — even this comes within two hundred
dollars.
From the consideration of these budgets, and
many more in our possession, it seems safe to esti-
mate the necessary cost of a child between the ages
of three and five at about one hundred dollars a
year when the mother is both housekeeper and
nurse-maid or teacher. This amount will be more
than doubled where a nurse-maid or governess is
employed.
A woman from a small New York town protests
that these budgets do not present the modifica-
tions that come with many children in a family.
She says:
"The unfortunate parents of the unfortunate
only child should know that two children do not
cost twice as much as one, nor three children
nearly three times as much. There are so many
things that must be provided for a baby and that
are outgrown before they are outworn. The first
long clothes are worn for so short a time that they
are always ready for a second baby, and usually
for a third with just a little mending. The baby
carriage, crib, tub, play yard, high chair and so
many of the things that make the first baby a seri-
ous expense, may be handed down to little brothers
The Cost of Children 207
and sisters quite indefinitely. Even in the ques-
tion of food, where pennies are counted very care-
fully, three children on the average eat perhaps
twice what one child would of special dishes pre-
pared for them, and the time and expense of fuel
are little more in cooking for three or four than for
one. Then if the mother teaches her own little
children, surely she will consider her time better
spent with three or four than with one, and when
she is not teaching them, they will play content-
edly by themselves where an only child would need
more of his mother's attention."
This is a valid criticism of these estimates, and
IS met only in part by the fact that all people
who do have children at all must begin with a first
one to whom these estimates will apply. A New
England friend makes a very different sort of an
objection. She protests against the publication
of such estimates as these, on the ground that
"they will discourage young people from having
children." She voices what seems to be a very
general superstition, that it is wise to draw a
pleasant veil over the cost till the offspring have
actually arrived, because then the parents "will
have to manage somehow" — as though each child
arrived holding a certified check for Its mainte-
nance In one hand and directions for its care in
the other!
It is strange that people — really Intelligent
people sometimes — will still hang on to the medie-
val Idea that ignorance is an asset. An eastern
clergyman inquires:
2o8 Increasing Home EflSciency
"Is it morally right to Inculcate the thought
that unless a young couple can foresee as a dead
certainty that they can send their sons and daugh-
ters to college, they must not have children? I
am inclined to think that the real reason why a
couple with an income of ^1,200 is afraid to assume
the responsibility of raising a family is because
they want to keep pace with a family that has an
income of ^2,400, and the family with ^2,400 wants
to keep pace with the family with ^3,600, and so
on."
Now is one more likely to forego a thing because
its money cost can be calculated?
An abstractor of titles from a western city gets
really quite stirred up over this whole question of
the cost of children.
"Going thus into a cold systematic calculation
of the financial cost of children," he writes, "brings
In a line of argument indicating a reduction of the
number of children In a family so that their elders
may have more time and money for social dissipa-
tion, or so that the fewer children may have more
money for long drawn out education. 'Education'
so-called, meaning long continued schooling, Is a
great American Moloch to which the children are
sacrificed. My wife and I have six children, and
during all our married life have attended strictly
to business, she In the home and I In my office.
Like ourselves, we have had none of our children
go beyond the equivalent of a high school course,
some of them not quite that. We have come to
realize that the American people have too much
The Cost of Children 209
confounded schooling with education, until educa-
tion has indirectly come to be so grievous a finan-
cial load to parents that with the unsatisfactory
results achieved, makes the raising of children
seem not worth while. There has arisen an ex-
cessive and false notion of the duty of parents to
the children, instead of the older idea of the duty
of the children to the parents. The parents are
expected to do too much for the children and they
become a financial mill-stone around the parents'
necks. But we are firm in our belief that any writ-
ing or talking about the cost of them, no matter
how well-intentioned, has the strongest possible
effect in discouraging the raising of them. Those
who really love the babes should taboo all reference
to cost."
It does not occur to this irritated gentleman
that the only way to reduce the cost of children
so that they can be produced without financial
hindrance is to understand what the cost is at
present, and how it can be cut or more easily met.
There is abundance of evidence to show that the
number of children in middle-class families is de-
creasing. Among seventy-six families whose com-
plete budgets we have, they average less than two.
Hasn't modern society got over the idea that it
can destroy its enemies by pulling faces at them
and calling them names .^
Would it conduce to the happiness of a child to
know itself an inadvertent obstacle between its
parents and their unrealized ambitions? Rather
than Ignore the facts, might it not be well to con-
2IO Increasing Home Efficiency
sider why, since a child is the most valuable gift a
person can make to the community, the tax upon
parents is so high as compared with their resources ?
What, for example, is the trouble back of such
plaints as these we have received?
"My life has been dwarfed in raising my
family."
"Our children have their higher efficiency cur-
tailed in order that they may keep alive."
"Father and his ambition had to be side-
tracked to educate us children, so our home must
be classed as a non-paying one."
"No teacher in this part of the country can care
for his children and have any money to spend in
keeping himself mentally efficient."
"My wife is a wonderful manager, but no
amount of management will make the salary my
congregation pay me large enough to bring up two
children on."
"My children say to me, 'Why, papa, can we
not go on with our education.^' And the only
answer an indulgent father can make is to say
frankly, * Children, the family grew faster than
papa's income, and now I must ask you to help
through."
All these good people seem to be surprised and
hurt. Are not children like flowers, growing of
God's good grace .^ Well, if we had the statistics
in black and white, it is probable that we should
find some cash outlay necessary to raise dan-
delions; and it wouldn't make them any less wel-
come in the springtime, either!
The Cost of Children 211
Now, such plaints do not appear to be based on
the "fixed costs" of children, although an analysis
of many budgets shows that these increase from
$100 for a child between three and five, to ^128
when the child is seven years old, ^180 when it is
between ten and twelve, and $212 when it is be-
tween fourteen and sixteen. They are based on
the uncertain costs of middle-class standards, on
the varying demands for health, and education,
and a start in life.
Undoubtedly some of this uncertainty is due to
the survival of the ancestral idea that our homes
are isolated units and that their efficiency is to be
measured not by the value of their social output,
but by the number of steps above "father" the
children are enabled to start. This cost cannot
possibly be laid to the parents' wish to keep pace
with the family ahead, but is chargeable to un-
sloughed ancestral ideals.
Is it not strange that American middle-class
homes will allow themselves to be crippled finan-
cially by the need of sending their children to
private schools and to save money for their college
courses.^ Is not the right to free education and its
social advantage, accepted by us all.^ We have
letters from one family with an income of only
$2,400 a year, showing how it is trying in vain to
stagger along under the burden of a son in college
and two daughters in a private school. This
family is by no means exceptional; and yet few
parents even dream of whispering into the public
ear that it is the business of the State to provide
212 Increasing Home Efficiency
free such education as their children ought to have
— an incontrovertible example of home incom-
petence.
But there are homes which are highly efficient
in getting from the community the sort of school-
ing for their children that is money in their
pockets. Mrs. Wyman, a little woman living in
Foxbrooke, one of those New York suburbs to
which the "stock and bond" people are prone to
remove while their children are small, has written
it into her creed that she must get Reduced Rates
on the Arts and Sciences.
"I'm not looking for any bargain-counter educa-
tion for my children," explained she, severely,
"nor for any of the machine methods of instruc-
tion still to be found in the rural districts. I
don't want them to get down to the level of bare
intellectual subsistence. I want them to learn
amply, to be intellectually rich. They've a right
to it."
"See here, Mrs. Wyman," protested a neighbor,
"you're using the wrong word. When you say
they've a right to it, you imply that it's somebody's
duty to give it to them."
"Well, isn't it.?"
"Why, not if you can't pay for it."
"But I'm paying for so much more than I'm
getting already 1"
"How do you mean.?"
"Why, I stand ready to furnish a hydraulic
engineer in Arthur, Jr.; a trained housewife in
Anne; and so far as the symptoms go, an aviator
The Cost of Children 213
in William. Now, society needs all these things.
It's got to have them, and yet it isn't willing to do
even what the big corporations do — help me to fit
them for their jobs. I won't stand it to have
society parasite on me like thatl"
"How are you going to prevent it?" we asked.
"I'm doing it already, and in its blind way
society is beginning to let go. Oh, the way I've
got myself disliked makes me feel quite prom-
inent and successful!" And she laughed as only
a much-loved woman can.
But it was true that Mrs. Wyman was making
enemies. It is inevitable that an unfit form of life
should dislike the higher form which eliminates it.
She had become a scourge to the old order, and
they knew it. Mr. McCann, brother of the Fox-
brooke contracting carpenter, had treated us to
the countryside gossip about her.
"Oh, she's a terrible woman — a terrible woman!
Went talkin' 'round that our school wa'n't good
enough for her children! I guess if it was good
enough fer my children it was good enough for
her'n. An' then she got the county sup'rintendent
to say we'd gotta hev a new schoolhouse. Yes'm,
thet's what she done! An' seein' we'd gotta hev
it, my brother Jake, he wrote up there that we
didn't want none o' them stylish buildin's — only
just a plain schoolhouse. An' he sent in the plans
like he alius done fer town buildin's. An' if them
city fellers at Trenton didn't up an' send 'em back
to Jake again, sayin' they wa'n't right! Well s'm,
you can bet Jake wouldn't stan' fer that. An'
214 Increasing Home Efficiency
him a-backin' out, there wa'n't nothin' but to use
them plans they sent down from Trenton. An'
not a soul in this hull town got a thing out o' it!
"An' it was just 'cause that woman thought
our schools wa'n't good enough fer her chil-
dren. I don't see nuthin' about her children
that's better'n any other people's children. Why
couldn't she send her children over to Mis' Dacy's
school at Esterly like the other high-toned people
done.?"
Mrs. Wyman laughed when we told her.
"I don't believe in sending young children away
to school," said she. "And besides, I can't afford
it. If I took the price of private schools out of
Arthur's salary, I'd have to make the children go
without something they ought to have. Anyway,
the community wants educated men. Theo-
retically the public schools are provided for the
purpose of producing them. All the finances of
the State are there to pay for the best education
to be had, so why should I pay for it out of our
Httle ^3,cxx) a year? I didn't believe in it, so I
just got five other women to h^lp riie, and we
found that the State would give us practically as
much of the things we insisted on having as they
had in stock. It didn't have everything, so we
compromised on a teacher of singing and a course
in Applied Art and they threw in German of their
own accord. Do you notice that since the schools
are better, not so many people send their children
to Esterly.?"
The "stock and bond" people had been used
The Cost of Children 215
to treat Foxbrooke like a great nursery. They
came there with their babies to get them out of
the New York streets and to avoid paying New
York rents, and filled the place with perambula-
tors. It resounded with infant voices. A private
kindergarten was established on the hill, to which
processions of trim little boys in Russian blouses
and girls in mushroom hats were led every morn-
ing. But until Mrs. Wyman took hold of the
public school question, there was no good instruc-
tion beyond the kindergarten, and the same sense
of parental responsibility which drove people to
Foxbrooke with their babies, drove them away
when their children came of school age.
Mrs. Wyman has not only helped to make Fox-
brooke something more than a brief episode in
people's lives; she has saved money for every
parent in the town as well as for herself. To her
own income she has practically added the $150 a
year which the tuition for Anne in Miss Dacy's
Collegiate Preparatory Department would have
cost; ^40 a year for William's tuition in the
Primary; $150 a year for Junior in the Techno-
logical Institute in the city; thirty cents a day for
carfare for the three, and whatever the special
teachers in music and art would have cost over and
above the tuition. A very perceptible addition to
Arthur's salary!
Mrs. Wyman's achievements in the matter of
schools are only unique in that it is unusual for
one little middle-class woman to buck the com-
munity single-handed, for that was what she has
2i6 Increasing Home Efficiency
done. In New York, when the people wanted
their children to learn stenography and dress-
making and cooking, these things marched right
into the curriculum of the public schools. And in
Chicago, they've got carpenter work and plumb-
ing, and one school, at least, goes in enough for
real advancement to buy pictures for its school-
rooms, at the American Artists' Exhibition and
the Water Color Show and to offer courses in
illustrating and embroidery. It may sometimes
be a little hard to lash a school board into the
vanguard where it naturally belongs, but if you
can do things like that in Chicago, it seems prob-
able that if you want any simple little thing like
technical training or agriculture put in anywhere
else, you can get it.
There is another woman who is reducing the
cost of her children's education at the same time
that she is improving its quality through the same
means as Mrs. Wyman but under the very different
circumstances of life on a Nebraska farm. She
is an authority on education, having been a suc-
cessful teacher, and she knows exactly what she
wants; the best features of the city schools, adapted
to country life, plus all the special instruction
that country children ought to have — about five
hundred dollars' worth of education per year per
child, and she wants it for nothing! The country
schools in her neighborhood were poor and grow-
ing worse; she can't afford to send her children
away to school, and even if she could, what joy
to a parent is an absentee child? It does not look
The Cost of Children 217
like an easy proposition, but she is solving it; she
is bringing the mountain to Mohammed; she is
making over the rural public school.
She has begun by getting herself made secretary
to the school board, the only position open to a
woman, where she has a voice in appointing the
teacher and arranging the curriculum, and she
personally selects the new books to be bought for
the school library. She admits that the school is
still far from what she thinks it ought to be.
"But it's coming on," she insists. "And just
you wait till Fm through with it!"
When this spirit of determined progress enters
the rural districts, it is astonishing what it can
accomplish. During recent years the State of
Virginia has been distinguishing itself for the
energy and brains it has been putting into the
development of its rural schools. It is a favorite
saying of Mr. Joseph D. Eggleston, Virginia's
State Superintendent of Public Instruction, that
"a man should not be educated to live on his own
visions and another man's head. Our schools
should educate our boys and girls so that they
may have both visions and provisions." This
spirit is trying to permeate the schools of Virginia.
