(3) The Housewife
O the soap vat is a common thing!
The pickle-tub is low!
The loom and wheel have lost their grace
In falling from the dwelling-place
To mills where all may go!
The bread-tray needeth not your love;
The wash-tub wide doth roam;
Even the oven free may rove;
But bow ye down to the Holy Stove,
The Altar of the Home!
C. P. Gilman.

In the great majority of households the wife and mother is also the housewife. In the great majority of households this arrangement is the most economical and suitable in every sense. So long as families live each in a separate home there will be a vast amount of domestic work to be done in the home, and a great deal of this work being suited to women’s strength and capacities, it seems more appropriate, as well as more economical, that each woman should do the domestic work of her own home, and do it to her liking among her own children and her own possessions, rather than go out and[90] do another woman’s work for wages. Further, a woman who is attending to the needs of young children is perforce a great deal in the home with the children, and therefore it is again economical that whatever work she does, in addition to caring for the children, should be work that can be done in the intervals, and that does not require her to waste time and strength in leaving the home. A large part of the function of child nurture is merely to be there, on guard and for emergencies. The child is both better and happier that is not too much interfered with; that lies kicking and crowing on a mattress, making acquaintance with its toes, and as it grows older, finds its own games and delights, in copying the arts and crafts of its elders. In sickness the whole of the guardian’s attention may be taken, but in health it is a fact that a woman can best develop the child by being herself occupied, so long, be it well understood, as the occupation does not take the whole of her attention. Babies must be talked to and sympathised with, and as they grow older the busy guardian must not be so busy that she cannot play their plays with them. The sort of work which occupies the hands and only a portion of the head is obviously the sort of work which is appropriate to the child-minder. A floor can be scrubbed, a grate blacked, bread made, and clothes mended with a baby on a mattress in the room, and a couple of tinies playing shop in a corner. It is not an easy life, and the mother may often feel she “doesn’t[91] know which way to turn”; but if children were not too many and houses were more convenient, and all housekeeping tools more adequate, and the housekeeping money sufficient, the life of the mother who is also the housewife would be a happy and healthy life; she could hope to do her work really well, and most women would prefer it to any other.

What are the causes of the present discontents among housewives? Many indeed. They feel that the woman who is not only bearing and rearing the children, but also buying and cooking and washing and cleaning and mending for the whole family, should have some of that independence which comes from handling the money she has earned and saved. I remember a man at a street-corner meeting once heckling me with the question whether a woman had not all that she required if she had “love an’ her keep.” He was a candid fellow, and when I asked him whether “love an’ his keep” would satisfy him, and whether he did not like to have some of the money he had earned as “spending money,” to do what he pleased with, go to a football match,—or even make his wife a present,—he laughed and said, “Well it takes a woman to think of such things! Of course I do,—I never looked at it in that light before.” The mother while she is bearing children should be “kept” in health and strength; the woman who is making wealth by personal services just as much as any other worker, should be paid for her services. If this[92] is not done, if a woman only gets her keep as any other domestic animal does, it is likely that, in modern times, she will be tempted to go out to work, when it would be better for all concerned that she should stay at home and work. Very often, of course, she is not merely tempted, but forced to go. The result is that we see women with the treble burden of child-bearing, wage-earning out of the home, and housework within the home. Small wonder when each of these is ill-done. The marvel is how well done they often are.

Sometimes, again, by the conditions under which the men choose to work, a monstrous burden is piled upon the housewife. The men who have been most persistent and most successful in obtaining an eight-hour day for themselves, have been those who have laid the heaviest burden upon the women. In the cottage of a miner you will sometimes find men working on each of the three shifts, and one housewife to do for them all. This means four sets of meals (where there are young children as well), and three sets of hot baths, and that condition of things which a good housewife detests more than any other, of never being “tidied up.” A canvasser reports how she found a housewife of this class looking so worn out over her ironing that the visitor remarked on it, and the patient housewife replied, “You see, I’ve not been rightly to bed for a fortnight.” It is these men, too, some of them, who were so outraged[93] at the suggested “indignity” of compulsory baths at the pithead. The freeborn Briton reserves to himself the right to bring his coal dust home to the scrubbed boards and washed pillows of his domestic drudge, and when he secures his eight-hour day, does not dream of employing some other woman to help his wife with her extra shifts, so that she, as well as he, may go “rightly to bed.”

Those who are intimate with the lives of poor people know how desperately hard on the women are the quick-coming children and the dreadful inadequacy of the money she gets for housekeeping. The increase in drugging as a preventive is a matter for very serious consideration. It is not only hard work and under-feeding that makes so many of our working women look old at thirty.

The dissatisfaction that is caused by all the defects of housing is purely to the good. It is to be wished that the women would all strike against the vile houses and the antiquated and decrepit implements and arrangements. Unhappily the women, having known no other, are often sunk in indifference. When people criticise the “folly” of teaching girls to cook on convenient stoves and to housekeep under reasonable conditions, because everyone knows they never will have convenient stoves or reasonable conditions, and it will only make them dissatisfied, I for one hail this dissatisfaction as the one star o............