Increasing home efficiency

Front matter

o V

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited

Contents

Chapter Page

I. How the Wind Blows ..... i

II. What Is the Home For? .... 9

CHAPTER I How THE Wind Blows

WE kept house one summer in an attractive middle-class suburb, under the ordinary conditions that make for comfort 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 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 efficient indeed! What problems did she find unsolvable.?

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 choosethe very rich for their subjects. They cling to the romantic tradition that loves to linger in the palaces 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 tragedy 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 perplexities constantly fringing the gossip of our middle-class friends.

"How much do you think I have to pay for butter 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 precipitated 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 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 playing 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 matters 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 aristocratic 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 aristocratic neighbors also to have the city dump carts drive up and stand before our lawn-fronted residence, 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 discomfort 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 telephoning 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 circumspectly and proceed subduedly down the street.

We never succeeded in making our servant the government earn its wages from our neighbors.

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 neighborhood, or the whole city had insisted on this department'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 councils 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 chemist. 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 problem 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 cooperative 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 locomotives 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 Florida 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 consulting the experiences of those who like our suburban 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 gumshoe work; you can't investigate the middle-class, as you can the poor, without its free consent. Through the columns of magazines, through leetures, 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 factory 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 civilization forward.

That man, socially speaking, is just born.

We are not concerned with those dead men except to remove from our pathway such useless and pernicious legacies as they have inconsiderately 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 listening 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 connection of common carriers, public utilities and corporate industries, and embedded in the mesoblastic 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 consumes.? 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 methods 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 physical strength, and certain elements of climate, temperament, occupation and markets, — to produce through the medium of a more or less permanent 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 desperately to know just what proportion of money 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 substitute 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, disassociated 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 Conference 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 reorganization 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 running 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 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 instill 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 Company at a salary of $150 a month. Jennie is still getting educated, but I expect she will turn out all right."

Here is the Shaw budget (compiled and averaged from the family account books) :

Income $2,400 a year. Two adults and three children.

Monthly Yearly

Shelter (mortgage, repairs, taxes) 33.00 396.00

Operating costs:

Heat and light 8.00

Carfare 6.00

Doctor, dentist, medicine $11.00

Church, charity 14.00

Vacation, travel, books,

amusement 3.25

Insurance (fire and life) . . 9.80

$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 admirable thrift. But their expense for vacations, travel, books and amusements in their almost fashionable suburb, where many sorts of entertainment 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 excessive 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 dollars unless they get it at a sale. I have a dressmaker 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 carefully when she buys a hat, that she wasn't so fond of. golden oak furniture, quarter-sawed and varnished high, that she knew the difference between scarlet and crimson and wouldn't use these good fast colors so profusely. This may sound like putting 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 much in the parents as it has gained in the children? 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 household 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 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 automobile 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:

Operating 600.00

$4,000.00

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.

Shelter (taxes, repairs, improvements, etc.) 475 -oo

Operating 625.00

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

$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 include 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

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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 vegetables. 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 husband have undoubtedly worked hard; they have applied business methods to the farm, and they've been fortunate. They haven't sacrificed themselves greatly. Loading their pig iron has consisted 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 conscious 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 middlewest 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 graduates 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 pendulum and think the clerk, the bookkeeper and the 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 hundred. 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.