An enterprising young principal in the south-
eastern section of the State has estimated the
amounts that an adequate system of rural schools
has saved the families In one district where in the
absence of efficient public schools, the parents
formerly sent their children to private academies.
Here are his figures:
2i8 Increasing Home Efficiency
Mr. L. A. 2 girls 6 years $ 1,500.00
Mr. R. M. I girl 4 " 1,000.00
Mr. G. J. I boy 3 " 750.00
Mr. G. A. I boy 4 " 1,000.00
Mr. E. W. 2 boys 4 " 1,000.00
Mr. E. J. 2 boys i year 250.00
Mr. L. F. 2 boys 3 years 750.00
Mr. B. L. 2 boys 2 " 500.00
Mr. O. I boy 4 " 1,000.00
Mr. S. I boy 3 " 750.00
Rev. Mr. D. 2 girls 2 " (at ^200) 400.00
Rev. Mr. N. i boy 2 " (at $200) 400.00
Mr. V. I boy i year 250.00
Mr. J. E. I girl I " 250.00
Mr. F. B. I girl 3 years 750.00
Mr. H.
f 2 girls
1 1 b(
boy 2 " (at $250) 1,500.00
Total savings in 4 years ^12,050.00
"These figures seem high," he explains, "but
in every instance I have taken the financial stand-
ing of the people and their method of educating
their children into consideration. I mean that
these men have older children whom they have
educated in secondary private boarding schools
at a cost of not less than ^250 per year. These
children educated at the public rural high school
receive more thorough and more efficient training
than they formerly received In the academies
and seminaries. And besides the saving of this
^12,050 to these sixteen parents, there have been
69 other pupils In the past four years who owing
X
The Cost of Children 219
to the financial condition of their parents would
probably not have been given any secondary edu-
cation at all except for the success of our rural
school campaign."
What these Virginians did in the matter of
their high schools is not only good public morals,
but good private ethics as well. Was it right to
support a few worthy middlemen as private
school teachers at the cost of the education of
these sixty-nine? Was it right to spend that
$12,050, when it could be used in other ways more
efficiently.^ Wasn't it just as extravagant as
buying February strawberries?
This point of view toward the cost of children
is so reasonable on the face of it that one is sur-
prised to find oneself regarding these instances as
exceptional.
It is not, perhaps, so strange that middle-class
people take no means to free themselves froin the
increasing menace of the doctor's bill. Among
more than a hundred letters, only one makes any
suggestion to diminish the increasing cost of health.
This is from a New York physician, who believes
that we should have free health as we have, theo-
retically, free education.
"The community should demand that the best
talent be in charge of free hospitals and clinics,"
he writes, " that they should devote all their time
to their respective fields of service, and be so re-
munerated as to make public health service not
only an object of wage-earning, but also an incen-
tive for greater professional skill."
220 Increasing Home Efficiency
This suggestion is likely to offend middle-class
susceptibilities. Free hospitals and free clinics
are for the poor, and shall middle-class men and
women or middle-class children be tarred with the
brush of pauperism? Precisely the same foolish,
undemocratic argument that stood for genera-
tions against the progress of the public school!
It is strange how we cherish ancestral ideals even
at the expense of public health and private well-
being. We used to think that the way to get pure
water was for every one to keep his own well, —
like the kings and the feudal lords our fathers
got rid of. The collection of garbage and sewage
disposal was once regarded as every man's in-
alienable right. But even our millionaires today
condescend to use the public highways and sewers
and water supplies. And if they didn't we would
compel them to, because our knowledge of con-
tagious diseases has made us understand that
sanitation is not a private affair. When we
or our children catch measles or scarlet fever or
small-pox, society steps in, quarantines us, dis-
infects our homes and declares that we shall not
be a common nuisance. Only the ancestral tradi-
tion that says that a man may do with his body
as he once could with his children, — what he has
a mind to, still makes it illegal for the public
doctors to cure our diseases even when they lock
us up and placard our front doors.
Except in the case of the Poor! In the case of
the working-class poor, we have begun to see that
health has an economic value, and we who employ
The Cost of Children 221
workmen and workmen's wives and their children
are beginning to object to the waste of good labor
power. Take the mining and manufacturing State
of Pennsylvania, for example. The law creating
the present State Department dates from 1905,
and followed the stamping out of a State-wide
epidemic of small-pox by certain members of the
existing staff. To apply to all communicable
diseases the technique which had won public con-
fidence in the fight against small-pox was, accord-
ingly, the department's first obligation. Among
the well-to-do, who could afford competent phy-
sicians and commercial anti-toxin, diphtheria had
lost its old terror; through the work of the German
scientist Behring, its cure had long since been
established. But in the State at large, the case
mortality before 1905 fluctuated between forty-
five and fifty per cent, i. e., from forty to fifty
among each hundred who contracted diphtheria
died. Obviously, diphtheria was essentially a
problem of poverty, and it was to the poor that
the department turned.
Pennsylvania was not without able private
physicians, neither was it entirely lacking in effi-
cient local health boards. But the swift, pell-
mell, anarchistic exploitation of its rich mineral
resources had bred the mental attitude of the
mining camp that stakes life lightly on the chance
of quick wealth. There was abundant evidence
that the death rate from diphtheria was high; but
how widely the disease was distributed, precisely
where the centers of infection were, no one had
222 Increasing Home Efficiency
bothered to find out. The community had not
awakened to the importance of such knowledge.
The law of 1905 not only requires the reporting
of all cases of diphthera (as of other communicable
diseases) by the attending physician, but equips
the department with adequate police power for
its enforcement. The moment a case is reported,
the department sees to the establishment of quar-
antine either through the local authorities or, in
their absence, directly. If the patient can afford
competent medical care, well and good; if not, the
department supplies the treatment. It supplies
anti-toxin from its own laboratories, supplies it
through its own physicians, and takes full re-
sponsibility for the result. In the Division of
Medical Inspection through which this curative
work is done, there are sixty-six medical inspec-
tors; one hundred and five deputy medical in-
spectors, who have power to take charge of all
suspicious cases that appear in railroad stations
or on trains; six hundred and seventy local health-
officers distributed throughout the State; and,
since January i, 191 2, one thousand inspectors
to safeguard the schools. To facilitate and give
additional accuracy to the work of this division, the
department operates laboratories in Philadelphia
for special microscopic investigations and for the
manufacture of biological products. From these
laboratories diphtheria anti-toxin Is distributed
to the poor through six hundred and fifty-six sta-
tions located at strategic points in the State.
If this method is good for the poor, why is it
The Cost of Children 223
not good for all of us? Is It better that we should
choose our doctors by the color of their hair or
the automobiles they drive, or take our chances
with clever advertising quacks and patent medi-
cines ? Literally thousands of middle-class children
are victims of this middle-class folly each year.
But, here and there tradition is beginning
to give way. Only yesterday. Society discovered
the relation between unenlightened motherhood
and our huge Infant mortality.
"Can the Nation afford to lose three hundred
thousand potential citizens a year?" Society
began to ask.
"Certainly not" came the answer: "And since it
is the poor who cannot pay for skilled physlcans and
nurses, let us provide them with charity schools."
And these free schools are proving themselves
so highly efficient that mothers of all classes are
turning to them.
One day we happened in upon one of these
mothers' schools in upper Manhattan, and found
a roomful of neatly dressed women of all degrees
of modest prosperity, some with babies In their
arms, some expecting babies. Our companion
was a young college-bred woman who had recently
had a child of her own. She had been attended
by a physician of large reputation, assisted by a
corps of expensive trained nurses. Everything
had been done for her, except that she had re-
ceived practically no special Instruction: it had
only been expected of her that she would do as
she was told. But her child almost died of im-
224 Increasing Home Efficiency
proper feeding during Its first year, and she herself"
had suffered from the breakdown of her feet, due to
too much ill-advised walking. It was extremely
interesting to watch her as the school doctor in-
structed these student mothers in the science of
motherhood. They were receiving a preparation
for their most important work in the world which
she with her college training and her expensive
specialist and her trained nurse and her untutored
maternal instinct had entirely missed.
And what is true of diphtheria and the problem
of infancy is true of the entire problem of health
as it is of the entire problem of education — it is
to the advantage of society that we should be
strong and well as much as it is that we should be
educated for life. Free health will do as much to
reduce the unnecessary cost of children as free
education. In New York a movement is on
foot that will eventually establish the school for
mothers as a respectable institution. The very
same thing is happening in this evolution of schools
for mothers that happened in the rise of our public
schools. A hundred years ago people discovered
the connection between literacy on the one hand
and crime and pauperism on the other.
"Do we want to have children brought into
the world, only to have them become burdens
upon the community.^" Society began to ask.
"Certainly notl" came the answer. "And
since it is the poor who cannot afford tutors or
private academies, we must provide them with
charity schools."
The Cost of Children 225
In 1805, for example, the Free School Society
was founded in New York to teach the poor their
letters. Soon all classes in the community saw
that the school instruction given to the poor was
infinitely better and more democratic than most
other people could get for money. Then The Free
School ceased to be the pauper school; it was
taken over by the State, and members of all classes
sent their children to it gladly.
These three — health, education, and a start in
life — are the great unknown quantities in the
money cost of children that imperil the middle-
class standards of living. But what of those other
costs — costs of brain and muscle — that also imperil
the middle-class ideals.^
A college professor has got this muscle cost
down to a time measure.
"The amount of my wife's time," he says,
*' taken daily because of the children — including
the time spent in dressmaking for them, washing,
ironing, etc. — averages between three and four
hours. Probably an hour of my time is taken, in
addition. The necessity of being at home to at-
tend to the children obliges my wife to forego
many pleasant social activities, and to curtail
greatly the time she might otherwise devote to
benevolence or public objects." He, however, has
a yard in which his children can safely play with-
out supervision.
In the city there would be four or five hours in
addition spent with the child in the street.
Now why should it shock any one to find out
226 Increasing Home Efficiency
how much time and strength a woman spends on
her child and how much she loses in other oppor-
tunities of usefulness to do it? But they do object
— oh vigorously!
"It seems such a foolishly short-sighted idea,
such a sign of diminished spiritual powers," pro-
tests a mother from New York State, "to count
up the hours spent in caring for children and the
pleasant social activities foregone because one's
continual presence Is needed at home. Would the
time, if not used In the care of children, and the
pleasant social activities If enjoyed, have yielded a
more valuable contribution to social progress than
the children? I doubt It."
This mother seems to take it for granted that
without the mother's "continual presence" the
children will not contribute to social progress,
and that the social activities of the mother are of
no value. Here's a letter from a Pennsylvania
woman who agrees with her:
"There are at least two things I must ever re-
serve for myself If I would be a good mother and
home maker — one, the personal care of my chil-
dren, the other, the direct supervision — mostly,
indeed the actual work — of the preparing of the
meals, that the health and efficiency of my family
may be as great as possible. And a woman has
little call to be Vusty' so long as she has good
books (I have little time to read myself — my hus-
band reads me the most important things) and
interesting friends who still think It worth while to
come and see her. I hope to have the strength to
The Cost of Children 227
devote myself to my children until they shall be
fortified and equipped for their work in life."
This is the old spirit of kissing the rod, and it
has permitted more unnecessary waste and hard-
ship than any other pernicious heirloom. It's not
by this sort of inert acquiescence, but by seeing
that something is wrong and trying to set it right
that we shall come upon smoother ways. As the
intelligent mother of three says:
"I can write and I have a head for facts and
figures. I would be glad to be of use in the com-
munity; I don't want to be a social drone; but I
have my hands full truly, taking care of my chil-
dren."
"But," our New England friend might ask,
"what greater privilege could that woman have
than to devote herself to her children.^"
Is it, after all, a question of devotion.^ Most
women who write us think that they cannot be
good mothers if they limit their social service to
their own homes. The ability to educate children
is not an inherited instinct and obviously it is to
the advantage of society to get a double value
from women, if possible. There is a real demand
for some mother-saving device, particularly while
the children are young. The only devices we have
today are the nurse-maid and the kindergarten.
Oh, that nurse-maid I No one who has merely
employed a nurse-maid can know her as one who
has actually been her does. One of us studied the
American home from the standpoint of a nurse-
maid for Everybody's Magazine. She has sat
228 Increasing Home Efficiency
with her in employment offices looking for a place;
walked by her side pushing baby-carriages
through the streets; gone to dances with her and
helped her entertain her "gentlemen friends";
and knows her from the fat-buttoned shoes she
wears to the way she does her hair. A few trained
and competent nurse-maids she met in different
parts of the country, but they aren't a tenth of one
per cent of enough to go around. And these few
good, efficient nurse-maids — aren't they the sort
of women whom it is for the advantage of society
to allow to marry and bring up their own children?
And the others — the incompetent sort — ought
they to be intrusted with any children at all? It
does not seem that the nurse-maid is a mother-
saving device from the standpoint of society at
large, because so much of the work she does badly
or misdoes has to be done over later at an in-
creased cost. Here and there groups of women
are trying to solve this problem by cooperative
nurseries under trained child-gardeners; the kinder-
garten solves It for a few hours each day for some
people; but the problem as a whole has not been
met.
The minimum cost of children sums Itself up
simply enough. It doesn't cost a prohibitive
amount to clothe and feed and shelter them. Peo-
ple who believe their duties to their children are
limited to these three things do not complain of
the cost. The difficulty Is that it may cost a great
deal to keep them In perfect physical fitness, to
educate them, and to start them in life. People
The Cost of Children 229
who believe their duties to Include all these things
are likely to be appalled at the prospect.
It Is not as though the mothers of the middle-
class were not satisfied with the amount they have
to eat and drink and the protective quality of the
clothes they have to wear. The book the Sage
Foundation has published on the standard of liv-
ing In New York says that on ^900 a year "families
are able, In general, to get food enough to keep
soul and body together and clothing and shelter
enough to meet urgent demands of decency."
Most middle-class women are quite as intelligent
as any Immigrant's wife. They could certainly do
as well as our washerwoman, Mrs. Schultz, who,
with the added burden of an Imbecile husband, has
brought up a useful family. Mrs. Schultz's three
boys went to work promptly at fourteen and now
one of them is clerk for the Consolidated Gas Com-
pany; another works for a towel supply firm; the
third Is in a wholesale grocery house; and their
united Income is ^68 a week. They're all good,
sturdy German-American boys, eating the good
boiled potato from the knife-blade, and spending
happy coatless, shoeless evenings with their
mother in their little East Side flat which has no
bath-tub. The young Schultzs are perfectly
good citizens and their mother Is justly proud of
them. But the outside limit of their earning power
is probably $100 a month each, the height of their
careers will be reached by thirty, and their indus-
trial places could be filled at a moment's notice.
In the economical education of middle-class
230 Increasing Home Efficiency
children, there are methods less tangible than
the obvious paying-less-for-what-you-get. They
might be called "Long Distance Economy" or
"Expensive Tastes as a First Aid to Thrift," and
can be practiced by those women who are not try-
ing to do what Mrs. Schultz has done — produce
offspring that fit into the community life like in-
terchangeable parts into a machine — but who are
striving to produce something much more costly
and difficult of production — something hard to
replace and therefore expensive.
"Only one per cent of the school children go to
the university, and therefore a university man is
valuable," they argue. "We will not let our boys
work now because it will make them worth less
as men. We will not have their play time stolen
from them because they may demand it back when
they are grown up. They shall not go through
physical bankruptcy — it is too costly. We want
them to be able to meet competition — not to have
to evade it by emigration. Our children intend
to be wonderful creatures and we try to prevent
their being content to be commonplace. Society
does not need the commonplace, and we will not
glut the market with it."
In producing exceptional children, parents are
making provision for their own future. The bread
they are casting upon the social waters is likely to
return to them jam-spread in time of disaster.
Their children are not likely to develop the attitude
of a Vermont farmer who has just sent to New
York for a destitute elderly woman to do the house-
The Cost of Children 231
work without wages for himself, his wife and four
children, promising that "he would give her the
same care that his mother would have." The up-
bringing of middle-class children is practically an
old-age pension for their parents, though whether
this is wise economics from the standpoint of the
community is quite another matter.
But to produce these exceptionally valuable
children is far more difficult than getting dancing
introduced into the schools. It involves, first,
developing the demands of taste and then satisfy-
ing them, giving a family a moneyed love of beauty
and art, a capitalistic taste for real luxuries on a
salary; that is, the sort of taste which can be bred
into a race by familiarity with the beautiful things
the rich can buy, and the leisure to enjoy them.
"Somehow the disadvantages of ^3,000 a year
have got to be overcome," said a Philadelphia
mother, firmly. "Take the matter of clothes for
Jane. Now she has a perfect right to beautiful
things and the joy of the changing fashions, and
she's got to know the real from the imitation. She
dropped a wish into the air for white furs. White
furs upon my daughter! But I know just how
quickly Jane learns from seeing things. I took
her shopping with me on Saturday and made oc-
casion to lunch at a cheap restaurant during the
rush hour. It happened most fortunately. About
every other shop girl who came in was wearing
white furs — cheap imitations, in various stages of
bedragglement. I saw Jane watch set after set to
its seat and take in the full effect of it in combina-
232 Increasing Home EflSciency
tlon with worn black jackets, exaggerated hats
and shabby shoes. Then in the afternoon I took her
to a little concert uptown where I thought some
of those quite well-dressed girls of old Philadelphia
might be. They were. I could almost see Jane set
the gentlefolks, and the soft pretty place and the
lovely music over in a column against the cheap
imitations. Yes, that white fur anti-toxin worked
perfectly. The only approach to the subject was
when she said once:
"'Wouldn't it be perfectly dandy, mother, for
you to have a set of ermine T
"But just the same I know that every one of
those struggling girls in the white furs and awful
hats had a right to something better. I say right
because if beautiful things will make Jane more
valuable, they'll help the shop girls just as much,
and if there is one thing that is sure, it is that the
community cannot afford to have us go without
anything that makes us more valuable to it.
"Now, of course, if Jane were a young plutocrat,
she wouldn't have to acquire good taste herself
because she could hire it. But as it is, this isn't a
place where even the law could help her out. I
have to lead my children personally into that
realm of taste.
"I'm trying," said she, "to drive into society
the idea that people like John and me and our
children have a right to a good deal because we
are valuable — much more valuable than the mill
hands we might have been. And I'm trying to
drive into the children the idea that a great deal
The Cost of Children 233
Is expected of them because they have received
so much, and because they have inherited a lot
they could not have been given. At the same time
I'm impressing on them the fact that they have
a right to receive a great deal more in return.
And I try to make them see that what is their
right is everybody's right.
"Do you remember the story of the princess
who was stolen away by the wicked witch and set
to spin with the peasant girls .^ She sat idle until
the witch asked her:
"'Why do you not spin.^'
"'You must give me a golden wheel,' said the
princess.
"So the witch gave her a golden wheel — but
still the princess did not spin.
"'Why do you not spin with your golden
wheel .^' asked the witch.
"'You must give me silken floss,' said the
princess.
"So the witch gave her silken floss — but still the
princess did not spin.
"'Why do you not spin with your golden wheel
and your silken floss .^' asked the witch.
"'You must bring a great lady to teach me,'
said the princess.
"So the witch brought a great lady to teach her
and the princess began to spin. And the golden
wheel whirled so fast, and the silken floss twisted
so tight that the thread was as flne as cobweb, and
the witch took it up to the palace and sold it to
the King.
234 Increasing Home Efficiency
"'Who spins this fine thread?' asked the King.
"'One of my maidens,' answered the witch.
"'How does she do it?" asked the King.
'"With a golden wheel and silken floss and a
great lady to teach her,' answered the witch.
"The King wondered so that he sent his son to
follow the witch home. And when the prince
came into the spinning room and saw all the
peasant girls spinning coarse yarn you could buy
for a penny, and the princess spinning fine thread
which was worth a piece of gold, he said :
"'Pretty maiden, why do you spin such fine
thread?'
"'Because I am a king's daughter,' she said.
"And of course you know what happens after
that in a fairy story.
"I only want the best for my children — that's
what the prince in the fairy story means. Time
was when there were so few good things somebody
had to go without, but now we all have every
chance for usefulness and happiness the whole
round world affords. Thank Heaven that the
intelligent discontent of the princess is spreading.
There's no reason why every peasant girl shouldn't
have a golden wheel and silken floss and a great
lady to teach her."
We were talking the other day with the wife of
a high-salaried professional man. Before her
marriage she had been a writer earning a good
income. She has two children, and, because of
her unwillingness to have anything but the best
medical care, the older of them has cost more
The Cost of Children 235
than six thousand dollars in seven years. More-
over, like an increasing number of middle-class
women, she feels that the public schools are not
providing the kind of education she wants her
children to have, and, because she cannot single-
handedly make the public schools what she thinks
they ought to be, she has given up her profession
and is devoting her entire time to training her
children at home.
"I wish we could have another child," she said,
"but, judging by what Alice and Tom have cost
us, I know we shall have to go without one. Be-
sides, I'm not a teacher by nature or training, and
I'm never certain that the care I give them is the
very best."
Hitherto society has placed the cost of improv-
ing the quality of children exclusively upon the ^
parents, with the result that, as standards rise,
homes like that of this professional man feel com-
pelled to limit their output. This suggests what
is probably the most serious unanswered question
in the development of home efficiency — not
whether people can afford to have children, but
whether society can afford to have those people
who are intelligent enough to count the cost, go
without them.
CHAPTER XII
Launching the Child
MY children are such a comfort," said
Mrs. Aken, a charming gray haired
lady. "They have turned out so
well."
We agreed that it must be a comfort to have
one's children turn out well, and then asked our-
selves if hers really had.
There was William, the eldest, a Chicago stock-
broker. He dealt in "public utilities," mining
stocks, and "industrials," keeping well within the
range of lawful enterprise. Sometimes we heard
that he was making money, sometimes that he
was losing it. On the whole, he grew more affluent
as the years went by.
There was her married daughter, Annie, who,
as her mother said, was "so domestic, and married
so well." Financially, she had. She has now two
lovely children who have passed through the
vicissitudes of babyhood and landed safely in the
best private school in the city. She has such a
genius for organization that she does not need to
keep her hands perpetually on the steering gear of
her house. She has shifted that burden to the
servants whom she has trained and whom her
236
Launching the Child 237
husband pays. Hours and hours of free time
Annie has, while her children are in school and her
housekeeping goes automatically on.
Frank Aken was the youngest. He showed a
bookish tendency at an early age — a dissociated
bookishness which led him into numismatics and
a study of the domestic life of Greece. No doubt
he has turned out well in a sense, for he is teaching
the classics in a boys' preparatory. He has been
married some years, but his salary is so small
that he does not dare to have any children.
As we considered these three — the stock-broker;
the woman who considers her life's job finished
when she has produced two children and has
trained servants to run a house to hold them; the
teacher of Latin and Greek, without which studies
of course no classic education can occur, but to
the teacher of which society does not pay enough
to permit his having children — we wondered if
Mrs. Aken's children had turned out so well, after
all. They conformed perfectly to the old ideal of
law-abiding, self-supporting offspring, but if so-
ciety had been asked, would it have said they were
valuable.^
Now of course the most precious output of the
home is the child; but to produce it, and feed and
clothe and educate and bring it to maturity, is
only part of the problem. Shall one raise lettuce
or cauliflower or corn only to plow them under.?
The home must launch its children as the gardener
must market his vegetables — it is part of the job.
The difference is that the gardener need only
238 Increasing Home Efficiency
consider getting rid of his product, but the home
must consider the effect of its output on the com-
munity that assimilates it.
We have a letter from Mr. Warner, a proud
father who recently retired from business and looks
with pride upon what his home has accomplished.
*'Our children," says he, "attended the common
school. The eldest had a year in boarding-school
and considerable money spent for musical training,
and she married well at nineteen and a half years.
The next went into the navy as an apprentice at
sixteen, spent nine years in the Navy and six in
the Army, where he is now a sergeant. The third
left home at seventeen to learn a trade. The
fourth attended high school several years, passed
a year in a law office, studied two years at law
school and is now commencing the practice of
law."
We gather from Mr. Warner's letter that his
children are definitely self-supporting. Of course
the general experience is increasingly against girls
marrying at so young an age. His daughter may
be an exception, but girls of nineteen are not
usually well enough educated or sufficiently ex-
perienced to make efficient wives or mothers, and
of course it is not for us to say that so long as we
have an Army, we do not need sergeants, but fif-
teen years' training seems a great deal of prepara-
tion— and, do we need an Army.^
There is a good chance that the boy who learned
a trade is doing something that needs to be done.
How about the young lawyer? Dr. Henry S.
Launching the Child 239
Pritchett, President of the Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching, says:
"No small proportion of the American lack of
respect for law grows out of the presence of this
large number of men seeking to gain a livelihood
from the business which ought in the nature of the
case to support only a much smaller number.
When six or eight men seek to gain their living
from the practice of law in a community in which,
at most, two good lawyers could do all the work,
the demoralization of society becomes acute. Not
only is the process of the law unduly lengthened,
but the temptation is great to create business."
There's a good chance that the lawyer son is
helping to demoralize society.
Both the Akens and the Warners have attained
the easily accessible ideal of making their children
self-supporting and respectable. This is purely a
personal ideal with a purely personal gratification.
It may not have any relation to the social demand
at all, since there are many self-supporting, ap-
parently respectable people for whom society has
no real need.
There is, however, a fair proportion of the pop-
ulation who do not think that respectable self-
support is enough. They feel that they must
launch their young in line with their greatest
ability and inclination, and sit in breathless ex-
pectancy waiting for their offspring to develop
tendencies and talents.
A gentleman from Michigan writes:
"The trades and professions offer a field wide
240 Increasing Home Efficiency
enough and diverse enough so that any young
man's natural gift may find expression in them.
And here is the real point — what is a boy's natural
gift? He could probably succeed along that line
and would probably fail in any other. A parent
could wisely use all his discernment in studiously
learning the natural tastes of his child. Give a
young man something to do that he likes and help
him qualify for it!"
Says a Pennsylvania mother:
"I found in early life that my son was a sales-
m.an. I allowed him to develop that talent. At
nine years he had a little candy stand in the yard,
also sold flowers. I paid him myself for the work
he did for me. If I had forced him to stay in
school, I would have wasted time and money and
he would not have been able to face the world."
Another family with an income of only $2,400
is already beginning to save because its eldest son,
aged thirteen, has expressed a desire to enter the
ministry, and it is evident to his parents, first,
that he should not be thwarted in his laudable
wish, and, second, that he will probably be un-
able to support himself if he carries It out.
We have word from the mother of a sixteen-
year-old girl in the West who showed a talent
for drawing. "I have cultivated it," says the
mother, "ever since Alice was seven. I have given
her the best training the city affords, but there
seems to be no market for pictures unless you are
at the very top of the profession."
An attorney from Akron, Ohio, has sent us the
Launching the Child 241
story of how his son pursued his ambition to be
a foreign missionary. The boy took two years'
regular college work, then was transferred to a
theological seminary. When he was ready to go
into the field, he could not have accepted a call
even if he had received one, because his eyes had
given out under the strain of study. His carefully
cultivated talent was useless. Says his father:
"Satisfied that he could not proceed along the
line of his choice, he came home a broken, dispirited
young man. He could conceive of no future ex-
cept to get a shanty and a few chickens. Then
he thought he could possibly work toward self-
support."
He first hired out to a chicken farmer, then
took a three months' course in the study of poul-
try. His eyes grew increasingly better as he re-
moved them from print and focused them on the
hen. He was offered a position as foreman of a
poultry experiment station. His practical work
gave him finally a degree in poultry culture, and
he is now a professor in full charge of the poultry
extension work throughout the State — a success-
ful man. He is said to be the best poultryman in
America, but he has not succeeded through his
effort to follow his inclinations into the heart of
China, but through stumbling on the social need of
better chickens and more eggs. The fact is that
his life came near being wrecked because he was
educated merely in the line of his inclinations
without regard either to his aptness for the job —
as the failure of his eyesight showed — or to whether
242 Increasing Home Efficiency
there was any market for him when he should
be a completed product.
That's the trouble with the idea that a child's
career must lie in the direction of its inclination.
It's only a fraction of the truth, as the idea that a
child must become self-supporting is only a frac-
tion. What's the use of being able to do some-
thing superlatively well if society doesn't need
to have that particular thing done at all? And
how repugnant to the feelings of a child, shaped
carefully like a peg to fit a square hole, to find that
advancing civilization in the shape of some swift-
whirling gimlet has made all holes round!
Parents will launch their children somehow,
and this parental drive, whether it focuses itself
merely on making the children self-supporting or
on cultivating their incipient talents, is an enor-
mous social force — how strong we have never
known, because so much of it is wasted in blindly
pawing the air.
We have a letter from a widow with an income
of $1,500 a year, who is bending all her life to
the education of her two sons, at the continual
sacrifice of herself. She does the housework in
order that they may have dancing lessons. She
cuts her yearly expenses for clothes to $115 a
year, while each son has, as she says, an allowance
of $150 a year, "which has thus far suflficed for
gentlemanly clothing and the expenses of ath-
letics." She saves on everything, cheering herself
the while "with the vision of the end this economy
is meant to accomplish."
Launching the Child 243
"I cannot say how we shall manage matters
when It comes to a university course," she writes,
"but I do quite confidently expect to manage
somehow. We have talked of the Government
foreign service, diplomatic or consular, as a pro-
fession for them. Surely a university education,
a speaking knowledge of three languages, good
health, and a trained judgment ought to lead
toward paths of distinction."
Not necessarily!
Only a few weeks ago a man came to our door
with a thinly veiled plea for money. Said he:
"Nobody wants a man around when he ain't
got nothin'. Why, even these Mills Hotels that
some rich man built for the poor man — do I get a
chance to stay In them.^ No. They're all full of
these college fellows out of a job. There ain't
no room in 'em for a working-man."
The time has gone by when a speaking knowl-
edge of three languages and a trained mind Insures
an income, and the cost of acquiring them Is very
high, although the Idea still survives that boys and
girls can work their way through college.
Says one gentleman from Michigan: "I think
any young man or young woman with a good
brain, abundant grit, and good physique can ac-
quire a college education without Injury to them-
selves. Probably the more they have invested
personally, the greater the treasure will be."
Many people do get through college this way,
but It Is questionable whether any one who has
stood up under a good stiff college course himself
244 Increasing Home Efficiency
would advise any boy or girl to add self-support
to the burden.
We have the record of a farmer's son who wanted
to be a civil engineer. He left home with ^70 to
undertake a four years' course in Purdue Uni-
versity. He has now struggled along three years,
having had about $300 by way of assistance from
his father, and is paying his way and a little more.
This cost of a little over $100 a year for keeping
a boy in college is the lowest of which we have
any record.
A well-to-do business man from Chicago writes
that the cost of sending his daughters through
college has been approximately $2,000 each. Both
of them have become teachers at adequate salaries,
so it would seem that this outlay of $4,000 has
been sufficient to educate and launch these girls.
Two boys at Dartmouth cost approximately
$600 a year each.
The expenses of a Pennsylvania minister's
daughter at Smith have averaged $828.04 a year.
Writes the mother of a boy whose college course
cost $1,800 a year: "People should remember that
if boys and girls are brought up on good food,
comfortable rooms, and decent clothes, they can-
not do with less when away. I worked much
harder while he was in college than ever before
or since. I did with less help in the house, but I
was determined that the pleasure of sending the
boy where he could learn should not be a burden
to my husband, and thus become a trouble in-
stead of a joy. The third year of his course he
Launching the Child 245
gave out with nervous exhaustion. He was not
used to city life, and never had good judgment
about what he could endure. He was not able to
do anything until a year ago, and was also a very
great expense — so much that I do not want to
know how much."
There seems to be no point above which the
expenses of college students may not rise, but the
average of those we have analyzed, counting out
students from families with incomes of more than
^6,000, or students who have received scholarships
or worked their way through, is ^665 a year. Now,
what will happen to that unselfish mother with
$1,500 a year if over $1,300 of it goes to her two
sons' education.^ Suppose she does manage to
somehow put them through the university, and
then they don't fit into any needed work.^ It
has happened to others. It might happen to her.
It is a social calamity to have that sort of splendid
parental force wasted — wasted In launching chil-
dren in stagnant ponds. In backwaters that lead
no where. In rapids and swift currents that need
not be navigated.
A letter came today from a woman whose hus-
band was practically crowded out of the career
that his college course opened to him, and who has
gone to the Yakima Valley to start again In work
that will meet the specific demand of that region.
"There are hundreds of people here who have
found the professions overcrowded In the East,"
she writes. "Fruit culture appeals to their scien-
tific training, and they are succeeding as fruit
246 Increasing Home Efficiency
ranchers." She says that to start over in this
new work, it is necessary for them to hire out on
fruit farms to get the practical side of the work,
and to take winter courses at the agricultural
college for the theoretical side. "The work,"
says she, "calls for expert knowledge of soils,
irrigation, pruning, controlling insect pests and
fungous growths, and a multitude of other things."
These people, having been fitted to a profession
where there was no demand for them, must be
re-educated before they can make a living. It
is, to say the least of it, a wasteful proceeding.
Everywhere in the country we are throwing away
not only the drive of that applied parental affec-
tion, but the child's career as well, and we're doing
it chiefly through ignorance. We do not know
either what the community needs in the way of
applied middle-class brains or what it is willing
to pay for — which may be quite a different thing.
We have, to be sure, a general idea that there are
more manufacturers of ladies' cloaks in the New
York Ghetto than can make a living, more book-
keepers and stenographers and clerks than can
survive in Chicago, too many doctors and lawyers
everywhere, but nobody knows how many or
why. Nobody has yet noosed the law of proba-
bilities sufficiently long to find what industrial
output is needed from the middle-class home.
We go on blindly producing at great cost in money
and effort without knowing whether the product
is needed or not. It is only in reference to wage-
workers that we are beginning to take serious
Launching the Child 247
thought for the misfits and unemployed. The
growth of bread lines and slums, of vagrancy and
pauperism and crime, the high infant mortality,
the increase in juvenile delinquency and prosti-
tution, the spread of tuberculosis and kindred
diseases of neglected poverty, are not only be-
ginning to cost more than we like to pay for courts
and jails, public health and public charity, but
are also undermining our industrial efficiency so
that we are threatened by the competition of
more foresighted and socially intelligent nations.
For long generations we assumed precisely the
same attitude toward unemployment among the
wage-workers that we still hold toward the mis-
fits and unemployed in the middle class, — every
man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, —
as if we were not all concerned with the devil's
harvest, as if the failure of any one individual
were not a social waste for which we and our
children must pay!
Happily, in one State at least, the tragic wreck-
age of the panic of 1907 shook this dangerous
complacency. In June, 1910, the New York
State Commission on Employers' Liability and
Unemployment sent a questionnaire to more than
five thousand employers, representing every in-
dustry in the State, seeking information about the
fluctuations in the number of their employes
from year to year and month to month, the sources
of their labor-supply, and their methods of secur-
ing workers. At the same time the secretaries of
more than two thousand trade-unions were asked
248 Increasing Home Efl&ciency
to report the number of their members who were
unemployed during the year, and to describe the
effect of lost wages upon the working-men's fam-
ilies. This information the Commission supple-
mented from the various investigations by the
United States Department of Labor into wages
and the cost of living, from all available State
documents dealing with unemployment, from
the quarterly reports of trade-unions to the New
York State Commissioner of Labor, from the
special Federal censuses of manufactures made in
1904 and 1905, from the records of charitable
societies, commercial and philanthropic employ-
ment agencies, and other kindred sources. Upon
this broad basis of fact the Commission framed
its conclusions, the chief of which is that "unem-
ployment is a permanent feature of modern in-
dustrial life everywhere. In the industrial centers
of New York State, at all times of the year, in
good times as well as bad, there are wage-earners,
able and willing to work, who cannot secure em-
ployment."
This is the great fact which today challenges
serious attention; for it involves all our social
and economic problems — it gauges the social
efficiency of our industries, it is fundamental to
the physical health of the nation, it is basic to the
problems of destitution, the dependency of chil-
dren, vagrancy, and crime. And it applies to the
middle class quite as much as it does to the wage-
workers.
Of seven hundred and twenty-three employers
Launching the Child 249
who replied to the question, "Are you always able
to get all the help you want?" sixty-seven per cent
answered, "Yes." At the same time eighty-seven
per cent stated that they got their help wholly or
mainly from workmen who made personal applica-
tion at their factory doors. In few establishments
do they even have to hang out a sign, "Hands
Wanted," or blow the whistle, as the canning
factories do, to announce that fresh loads of fruit
or vegetables have made places for more workers.
They have rather to protect themselves from
importunities by placards like those one sees
outside almost every building in process of con-
struction: "No Carpenters Wanted" — "No Brick-
layers Wanted" — "No Steamfitters Wanted" —
"No Workmen of any Sort Wanted."
"It is apparent," says the Commission, "that
many workmen must be going from plant to plant
in vain." To what extent this Is true of the middle
class most of us know through bitter experience.
Of one hundred and seventy-nine trade-union
secretaries who replied to the question, "Are there
at all times of the year some of your members out
of work?" fifty-three per cent answered, "Yes."
Only eight per cent said that their members lost
no time through unemployment, while twenty-
five per cent replied that their members lost an
average of three months or more In the year. The
reports of the New York State Department of
Labor, covering a period of seven years, show that
in ordinary times at least fifteen per cent of the
organized workers of the State are idle during the
250 ^ Increasing Home Efficiency
winter months, while even during October, the
month of maximum industrial activity, the per-
centage of unemployment among skilled workers
does not drop below five. During years of panic
and industrial depression the limits both of max-
imum and minimum unemployment rise sharply,
and the recorded idle among the best trade-unions
range from fifteen to more than thirty-five per
cent.
These figures deal entirely with skilled work-
men. No comparably accurate data were procura-
ble to show the extent to which the unskilled suf-
fer from worklessness. Such facts, however, as
the Commission was able to gather, furnish an
interesting index to the truth. During 1910 the
Free Municipal Lodging House in New York City
gave shelter to more than thirty-three thousand
homeless and penniless men and women, most of
whom, though unemployed, were "by no means
unemployable." In this same year the Salvation
Army had five thousand applicants for work, for
only five hundred of whom was it able to find
places; and the National Employment Exchange,
an agency conducted at great expense by a small
group of financiers, found work in eighteen months
for only four thousand, six hundred and fifty-
seven out of approximately twenty-four thousand
applicants.
Too much weight is not to be given to these
figures; undoubtedly many of the work-hunters
registered with more than one agency, and in many
cases positions were left unfilled because none of
Launching the Child 251
the long list was qualified to meet their special
requirements. They do, nevertheless, indicate the
silt that is seeping through the foundations of our
American homes.
Always it must be remembered that unemploy-
ment is not a disease of panic years which can be
met by emergent relief; its evils are not necessarily
most serious when the number of unemployed is
largest. The important questions are: How many
workers do the industries of the State normally
require.^ To how many can they give steady em-
ployment.^ and, How many do their fluctuating
demands keep in the reserve army of casual
workers ?
The Federal census of manufactures shows that
about ten per cent of the wage-earners of New
York State form a reserve to meet the varying
monthly demands; that fully one-third of those
who are employed at the busiest times are out of
employment, or are compelled to lose time in going
from job to job during the year. Of 37,194 es-
tablishments, only forty per cent were in operation
for the full year; nineteen per cent lost a month or
more, and eight per cent were shut down half the
time. " Investigations of over four thousand wage-
earners' families in the State," says the Commis-
sion in its summary, "show that less than half of
the bread-winners have steady work during the
year."
What is the effect of this industrial turbulence
upon the efficiency and stability of our homes?
It has been customary in New York to adopt
252 Increasing Home EflSciency
the conclusion of Dr. Robert Coit Chapin, that
for an average working-man's family consisting of
two adults and three children, or four adults, "an
income under eight hundred dollars in New York
City is not enough to permit the maintenance of a
normal standard; families having from nine hun-
dred to a thousand a year are able in general to
get food enough to keep soul and body together,
and clothing and shelter enough to meet the most
urgent demands of decency." Because, however,
seventy-five per cent of the trade-unions under
consideration were located in the smaller cities of
the State, the Commission conservatively adopted
seven hundred dollars as the amount upon which
a family "can barely support itself, provided that
it is subject to no extraordinary expenditures by
reason of sickness, death, or other untoward cir-
cumstance."
The secretaries of two hundred and eleven trade-
unions reported that if employment had been con-
stant, the average income of slightly more than
half their members would have risen to a thousand
dollars a year, while in only four per cent would it
have been less than seven hundred dollars. But
owing to the inconstant demand for labor, the
average income actually fell below seven hundred
dollars in twenty-five per cent of the membership,
and reached a thousand dollars in only fourteen
per cent.
These figures are, of course, corrected for strikes;
they represent normal conditions. Moreover,
they deal only with a group of skilled, and there-
Launching the Child 253
fore well paid, trades. They leave to the imagina-
tion the economic status of the unskilled and
casual workers, whose periods of unemployment
are longer and more frequent, and who, even If
they were employed six days a week, the year
round at the usual wage, could not earn more than
five hundred and fifty dollars. The dock-workers
are, perhaps, the most typical of these casual
laborers. In every city or town that has shipping
by ocean, lake, or river, they are to be found, either
idling about waiting for a job, or working night
and day, loading and unloading vessels. New
York City alone has between forty and fifty thou-
sand of them, not more than half of whom are
working any one day. What do they do between
whiles.^ The Municipal Lodging House gives the
history of some of them. They wash dishes in a
restaurant for a few days; they help to fix up Madi-
son Square Garden for a show; they do building
laborers' work for awhile; help a team driver when
an extra man is needed; distribute directories and
telephone books, and pack and ship goods in a
department store during the Christmas season.
How shall their families adjust their living to such
wage-earning? Or how long will It take an Indus-
trial system that presupposes a man to have no
family to produce the thing it demands .^^
Of course It may be justly said that the full
weight of lost income due to unemployment is
not always felt through a lowered standard of
living in a working-man's family. When he is out
of a job, his wife goes to work, his children go to
254 Increasing Home Efficiency
work, and In this way the home may be kept to-
gether. In city parks and playgrounds, able-
bodied men taking care of babies and young chil-
dren while their wives and older children are at
work are common enough. But from the stand-
point of the homes and the State's interest, these
can hardly be considered satisfactory adjustments.
For the children of unemployed or under-employed
workers, neglected in their early years because
their mothers must go to work, are frequently
forced to enter industry, untrained and physically
handicapped, by way of the first job that offers;
and as they grow up they drift out of the "blind
alleys" of makeshift occupations, to swell the hosts
of casual, unskilled labor.
And it isn't as though the unemployed man
would rebound into estimable respectability when
given a job. One who has listened to the perfervid
denunciations of society by the street-corner
orator, whose emotions have been set aflame by
the sight of the righteous man forsaken and his
seed begging bread, is curiously impressed by the
clear echo of the agitator's language in the State
Commission's report.
"The unemployed man walks the street in
search of work, hopeful at first, but as time goes
on becoming more and more discouraged. The
odd jobs he picks up bring an uncertain and very
insufficient income. His whole life becomes un-
steady. From under-nourishment and constant
anxiety his powers — mental, moral and physical —
begin to degenerate. Soon he becomes unfit for
Launching the Child 255
work. The merely unemployed man becomes
inefficient, unreliable, good-for-nothing, unemploy-
able. His family is demoralized. Pauperism and
vagrancy result."
These conditions are not peculiar to New York.
The recently published Federal inquiry into the
reasons why six hundred and twenty children In
selected manufacturing towns in Rhode Island,
Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Georgia left
school to go to work, shows that thirty per cent
went into industry under pressure of starvation,
and another twenty-eight per cent because the
parents were not able to maintain such a standard
of living as seemed to them imperative without
their children's assistance. In this Federal report
the most significant piece of information is rele-
gated to a foot-note in the smallest type: "In the
period between the children's going to work and
the investigation, one hundred and ninety-two
fathers had been unemployed for varying periods.
Using the fullest information obtainable, there
seemed only eighteen cases (concerning two and
eight-tenths per cent of the children studied) in
which the father's lack of work seemed attributable
to his own Indolence, Intemperance, or other fault."
It is from the ranks of these child-workers,
whom destitution pushes prematurely into the ma-
chine of industry, that our criminals are increas-
ingly recruited. The latest governmental study
in juvenile delinquency and Its relation to employ-
ment shows that the percentage of delinquent
children is nearly five times as great among
256 Increasing Home Efficiency
those who work as among those who are at
school.
Uncertain and insufficient wages, Juvenile delin-
quency, crime, and prostitution — this is the array
of evils that is breaking up our homes; and the
parent of them all is unemployment.
Confronted by such facts, it is idle to cling to the
illusion that America is a bucolic neighborhood of
freehold homes, or to declaim against a program of
remedial legislation as an unwarranted interference
with personal liberty. What personal liberty have
the hungry? At such a time academic discussion
becomes both inhuman and unpatriotic; what we
need is an enlightened statesmanship.
Against the dark background of the New York
Commission's general findings one cheerful fact
stands out. While thousands look for work and
cannot find It, scores at least of positions remain
unfilled. So long as business men rely upon the
chance-come applicant at their factory doors, there
must always be times when places requiring special
types of labor will continue empty. Moreover, it
is notorious that there are times In the year when
farmers cry In vain for hands, and always there
are lost opportunities for agricultural workers be-
cause the means of communication between the
manless job and the jobless man are inadequate.
Because common sense suggests that this un-
satisfied demand for labor is the readiest means of
grappling with the problem of unemployment, the
Commission gives first place In Its list of Imme-
diately practicable remedies to a generously fi-
Launching the Child 257
nanced and State-wide system of free employment
offices. Would a manufacturer in need of raw
material tack up a sign, "Cotton Wanted," or
"Lumber Wanted?" Why should the labor
market alone be left unorganized?
It is the English system which the New York
Commission has taken for its model. After years
of futile experiment with Distress Committees and
Relief Work — futile because it was impossible to
give really useful work to the idle without taking
it away from the employed — the English govern-
ment passed the Labor Exchange Act of 1909.
In February of that year the Board of Trade
opened ninety exchanges, and increased the num-
ber to one hundred and forty-two in 1910. The
kingdom is divided into ten administrative dis-
tricts. Three times a day each exchange sends to
the central district office a list of all positions it is
unable to fill, and a similar list is exchanged among
the ten divisions once or twice weekly. Channels
of regular intercommunication net the kingdom.
When necessary the government pays the cost of
transportation of the workman, then collects it
from the employer, who in turn deducts it from the
workman's wages. At the head of each of the ten
districts is a divisional officer, who is assisted by a
committee of employers and workmen. The ex-
changes do not advance transportation to places
where strikes are on, or where the wages offered
are below the prevailing rates. Already, in their
second year, the exchanges were finding jobs for
about fifteen hundred workers daily.
258 Increasing Home EflBciency
A Juvenile Advisory Committee, composed of
workmen, employers, and educators, who protect
the children against "blind alley" jobs, is provided
for in each district. The need of hitching up the
schools with industry is revealed by the fact that
in 1909 forty per cent of the positions found by the
exchanges could not be filled because properly
trained workers were not available.
In the main this is the system recommended by
the New York Commission, whose bill includes
provision for cooperation with employers and
trade-unionists, notice of strikes, and special
facilities for children between the ages of fourteen
and eighteen.
We have pretty definitely grasped the idea that
the labor market must be organized, because it is
for the social advantage that the trades should be
neither over nor under-supplied with workers; but
it seems to shock people inexpressibly to think
that the demand for ministers and teachers and
doctors should be put in the class with that for
bricklayers and plumbers. And yet the problem
is quite as acute in the middle class as among
the wage-workers. Take the profession of medi-
cine, for instance, a calling of the social value of
which there can be no question, and which is largely
recruited from the middle class. The introduction
of the Carnegie Foundation's Report on Medical
Education says:
"In a society constituted as are our Middle
States the interests of the social order will be
served best when the number of men entering a
Launching the Child 259
given profession reaches and does not exceed a
certain ratio. . . . For twenty-five years past
there has been an enormous over-production of
medical practitioners. This has been in absolute
disregard of the public welfare. Taking the United
States as a whole, physicians are four or five times
as numerous in proportion to population as in
older countries, like Germany. ... In a town
of 2,000 people one will find in most of our States
from five to eight physicians, where two well-
trained men could do the work efficiently and make
a competent livelihood. When, however, six or
eight physicians undertake to gain a living in a
town which will support only two, the whole
plane of professional conduct is lowered in the
struggle which ensues, each man becomes intent
upon his own practice, public health and sanita-
tion are neglected, and the Ideals and standards
of the profession tend to demoralization. . . .
It seems clear that as nations advance in civiliza-
tion, they will be driven to . . . limit the number
of those who enter [the professions] to some rea-
sonable estimate of the number who are actually
needed."
And In the face of this there were In 1910
23,927 students in preparation to further congest
the profession of medicine! It's a perfectly in-
excusable waste, for, though there's much the
statistician hasn't done, there's little he can't
do when he sets his mind to It. If he can estimate
the market for the output of a shoe factory, why
not the market for the output of a professional
26o Increasing Home Eflficiency
school? It ought to be possible to tell how many
crown fillings the people of Omaha will need in
their teeth in 1920 and just how many dentists
must be graduated from the dental schools in
time to do it.
Of course, no one home can command the nec-
essary information to organize the market for
middle-class service; it can be had only through
some form of community effort. If it is good busi-
ness to hire experts to show us how to get the
maximum power out of the energy stored up in a
ton of coal, isn't it even better business to hire
experts to show us how to get the maximum power
from the middle-class homes? Isn't it, as a matter
of fact, important to the Nation to have the pre-
cious assets of professional brains conserved and
applied exactly when and how we need them?
And it's beginning to be done. Here and there
the facts about some special business or profession
are being put together, and the chances in it, or
the lack of them, brought to light. The Vocation
Bureau of Boston for example published in 191 1,
together with studies of the baker and machinist,
a little pamphlet on the architect, to show the
people of Boston how their boys may become
architects, and what the chances of money and
success in that profession are. It insists on the
requirements of "good health, good habits, and
good eyesight," so those handicapped will not
enter it. It says: "Professional education is by
far the best. One cannot well educate oneself
for an occupation having such high requirements,"
Launching the Child 261
and adds: "The majority entering the profession
remain draughtsmen permanently, at pay varying
from $20 to $35 a week." The report does not
publish an estimate of the number of architects
who could find work in the country, or even in
and around Boston, but it does say: "There are
very great opportunities for young men of vary-
ing talents and abilities. ... It has the future
of an important occupation."
A little vague, but a beginning. Why should
not this, and much more, be done for all profes-
sions and businesses? Why is it not worth the
while of the Nation to see that this firing into
the blue should stop in child launching as well as
gun practice? Does the gunner on a battleship
push and pull at a gun till it looks right to him?
Far from it. He has the range given him by his
superior officer, and he aims that gun by what
looks to the unsophisticated eye like applied trig-
onometry. Why not perform a similar mathe-
matical feat in launching a child? Isn't it quite
as important to launch a productive child as a
destructive shell?
Society may even find it to its advantage to do
what some of the great businesses do. Finding
that the Nation does not automatically produce
the sort of skilled mechanics they need, they
have taken the raw material that society does
furnish and made it into competent workmen
at their own expense, just as a furniture factory
makes pine trees into rocking-chairs. Several
great corporations have found it to their advantage
262 Increasing Home Efficiency
to educate free of charge the people whom they
wish for definite uses. How does society, which
produces many things, differ from a factory which
produces one thing? Will not the same principle
hold? If we could so coordinate and specialize
our social activities that no man should be edu-
cated to a profession where there was not room
for him, if the child was made to fit the demand,
would it not automatically absorb him? And
would society not conserve an immense amount
of precious human energy that is now wasted in
blind fumbling about?
At present we have all over the country unsatis-
fied economic demands and undemanded economic
supplies. We have laid in a stock of workers in
unneeded lines and left much of the needed work
of the world undone. No doubt it is a left-over
brain process from our ancestral nomadic stage
that makes us talk of wringing a living from the
world. That was probably what people once
literally did, but it is no longer necessary. In
fact, it has come to be mere short-sighted folly.
There is plenty. If we followed an intelligent
plan of social housekeeping, we should find that
there are three jobs for each man instead of three
men for each job. The necessity of fighting with
the world for a living is past, and the world loses
in permitting it to go on. A man's choice of pro-
fession is not his own business. It is a social
question, and one that so far as the middle class
is concerned, has hardly begun to be solved.
CHAPTER XIII
Savings and Efficiency
WE'VE a friend whose recipe for story-
writing is: "Take a block of large yel-
low paper and a soft pencil; place all
unpaid bills on the upper left-hand corner of your
writing table — the result is literature."
But she's the one exception we know to the rule
that a mind must be free from the hundred pinches
and pulls of money worry to turn out its most
valuable product.
Most of us know how visions of our children
in want and ourselves helpless through old age,
will switch our minds from the legal case we may
be working out, turn our calculations on the strain
of Iron girders to foolishness, lift our brushes from
the canvas and our pencils from the paper, or
break our voices as we lecture to our classes. If
we had the choice of an incentive, wouldn't we
prefer the love of our work and the certainty of a
reasonable reward to the fear of what might hap-
pen to us if we failed? Wouldn't a man run better
In the joyous hope of taking an Olympic prize
than In the deadly fear of pursuing growls in the
forest.^ Why, then, do we torment all our pro-
ductive years with the fear of a helpless old age and
dependency?
263
264 Increasing Home Efficiency
"It IS well to take an optimistic view of the
future," writes the wife of a New England pro-
fessional man, "and every man and woman who
dares to found a home with only the earnings of
the father for its support are true apostles of hope;
but it is sheer folly not to set aside what will spare
them the dependence which is the bitterest drop
in the cup of old age. No magic can spend one
dollar twice. If we are to educate our children and
achieve even partial provision for sickness and the
non-productive years, it must be by the old hard
road of going without."
And so she does what most women of her group
ordinarily do — the wives of the doctors, lawyers,
architects, journalists, scientists and engineers
who, according to our seventy-six budgets, have
an average income of ^2,598.32 a year — cuts
down on travel and recreation and service in order
to put between three and four hundred a year
into savings, ignoring the fact that she is spending
an undue proportion of her income on the health
of her family in consequence, and the fact that
even if she can keep up this saving for twenty years
she will only have laid by enough for an annual
income of ^420 — a good deal less than she and her
husband will need for decent living.
We have the family budgets of a series of high
school teachers and college professors, men on
salaries ranging from ^1,200 to ^4,000 a year, and
scattered across the country from Maine to Cali-
fornia; and in every case but one it is easy to see
how old age and the fear of it is like a para-
Savings and Efficiency 265
lyzing hand to mar the present efficiency of their
homes.
As the second bulletin of the Carnegie Founda-
tion shows, the majority of the teachers in America
receive salaries below the comfort line, though
that line varies greatly for different localities in
accordance with the local cost of living. Now
teachers who are continually worried by money
are in no state to turn out their best work, either
as teachers or home-makers. Their salaries may
not look so small in money, but it is important to
realize the difference between a salary that is
comfortable to live on and a salary that is com-
fortable to save on; for the fear of the future in a
profession in which the average income even of
college professors at the height of their earning
power is only ^2,500 a year drives men to save
as the only way to provide for the future, and
tends to reduce the amount of money they are
at liberty to spend on their homes and their pro-
fessional equipment to a point below the efficiency
line.
It doesn't matter in the long run whether they
are content to cut down their home budgets below
the point of efficiency or not — cheerfulness under
misfortune undoubtedly makes things pleasant for
the neighbors, but it isn't a good social substitute
for a strong-fisted campaign of prevention. There
is plenty of cheerfulness among the teachers just
above the line of decency, and a tendency to make
the intangible receipts of inspiration, and con-
sciousness of their noble calling, and various other
266 Increasing Home Efficiency
comforting platitudes, piece out mere beef and
potatoes, till one feels pretty sure that the scholar's
stoop comes as much from underfeeding as from
overstudy. Teachers, or their wives, living on
$1,500 a year and less have a fashion of writ-
ing:
"Our monthly expenditures average around $50,
and we think we are living high."
"Our salary looks pretty big to us, because we
have so many dear friends who have so much
less."
"Our professors here are fine, upright, happy
people, and all on $1,200 a year or less."
"We deny ourselves in none of our needs and
pleasures."'
"Counting all candy, ice-cream, and every
eatable, our food average for a day is not above
twenty cents."
To read these brave letters, gives one a happy
warmth in the heart which lasts just exactly till
we analyze the family budgets that go with them.
Here is the best and most reasonable budget we
have been able to get from any teacher with an
income of $1,500 or less. It comes from Mrs.
Brownson, a cheerful, happy woman in a section
of the Middle West where living is so cheap that
her husband's high school salary of $1,200 will
go further than would seem possible to an Eas-
terner:
Savings and Efficiency 267
Budget of a High School Teacher in the Middle
West, Wife, and Child Four Years Old
Income: $1,200.00 a year, salary.
20.00 from private lessons.
$1,220.00
Food $180.00
Shelter (rent and water tax) 121.50
Clothes, etc 140.00
Operating Expenses:
Coal, wood, ice $50.00
Gas and laundry 20.00 70.00
Advancement:
Church 30.00
Y. M. C. A. & Y. W. C. A 10.00
Summer school i35-oo
Insurance 140.00
Vacation 50.00
Doctor 10.00
Bank 325.00
Magazines, papers, books 7.00
Incidentals 1.50 708.50
$1,220.00
Obviously, Mrs. Brownson is a careful house-
keeper, happily busy trying to make every re-
luctant dollar give up a hundred cents of value
and to keep her young son up to the mark. Ob-
viously, too, she succeeds, for they've just paid
268 Increasing Home Efficiency
off the big left-over debt from Mr. Brownson's
schooling, and are able to give $30 a year to the
church and contribute to the Young Men's Chris-
tian Association and the Young Women's Christian
Association. Now this generosity is right in line
with Mrs. Brownson's cheerfulness — pleasant char-
acteristics both — but the community expects
much bigger gifts from a high school teacher than
dollars. The community expects him to be a
mine from which to quarry indefinitely, but a
modern mine whose supposedly inexhaustible store
has got to be continually replenished from with-
out by travel and books and contact with people.
l\ teacher's mind is a storage battery; it can't
be charged once for all and then go on emitting
power forever.1 And the thing that prevents the
frequent recharging of Mr. Brownson is the menac-
ing hand of the future reaching backward, grip-
ping hold of a hundred and forty dollars a year
and saying:
"Think what will happen to your family if you
don't give me this in the form of insurance!"
It takes hold of the $325 a year savings and says :
"Give me this in proof that you've remembered
the rainy day."
And it leaves the teacher, who ought to have
some hundred dollars a year to put into books and
technical equipment alone, with $7 only for maga-
zines and papers, and $50 for a vacation for three
people, and not a cent for a lecture or a concert or
a theater. To be sure, Mrs. Brownson writes
that they have an extended circle of acquaintances
Savings and Efficiency 269
among the " rich, the middle, and the poor classes " ;
but balance against the consequent social diver-
sion the fact that all the idiosyncrasies of the
human imagination have to be trammeled to fit
the $1.50 a year spent for "incidentals!"
The food allowance of $180 is well below the
lower limit of subsistence in most places as ascer-
tained by the University of Wisconsin, but as
only $10 went for doctor's bills and nothing at
all for medicines, the Brownsons seem to have
been sufficiently fed. This is possible because
they live in a great fruit and vegetable producing
State, where one may purchase the luscious water-
melon at five cents and peaches for so little that
it is not safe to mention the price, and where flour
comes down from Duluth by water — altogether
one of the cheapest places in the country to live.
But just look at the things that must be left out
of the account when the fear of age and decrepitude
steals ^465 a year out of ^1,200. That ugly fear
steals their chances of present efficiency and looks
mealy-mouthed and virtuous while it does it!
And though it may not be true of Mr. Brownson
in particular, isn't it true in general that such
sacrifice builds an unjumpable wall in the path
of a teacher's success.^ And isn't it an indirect
sacrifice of the brains of all the little Smiths and
Joneses that sit under him? Of course one can't
starve when one is old any more complacently
than at any other age; the grasshopper may have
become a burden and the caper-berry have failed,
but one eats notwithstanding. The question is,
270 Increasing Home Efficiency
Can the community afford such sacrifice? Isn't
there some way out?
Of course the children and their future have got
to be provided for, either by education or endow-
ment— that's an axiom; but too often the axiom
runs in direct opposition to the justifiable demand
of society that each generation shall give itself
fully in the present, and its refusal to accept in-
stead any I. O. U. reading: "In the persons of my
sons and daughters, I promise to pay — ."
The attempt to substitute one's children for
one's self is apt to be disastrous. Of course there
is the beautiful idea of lifting them a step up, the
theory that no sacrifices are too great to be made
for them, that no slaving is real slaving, no hard-
ships real hardships, where they are concerned;
and doubtless these thoughts do ease the mind,
though they don't radically rest the muscle. One
has got to be pretty sure that it is only one's self
that one is sacrificing; it may be one's neighbors.
Mrs. Taylor, wife of a high school principal in
a Middle Western city, sends us the following
schedule:
Budget of a High School Principal in a Middle
Western City, Wife and Four Children. In-
come ^3,700 A Year.
Food $ 500.00
Shelter (heat, outside cleaning,
light, etc.) 715.00
Clothes 333-00
Operating expenses, etc 128.00
Savings and EflSciency 271
Advancement:
Annuity premium $414.00
Insurance 94.00
Taxes (on vacant lots) 25.00
Tuition at 450.00
Tuition at 381.00
Church 30.00
Allowance to children 1 20.00
Husband's expenses 510.00 2,024.00
$3,700.00
Mrs. Taylor says that she and her husband are
putting their children through college, and feel
that this education is a sufficient substitute for
money to start them in life; but she makes these
elucidating comments:
"You will see from this schedule that it is ab-
solutely necessary that I should do all my work
myself, including the laundrying. But trying
to put our children through Eastern colleges was
too much for some of us, for I have been under a
severe mental strain, and one daughter has been
in a sanitarium for months because of a nervous
breakdown. Teachers as a rule are not paid ac-
cording to their needs, and have to stint in every-
thing in order to make a living. We took out an
annuity policy three years ago for $5,000 to be
paid up in ten years, which will pay us $250 a year
till the end of our lives. My husband has life
insurance for my benefit, the premium of which I
pay; but after my husband outlives his usefulness
272 Increasing Home Efficiency
as a teacher, he and I will have to live on ^250 a
year, there being no provision made by law to
help the superannuated teachers."
Now the Taylors have done the thing which
ever since the Mayflower landed we Americans
have tried to do — they have given their children
OPPORTUNITIES. They have seen the word
spelled in capitals all their lives, they have pur-
sued and overtaken it, and are quite willing to pay
the cost; but does it seem a thing we can afford
to let them do at the price .^ If^^j ^^ addition to
their sacrifice of present efficiency, they turn the
minds of other teachers to the elementary propo-
sition that such and such an income will give
such and such things only, that a time will come
when a teacher's usefulness is over, and that the
lean years must be provided against out of the
fat ones, until the less daring ones grow afraid to
assume the responsibility of children]
Mr. and Mrs. Carton, out on the Pacific coast,
have reversed the sacrifice of the Taylors. Mr.
Carton holds a small professorship at a salary of
^1,800 in a community where living is high. He
believed that it was his duty to be a good teacher
first and a happy man afterward, and that he
ought not to marry until he had stored up enough
in his head to be sure of holding his position and
enough in his pocket to be sure of making a wife
comfortable. Remember how small is ^1,800 a
year on the Pacific coast! After a long engage-
ment he married and continued to save. He didn't
dare cut off chances to study — competition for his
Savings and Efficiency 273
job was too keen; so there were summer courses and
conventions and a year's leave of absence and a lit-
tle travel and lots of books, and always the saving,
saving, saving, urged by a little tormenting demon
sitting in the back of his head who whispered:
"You're going to be old! Suppose you fall ill?
What about accident? What will happen to your
wife? You've got to provide for her!"
And that ruthless demon reached over and drew
worry lines about Mr. Carton's eyes, and picked
out his hairs, and troubled his soul, and whispered
always: "One must either provide for children
or go without them!" and kept him and his wife
always alone.
To be sure, he tried to supplement his income
by writing text-books and giving lectures and
doing the other things which lead Dr. Henry S.
Pritchett of the Carnegie Foundation to say:
"A large proportion of the teachers in American
universities are engaged in turning the grindstone
of some outside employment with one hand while
they carry on the work of teaching with the other."
Again, it is the fear of age and poverty that
has stolen from the community the children the
Cartons might have had, and their home as judged
by its output is only half efficient. It has given
a good teacher, but it has stopped short at this
generation. This too seems a waste we can't
afford, and is referable to the same cause which
makes the high school teachers in communities
where there is "no provision made by law to help
the superannuated" put so large a proportion of
274 Increasing Home Efficiency
their salaries into savings instead of present effi-
ciency. With 446,133 teachers in the United
States, these wastes bear seriously both upon edu-
cation and the home.
Fortunately, we know the cure of this evil as
well as we know the uses of q^uinine. Let a cured
patient explain.
He is Mr. Forsythe, professor in a small Eastern
college. He receives $1,800 a year, is entitled to
a pension at the age of sixty-five or after twenty-
five years of service, and his wife, in case of his
death, will have a widow's allowance. The fear
of the future either for him or his, need not steal
anything at all from the present. Here is his
family budget:
Budget of an Eastern College Professor with
A Wife and Two Children. Income $1,800 a
Year.
Food $ 260.00
Shelter (payments on house and
farm) 500.00
Clothes and personal expenses:
Children $ 60.00
Wife 120.00
Husband 90.00 270.00
Operating Expenses:
Fuel ^120.00
Service 72.00
Telephone 18.00
Light and gas 24.00 234.00
Savings and Efficiency 275
Advancement:
Life insurance $192.00
Benevolence 84.00
Incidentals 80.00
Surplus 180.00 536.00
$1,800.00
About some of the items in this budget Mr.
Forsythe is slightly apologetic; they are the items
that look even remotely like savings. Why should
they buy a home.^ Mr. Forsythe explains:
"Families without children in are able
to get pleasant apartments for $20 a month, but
our reason for purchasing a house v^as that in this
wa.y we secured a very large lot where our children
might have plenty of air and sunshine and be safe."
Sort of in loco nursemaidce! Now nurse-maids
average about five dollars a week — that is, $260
a year — besides food and lodging. To buy that
house looks like good business. Professor Forsythe
writes :
"The natural beauty of our premises — there is
a steep rocky slope back of us crowned with oaks
and pines — and the privacy and repose are also
worth much to us. Almost every year we purchase
a few trees or shrubs for our grounds, and we also
bring young pines and hemlocks from the woods
and set them out where we hope they will grow to
be things of beauty. Our home is a pleasant place
to live and work in, and a dear refuge to look
forward to after hours of outside work.
276 Increasing Home Efficiency
"We also bought a little farm in order that we
might be able to escape completely from our or-
dinary activities during the summer months and
live unconventionally in the midst of natural
beauty. Most people, doubtless, would not find
so long a vacation needful, but we find that only
in this way can we recuperate from the wear and
tear of the year's work."
The Forsythe home-buying, which with many
people would be a form of investment, is to them
a luxurious indulgence, making them more efii-
cient at the present time.
But there is life insurance; what is the present
value of that.^ Again Mr. Forsythe:
"This pays for endowment policies which will
mature in from twelve to fifteen years, and we
propose to devote the greater part of the money
to completing the payments on the house."
That food allowance in the budget looks dan-
gerously low; but we have taken pains to check up
prices in that particular region, and find that
butter, eggs and milk are considerably cheaper
than in most places, fish at least a third less, while
meat, vegetables, and fruit are about the average.
Then, as Mr. Forsythe explains:
"Our home and farm orchard supply us with
abundant apples and pears, and, eating them
freely, we purchase relatively less quantities of
vegetables."
So, evidently, part of the cost of "shelter"
ought to be credited to the food account. But the
final test of the food supply is the doctor's bill
Savings and Efficiency 277
and except for the expenses incident to the birth
of the two children and a surgical operation in no
way related to too little food, no mention is made
of a physician's charge.
Let us slide past the easily explained items of
fuel, service (occasional help only), clothes (Mrs.
Forsythe makes many of the children's clothes),
down to the last three items — benevolence, in-
cidentals, and surplus.
Benevolence includes church dues, contribu-
tions to charity, and membership fees in civic
and benevolent associations. Incidentals include
presents, flowers, theater and concert tickets,
railway fares to attend teachers' conventions and
"classical organizations," and the eight regular
magazines that come Into the house. Mr. Forsythe
mentions that they have access to all the best
magazines In the college library also. They plan
to attend the good plays, operas, and concerts
during the year. "Needless to say," he concludes,
"we always overrun this appropriation twenty
to forty dollars." And this brings us to the last
item — surplus, which isn't really a surplus at all,
but elbow room in the other departments. It
buys them a few good books every year, besides
the technical ones for the professor's work; it
buys music for Mrs. Forsythe to play and sing;
it buys pictures for their walls; and It Is hoarding
itself up by littles to buy a new piano in place of
the old one.
All this is for themselves, of course; now what
are they doing for others ? Mr. Forsythe writes :
278 Increasing Home Efficiency
"We plan to invite the students as often as
we can, by classes, or in groups of four or five for
dinner, or to tea on Sunday afternoons. And we
are trying to reach some of the foreign population
and get them to come to our house. My wife
devotes all the time and strength she can to as-
sisting in the management of a working-girls'
home and a model employment bureau, besides
doing a good deal for the young women in our
college."
"But," Mr. Carton of the Pacific coast, or Mrs.
Brownson of the Middle West, might ask, "how
about providing for those two children.^ Do you
mean to foist penniless offspring upon an already
glutted community?"
"They'll have an education in place of a home,"
their father might answer.
"But," we can hear Mrs. Taylor pipe up, "do
you labor under the delusion that you can edu-
cate your children for nothing.'' Look at my ex-
perience!"
Such questions do not fluster Mr. Forsythe,
because, thanks to his pension, he is free to spend
all of his income on the present efficiency of his
home as a factory for the production of citizens.
Something more (this is not included in the bond,
and just happens to be within our knowledge)
Mr. Forsythe is giving back to the community a
lot of first-rate influence on his pupils quite aside
from the mere technique of his special subject,
and he is giving text-books that toiling youngsters
may not indeed struggle with joyously — such is
Savings and Efficiency 279
the perverse nature of the young — but which they
may at least absorb with profit.
And Professor Forsythe writes that his family
is fairly typical of those in his college community.
Now, if he is right, we have come to the cure of
a lot of ills and the solution of a lot of problems.
No doubt before the days of pensions there were
teachers in high schools and colleges who matched
Mr. Forsythe's twofold efficiency, but in the scores
of letters that have come to us, his is distinguished
by its confident spirit of present freedom. He is
joyfully concentrating his entire energy upon his
immediate maximum production, while through
the letters of his unprotected co-workers runs a
pre-occupying concern for the future.
We're not for one moment criticising those
other teachers. Under the circumstances, how
could they do other than they do? But what
shall be said of a community which forces them to
make a choice between sacrificing their homes and
sacrificing their service.^
Yesterday we asked the head of a great public
school system: "If you knew that you would have
a pension for your old age, and that your family
would be provided for if you died, would it make
any difi"erence In your work.^"
He began to walk up and down the room.
" It would make me thirty — no, forty — per cent
more efficient right now! The thought of what
might happen to them if I were scrapped, is a ball
and chain on my foot, holding me back from no
end of things I niight and ought to do."
28o Increasing Home Efficiency
And just what might happen to them and to
him?
An old teacher with 43 years of hard work be-
hind him writes:
"Commencing when I was nineteen years old,
my life has been one long struggle. There have
been no pleasure trips in the summer nor theater
parties in the winter. Love for each other and
for God has been our comfort. I find myself at
sixty-three years of age without a shelter for old
age, depending for future necessities upon the
promises of the Bible and the love of my children.''
Now it is not that this man is in danger of being
cold or hungry or having no roof over his head, but
that after having rendered valuable service to the
community, after having brought up and educated
five children, after having struggled and denied
himself for forty-three years, we allow him to
taste this last bitterness of the middle class — and
allow to all of ourselves a lifelong foretaste of this
bitterness in our own mouths.
According to the calculations just published by
Mr. Lee Welling Squier, there are at this moment
a million and a quarter men and women over sixty-
five tasting the bitterness of dependence in the
United States. And they're not dependent through
their own fault either, but through our collec-
tive fault and their personal misfortune, for as the
Massachusetts Commission on Old Age Pensions,
Annuities and Insurance reports, sixty and one-
tenth per cent of the old age dependents who have
lost their property attribute their loss to extra ex-
Savings and ElBBciency 281
penses on account of sickness and emergencies.
It is generally estimated that seventy-two per
cent of existing pauperism throughout the United
States is attributable to misfortune.
And how this middle class does try to save!
How it takes out insurance and goes into building
and loan associations and supports savings banks!
The representative of one of the great life insur-
ance companies told us that almost all their endow-
ment policies were taken out by people with in-
comes between ^2,400 and ^3,000 a year.
Here are the average amounts the middle class
puts into insurance and savings, compiled from
our budgets and classified by occupations.
Capitalists $ 70.00
Clergymen io5-99
Farmers 267.38
Physicians 276.00
Miscellaneous professions 3I4-07
Mechanics 3I7-30
Educators 346.56
Clerks, Accountants, salaried employees .... 381.02
Business men 626.93
Obviously the small capitalists do not need to
save because they are already living on incomes
which are entirely independent of their own earn-
ing capacity. The clergymen don't save because
they can't — the requirements put upon them are
so heavy that instead of being able to save, they
run up larger average deficits than any other class.
Large provision for the future is not so necessary
282 Increasing Home Efficiency
for farmers because in general the farm itself con-
stitutes a permanent income. But the others — !
Take the clerks who are on comparatively low
paid jobs, and save $381.02 a year.
How hard this saving bears upon their homes is
shown by the results of a poll taken by a Washing-
ton, D. C, newspaper among 10,000 civil service
employes. Seventy-one per cent of them indi-
cated that their incomes were so low that to save
any part of them for old age would be a hardship
quite impossible to contemplate. But even sup-
pose that this group of the middle class should
put all of their annual savings into the bank for
the twenty years they may be supposed to hold
their positions, what would they have at the end
of iti^ — $7,620.40, which at the high rate of six
per cent, would provide them with an income of
$457.22 — much less than it would cost them to
live in decency!
Now if this hampering fear of old age so cuts
down the efficiency of teachers who are better
paid and more sure of their jobs, how much must
it decrease the value of the work these clerks
give in return for their salaries!
And yet how many things — things that are
necessary to the efficiency of the home, we make
contingent upon the savings which by cutting down
the present income may make social efficiency
impossible.
"We are saving with a view to owning a home
of our own," writes one.
"We hope to raise a family of children and are
Savings and Efficiency* 283
saving and expect to save for their education,''
writes another — making the great social contribu-
tion of children dependent upon the power to save.
"We have been able to save a larger proportion
of our income this year than ever before. My hus-
band is forty-one years of age, and we feel that we
are at the height of our health and strength and
must save for the future when the income may be
much smaller," writes a woman, triumphing in the
things she is learning to do without.
"When I know that we have put by enough, so
that we can receive even two-thirds of my hus-
band's present salary for the rest of our lives, the
whole face of nature will change for me," writes
the wife of a Boston salaried man who is foregoing
the opportunities of the present to win security
for old age.
But this Gorgon of thrift is dying — slowly per-
haps, hardly more than by inches, but still dying.
We are learning that if the home must be a sav-
ings bank, it must conserve more precious things
than dollars. As the wife of a western engineer
says:
"Homekeeping, I take it, means more than a
matter of endless contriving and economy. When
I find that I am too tired at night to be a com-
panion to my husband, or that my brain is repeat- y'
ing over and over the details of to-morrow's work
lest a precious moment be wasted, then I know
that my body and brain have received what my
engineer relatives would call a 'permanent set,' —
that they have passed their elastic limit of strain,
284 Increasing Home Efficiency
and will not return of themselves to their normal
state. And that is the point at which I believe in
substituting money for brain and muscle. Suppose
I do throw away the meat-bones without making a
delicious soup of them? I am ready to slip into a
fresh gown before dinner, to pick a posey for the
table, to tell the baby a story, to read with my
husband, and to go to bed with a clear conscience
and a quiet mind."
And so the wife of an Eastern business man:
"If anything should happen to my husband, we
are provided for and nobody, I don't care who it
is or how many millions they own, — nobody has
a better time than we do. Nobody's children
have better advantages or are more loved and
cherished."
Now isn't the attitude of mind shown by these
two women what we would like to sow broadcast
over the race.^ Doesn't happiness, and the quiet
mind, the certainty of being able to provide for
your children, and of not coming to want your-
self, make for home efficiency in the present.'*
Because after all, it is the fear of dependency and
of the shame we have attached to it that forces
people to scrimp and hoard to the present disad-
vantage of us all.
And as a matter of fact, public provision for aged
dependents is not a new thing. Each year the
government pays something like ^114,590,068.24
to civil war veterans who average seventy years
of age, and while we have no complete statistics
of the disbursements of public and private philan-
Savings and EflSciency 285
thropies, we know that at least $64,309,900.17
goes into public and private homes for old people
through these channels. Here is a community
charge of $178,899,968.41 a year. Mr. Squier in
his book Old Age Dependency in the United States
estimates that other forms of contribution would
bring this up to at least $250,000,000.
Obviously the money which might provide
security for old age is being spent now, but except
in the case of the civil war veterans it is spent
grudgingly after the mischief has been done, and
as a result the community derives a minimum
benefit from the investment. Moreover, it is so
spent that those who receive it are branded with
the disgraceful mark of pauperism. The problem
is to disburse this money with honor, — to make
it what it really is, a deferred payment to the old
for their past service to the community. For even
if people have not saved money during their youth,
it is idle to say that they have not contributed to
the wealth of the State. Besides, as Chancellor
David Lloyd-George said before the English
House of Commons:
"As long as you have taxes upon commodities
which are consumed by practically every family
in the country, there is no such thing as a non-
contributary old age pension scheme. If you tax
tea and coffee, sugar, beer and tobacco, you hit
everybody one way or another. Indeed when a
scheme is financed from public funds, it is just as
much a contributary scheme as one financed
directly by means of contributions."
286 Increasing Home Efficiency
Once we have established the principle that it
is for the advantage of society that every normal
member of it should live in decency, and once we
have established the financial minimum both for
decency and efficiency, we shall no longer en-
courage those who have not the minimum for
efficiency to trim it still further for the sake of
savings or insurance. A thrift which encourages
them to do this is a social vice not a virtue.
Since we do in fact provide for the aged now at a
cost of ^250,000,000 a year, why not do it in a way
to promote the present efficiency of those to whom
the money will ultimately be paid ? If a man takes
out an insurance policy, he merely turns over to a
private corporation certain siims of money upon
which the corporation does ultimately pay a cer-
tain interest, but which it uses in the meanwhile
to its own very considerable profit. If instead of
turning over these sums of money to private busi-
ness, he should be free to turn over to the com-
munity an equivalent in brain and muscle, would
it not profit the community to make deferred pay-
ments upon his social service? If retiring pensions
promote efficiency among college professors, why
would they not do the same among the entire
middle class .^
This whole business of individual saving works
around In a vicious circle. If you have too small
an income to provide against emergencies, you
must further reduce your working capital by sav-
ing to meet them; if your tenure of work is uncer-
tain, you must reduce your chance of enhancing
Savings and Efficiency 287
your economic value by saving against unemploy-
ment;— the very sense of security which you try
to create by saving is destroyed by the necessity
of saving. And the remedy for this evil Is a uni-
versal system of scientifically administered In-
surance against sickness, unemployment and old
age.
Psychologists tell us that we have Inherited use-
less hates and desires and fears from the strange
pre-human times, — feelings that serve no protec-
tive purpose In this new world we have made for
ourselves since our late tree-dwelling. We still
have the monkey fear of the great swallowing
python, but we apply It to the unwilling worm; the
fear of the dark room Is the harmless survival of
the fear of lurking beasts; and, worse fear of all,
that fear that came with our first power to reason,
— fear of the helplessness of age. For very early
we saw that the great prizes of food and shelter
were only to the strong, and except he provide
these out of the strength of his youth, how shall
an old man llve.^
It Is for us as an organized community to say
whether we shall have savings with fear, or freedom
with efficiency.
CHAPTER XIV
One Answer to Many Questions
IT Is now nearly three years since the question
raised by our middle-class neighbor in the
attractive middle-class suburb when she cried
out that she was nothing but a clearing house for
the family bills and did not control any of the
things that she used In her housekeeping, sent us
on a journey of discovery through the middle-class
country. We have run up and down the land both
personally and by letter, and have piled up about
ourselves a great modern kitchen midden of middle-
class beliefs and practices.
We have not found the middle-class housewife
perplexed over how to cook, or clean, over how to
serve her meals or how to wash her clothes. The
technique of these employments has been pretty
well worked out, and the general feeling seems to
be that the woman who hasn't mastered them has
nobody to blame but herself or her grandmother.
Any one who can measure flour In a cup and
watch the clock, can cook.
Our grandmothers had no call to make this cry
that they did not control the things they used in
their housekeeping — they did. They made, or
grew, or foraged, practically everything they con-
288
One Answer to Many Questions 289
sumed — they and our grandfathers together. If
they wanted a chair they built it, if they wanted
light they made candles, if they wanted news
they went out and collected it from the neighbors.
Their problems were close by, under their four
hands, and being able men and women they solved
them, eventually. But the time must have been
when they were as much baffled by their prob-
lems as we are by ours today. We are not less
able than they were. We are not failing to solve
problems which they mastered. We are not degen-
erating, but we are struggling vv^ith a span fire new
set of original problems. It is as though we were
the first who had ever been asked to prove that
the square erected on the hypothenuse of a right
triangle was equal to the sum of the squares on
the other two sides. Did the philosopher who
first met up with that familiar puzzle crack his
heels together and solve it with a gladsome shout .^
Hardly!
Our ancestors had easier problems to solve than
we have for the very simple reason that theirs were
nearer at hand. Ours must be solved at long
range. The tools which the middle-class house-
wife once used to feed and clothe and educate her
children have fled from the middle-class home, and
the middle-class housewife, hampered by the
length of the lever she must use to control them,
bound by the romantic tradition of the "Proper
sphere of woman," and terrified at the indeli-
cate possibility of appearing unwomanly, flutters
ineptly on her threshold.
290 Increasing Home EflBciency
Part of her inefficiency would seem to grow out
of the mental confusion under which the middle-
class woman labors. She seems to think that her
function is to preserve the home as a sort of shrine,
a thing apart, an end in itself. She does not see
it as a part of the great factory for the production
of citizens, nor understand that her job is exactly
the same as that of any other factory manager —
to turn out the product. Shall she preserve the
white hands of her sensibilities at the expense of
the race. ^
The things with which the on-coming citizens are
to be fed and clothed and educated and launched
are no longer within the gates of the home. The
industrial revolution in sweeping the loom and
the distaif into the factory, in trustifying the pro-
duction of cloth and food, in substituting the tele-
phone and telegraph for the village crier and the
neighborhood gossip, the railroad and trolley for
the democrat and prairie schooner, the public
school for the itinerant pedagogue, has dropped
such a boulder into the "circle of woman's in-
fluence" as has spread waves to the ends of the
earth. So long as women content themselves
with fluttering about inside four walls under the
delusion that these mark their proper sphere of
activity, they cannot so much as grapple the prob-
lem of home efficiency. They must do their work
where it is to be done if they do it at all.
Woman the idler, must become woman the
worker. She must do the same work she did before
the invention of steam engine and power loom left
One Answer to Many Questions 291
her sitting empty handed. She must do the same
work her greatgrandmother did, but by the new and
improved methods. She must follow her tools of
production into the mine, the mill and the factory.
It is as much her duty today to see to it that her
tools are wisely used in the interest of her home
and in fairness to the workers as it ever was. And
since production without adequate distribution is
vain, it is as much her business as it ever was
to control the means of distribution. The evi-
dent fact that no woman can do any of these
things single handed, is but another proof that she
must fit the manner of her work to the new condi-
tions. XShe must get out of the individualistic
groove in which she is helpless, she must see her
home as part of a greater unit to be controlled only
by the greater power of many people working
together. She must democratize industry as we
are striving to democratize government. If the
truth were knQwn Politics and Parenthood are
pretty close kinT/
In a word th^^one ansv/er to many questions is
that the middle-class mother must stop soldiering
on her job; she must follow the spinning wheel
into the world; she must take up her share of the
duties of citizenship. For after all what is the
home but a flower pot in which to grow the family
tree.f* What are all the family trees for but to
furnish the timber for the social building.^ And
yet today industry and the home are in a state of
abnormal and immoral divorce. The health goes
out of industry when it forgets that its only nor-
292 Increasing Home Efficiency
mal purpose Is to cooperate with the home, not
as equal but as servant, in the perpetuation of the
race and the nurture of good citizens. So long
as women do not do the work set for them to do,
and men make business a gamble and a sport, our
homes cannot be efficient. Business is woman's
affair as much as man's. The home is man's affair
as much as woman's. What we need most today
is the domestication of business and the socializa-
tion of the home.
We have found that the goddess of the Home
is Our Lady of Public Service, — not the hired girl.
That the altar of the home isn't the cook-stove
but the factory furnace, and that when God made
homemakers, male and female created He them!^
APPENDIX
Individual and Group Budgets
A I AHE following budgets have been selected
from those we have collected because in
1
every case we have reason to believe
that they are correct. In the group budgets,
classified by income, occupation and locality we
have used some additional budgets which came
into our hands after the series printed here was
compiled.
We have classified the expenditures under seven
headings: food, shelter, clothing, operation, ad-
vancement, incidentals and deficit.
Food includes not only the amount spent in
money, but also the estimated value of the food
raised. We believe that the minimum expenditure
for health is approximately 35c. per adult man per
day under the present prices of food stuffs. With
this as a basis we have used the scale adopted by
the United States Department of Agriculture
which is as follows:
An adult woman requires .8 as much as an adult man
A boy of 15 to 16 " .9 " " " " " "
A " " 13 " 14 " .8 " " " " "
A " " 12 " .7 " " " " " "
A " " 10 " II " .6 " " " " " "
293
294
Appendix
A girl of 15 to 16 requires .8 as much as an adult man
A " " 13 " 14
A " " 10 " 12
A child from 6 to 9
A " " 2 " 5
A " under 2
.7 " '
' " " " '
" .6 "
( <( (( « (
" .5 " '
< u u u t
" 4 " '
( (( <( <( (
. .3 « «
( (( (( It ({
In the case of families who have gardens of
their own we have used this scale to estimate the
value of food raised which we have added to the,
cost of food purchased. The cost of shelter in-
cludes rent, or taxes, or payment on a mort-
gage.
Under the heading Operation, arc grouped the
items light, heat, refurnishing, repairs, service
(which includes laundry and the services of a
barber) telephone, express and all other items
connected with the running of the home plant.
Advancement includes money spent for church,
benevolence, health, insurance, savings, travel,
recreation, entertainment, education, books, post-
age, telegrams and other things not absolutely
necessary to the continuance of the family.
Where the family runs a deficit, the amount
of it is added to the money income in estimating
the total income, on the theory that the family
has consumed goods to this amount whether they
have paid for them or not. As in the case of
the food which a farmer's family consumes, the
real income is the sum of all the things the family
has enjoyed rather than those they have paid
for.
Appendix 295
Key to items under Advancement
"C"— Church
"B"— Benevolence
"H"— Health
**!" — Insurance
*'S''— Savings
Q
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8
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8
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(NO CO
urn W wc/5
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'~r<HE following pages contain advertisements of a
few of the Macmillan books on related subjects.
Human Foods
By HARRY SNYDER, B. S., Professor of Agricultural Chem-
istry, University of Minnesota, and Chemist of the Minnesota
Agricultural Experiment Station.
Illustrated, cloth, i2mo, 362 pages, $1.25 net.
A discussion of the composition and physical properties of goods,
the main factors which affect their nutritive value, etc.
Principles of Human Nutrition
A Study in Practical Dietetics. By WHITMAN H. JORDAN,
Director of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station.
Cloth, i2mo, 450 pages, index, $1.75 net; by mail, $i.8g
The present work is a concise presentation of the subject-matter
related to human nutrition which will be more or less adapted to
popular use, but particularly to instruction of students with moderate
scientific acquirements, whether in colleges, secondary schools, short
courses, schools of domestic science, or correspondence schools. The
reliable knowledge bearing on the nutrition of man is mainly to be
found in elaborate works on physiology and physiological chemistry,
the contents of which are not generally available. Moreover, the
highly technical facts are usually not centered around a philosophy
of living. The aim here has been to show the adjustment of this
knowledge to a rational system of nutrition without insisting upon
adherence to technical details that are not feasible in the ordinary
administration of the family dietary.
Throughout the author has relied upon the conclusions of those
authorities and investigators whose sound scholarship in this field of
knowledge is imquestioned.
PUBLISHED BY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
A New Work on one of the Great Questions of the Day
The Business of Being a Woman
By IDA M. TARBELL
Cloth, i2mo, $1.25 net; postpaid $1.37
What is the business of being a woman? Is it something incom-
patible with the free and joyous development of one's talents? Is
there no place in it for economic independence? Has it no essential
relation to the world's movements? Is it an episode which drains
the forces and leaves a dreary wreck behind? Is it something that
cannot be organized into a profession of dignity and opportunity
for service and for happiness? These are some of the questions
Miss Tarbell answers. She has treated on broad lines the political,
social and economic issues of to-day as they afifect woman. SufiFragc,
Woman and the Household, The Home as an Educational Center,
the Homeless Daughter, Friendless Youth and the Irresponsible
Woman — these but suggest the train of Miss Tarbell's thought;
she has made out of them because of their bearing on all of her sex,
a powerful, unified narrative.
PUBLISHED BY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
The Book of Woman's Power
Introduction by Miss IDA M. TARE ELL
Cloth, i6mo, $1.25 net; leather, $1. 75 net
In this book are brought together and set forth "simply and with-
out contention the best which has been written of the potent, varied
relation of Woman to Society. Whether its readers favor "votes for
women" or not, the book will make an especial appeal to the atten-
tion of all interested in that subject.
Woman and Social Progress
A Discussion of the Biologic, Domestic, Industrial, and
Social Possibilities of American Women
By SCOTT NEARING and NELLIE M. S. NEARING
Cloth, $1.50 net; postpaid, $1.62
In this discussion of Woman and Social Progress, the authors
are not at all concerned with the relations of woman's capacity to
man's, but with the relation of her capacity to her opportunities and
to her achievement. The biologic, domestic, industrial, and social
possibihties of American women are discussed at length. The work
proves that women have capacity, and that it matters not a whit
whether that capacity be equal to man's, inferior, or superior. If
women have capacity, if they are capable of achievement, then they
can, as individuals, play a part in the drama of life. The world
abounds in work, a great deal of which will not be done at all unless
it is done by women. If it can be shown that women have capacity
for work, every relation of social justice and every need of social
progress demand that this opportunity and this capacity be corre-
lated in such a manner as to insure women's achievement. These
are the theses which are proposed in the early chapters of the work.
Succeeding chapters contain the solution, viz.: that women's capacity,
if combined with opportunity, will necessarily result in achieve-
ment; that therefore they should take their places as individuals
in the vangxiard of an advancing civilization.
PUBLISHED BY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
The Development of the Child
By NATHAN OPPENHEIM, M. D
Cloth, i2mo, $1.25 net
" 'The Development of the Child/ by Nathan Oppenheim, is a
most valuable contribution to a subject of universal importance and
interest. The book is written from full knowledge, and it is practical;
it should be studied by every parent, and if its wise counsels were
followed the child would be the happier and the better for it. Dr.
Oppenheim gives the best and the soundest of advice, he is always
scientific, even when he is opposing some of the cherished isms of
our day, and his book stands in the very front rank as a lucid, well-
reasoned, and trustworthy guide on the development of the child."
— Boston Saturday Evening Gazette.
The Medical Diseases of Childhood
By NATHAN OPPENHEIM A. B. (Harv.), M. D. (Coll.
P. & S., N. Y.). Attending Physician to the Children's De-
partment of Mt. Sinai Hospital Dispensary; author of "The
Development of the Child."
With loi original illustrations in half tone, and
ig temperature, pulse, and respiration charts; cloth,
8vo, $5.00; sheep, $6.00; half morocco, $6.50 net
"Dr. Oppenheim shows himself a careful and judicious investigator,
and is happily free from the hasty generalization which makes use-
less so much of the literature deahng with the facts of child life." —
Journal of Pedagogy.
"It is difficult to restrain one's enthusiasm when speaking of it." —
The Outlook.
"His book should be read by all who are interested in the proper
education and training of children. They will find in it a good deal
of original thought and many valuable suggestions." — New York
Herald.
PUBLISHED BY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
Food for the Invalid and the Convalescent
By WINIFRED STUART GIBBS
Price $.75 net, by mail $.81
A great many books of special menus have been published, but
upon one and all the same comment may be made — they are too
elaborate. They mean either the expenditure of too much money
or too much time and patience. It has long been realized that there
was a decided need for a book of few pages which shall concisely set
forth simple, inexpensive meals from which the greatest amount of
nutritive values may be obtained.
This has been exactly Miss Winifred Stuart Gibbs's purpose in
this work, a fitting sub-title for which might be "A Maximum of
Nutrition, a Minimum of Expenditure." Beginning with a few
general articles on how to buy food, how to keep food from spoiling,
the kinds of food to eat, the necessity of good cooking and how to
cook, Miss Gibbs passes rapidly to her two main considerations, the
preparation of the various classes of food and the combinations of
food into special menus and diets. In the first part, drinks, liquid
foods, soups, meats, fats, fish, eggs, cereals, breads, vegetables, fruits
and desserts are considered, while in the second part the menus are
divided into three classes, those for the healthy, for children, and
for the sick and convalescent.
PUBLISHED BY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
H 122 81
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