IS HOUSEWORK PUSHING DOWN THE BIRTHRATE?

Otago Witness, Issue 3414, 20 August 1919, Page 59

IS HOUSEWORK PUSHING DOWN THE BIRTHRATE?

By Bona Gale, in the Ladies' Home Journal. The British public was recently startled by one of its best-known economists coming out in public and making this statement: "As a lifelong student of the birth-rate, which is everywhere indicating to all but the glass-eyed that, i as civilisation is now going, it is doomed, I submit that to eliminate the perpetual demands of purchasing, prepai*ing, and cooking food, and washing the cooking implements, is our only chance of preventing the birth-rate from falling to a level which means, m a few generations, racial extinction." Just as machinery revolutionised the labour and life of men, so the elimination of "housework" by central kitchens, cooked-food delivery, and eight-hour home assistants instead of servants will revolutionise the labour and the life of women, and most of all the labour and life of mothers. But, exactly what will these changes do to the life of women? Is the English writer whose startling statement is "boxed" on this page right? First, let us see what has been done to her life by her over-specialisation_ in the one industry. And let us be quite clear what we mean by "the one industry." We do not mean motherhood, which is a vocation, an art, requiring infinite pains. We, mean something quite different—namely, cooking, cleaning, laundry work, and chamber work. In other words, the four branches of housework performed in the houses of the rich by at least four servants, in some homes by two servants, and in the majority of the homes of the world by one woman, the wife and mother, who, in addition, bears and rears her. children. What has this specialisation of four branches done to the lives of women? —The Game of What They Liked Best To Do.— There is a game played for amusement by women at tea parties and clubs, especially in the little towns, and they get from it a good deal of hilarity. Slips of paper are distributed and every women is asked to write down that occupation in which she liked best to engage when she was a girl. Then one of the usual games of clever catch questions follows, and the women making the lowest scores are required to give a demonstration of the way in which they would perform, now, that favourite occupation of their girlnood. Those occupations, written down after long thought or with fair promptness, run about like this : Ringing Dressmaking Piano playing Dressing hair Drawing Baking oak© Dancing Making- candy Arranging furniture Cooking Acting Nursing Telling stories "to Playing tennis (or children other outdoor sport) Going to school Designing clothes Working to earn money These are fair sample replies. Every occupation listed here—save tennis and 4 going to school —is being carried on by somebody as a gainful occupation. Occasionally there will be listed something like one of these: " I always thought I would like to be in a bank," "I wanted a shop of my own," " I could have taught swimming," "I wanted to write." The percentage of those who write "Cooking" is fairly high. But almost never will you find listed "Washing dishes," "House cleaning," "Washing and ironing," or "Making up beds." None of the other occupations, except cake and candy making, is in the least allied to women's four-branch specialisation. Here, then, are at least 12 occupations, for women A unconnected with that upon which

the majority of the women of the world are engaged. Evidently the four-branch specialisation lias resulted in forcing to itself a large body of -womankind who had an aptitude for doing something else. • —Women's Labour Ordered Liko Men's Labour.— Recently, however, we have been hearing much about vocational guidance; about the waste involved in our custom of placing round pegs in square holes ; about the need to conserve gift and effort as precious assets of the State. This must mean for women as well as for men. Yet on the basis of our present adjustments some mythical vocational guide must have been saying to all women something like this: " You have a gift for designing gowns, drawing, house decoration, accounting, nursing, 'teaching. These are precious talents, assets to the State. These must not bo wasted. So now, therefore, proceed to practice these pursuits for one, three, five, seven years after you leave school. Then give them all up and turn your attention to (1) cooking, (2) cleaning, (3) laundry work, (4) chamber work. For it is fitting." But now suppose that the bewildered woman, who is getting in effect . this strange brand of vocational guidance, replies : "But what of the waste of my aptitude and my training? What of the waste of the State, of which you just spoke?" The reply will be: " You will be married. And cooking, cleaning, laundry, and chamber work belong to marriage." Now, suppose the woman ventures once more and says: " But I love the work I can do best, and I don't want to give it up." The old reply has been: " You will forget all this in motherhood." Never until the last few years has the thunder of woman's third question shaken the world: "Why?_ Why will my time of active motherhood leave me no time for the work I love, but leave me ample time for cooking, cleaning, laundry, and chamber work. Why?" Why, indeed. Even now the answer is coming in hundreds of thousands of voices. The New Plan Will Benefit the Children.— How, then, if her question is answered, and her universal four-branch industry is eliminated save as performed by paid professionals acting not for one family but for groups of families? What would this do to the life of woman? The work in her house would now be organised as effectively as the work in the rest of the world, coming under the general Tules of division of labour and centralisation of effort so successfully operative in the labour of men. /This would be brought about, as already intimated, by neighbourhood kitchens and the delivery of cooked food; by the eight-hour—or less—home assistant, working in one or two shifts; and by the eight-hour day for all women workers, so that the wife and mother is engaged- on her own gainful occupation approximately eight hours a day, instead of being diverted from the offices of her motherhood by the househod duties for the majority of her waking hours, as she now is. If she gives lessons or is purchasing agent or has her studio in her home, the matter is simple, for it involves no especial upset to the imagination. If, however, her chosen work involves other routine, she leaves the house in the morning with her husband, goes to her office or place of business, and returns home when or before he does. And during those eight hours she engages in the varying occupations for which she may be individually fitted, instead of the eternal one industry with its four ceaseless branches to be done over and over by her. What, now, of the children? It is the all-important question. For if the plan wall not work for them, it will not work for all. The children would go to school as they do now. Only the hours of the school would be lengthened, by two_ or three, and would include more physical training and recreation, and also the noondav feeding. Two distinct gains for the children —first, for their physical education, about which, we now know, something must be done and done speedily; and, second, for the better nourishment of a large proportion of them. Incidentally, this will mean the actual lightening of the work of another large bodv of women—the teachers—since more teachers must be employed at better wages for longer hours. _ The "family, then, returns to a home clean and ordered as it is now, only the wife and mother has not cleaned and ordered it all; returns to food delivered hot at the door, instead of having been delivered raw for the wife and mother to prepare, whether she knows ?iow or not. And for the 16 hours, waking and sleeping, spent in her home the wife and mother is free for the various affairs which she herself must look after, and free to devote herself to her children. This might cut down somewhat that which is known as "social life"—not a bad result, as will be conceded. The family life, for the evening and breakfast —the only times when it" is united now—would be united just the same. " Yes, and a nervous, irritable, overwrought' wife, from her day at other people's business." Why any more nervous, irritable, or overwrought than the woman who has engaged all day long in (1) cooking, (2) cleaning, (3) laundrv work, and (4) chamber work! Just why ? Let the average husband and wife, in the dight of experience, face that honestly. For, on the other hand, the woman has had the change of going in the open, to and from her work; she has had the stimulation of working with others and not in solitude, and she has been engaged upon work which sho likes and for which she has been trained and -which expresses her, Tather than in the endless round of her ancient job. And, what is as important as any of these, she is

earning money at her vocation instead of doing work, seven days in a week, foi nothing. Upon this financial independence no woman needs to write to other women, and perhaps no man really can write upon it, because he does not know in his soul what it means always to have been without it; while every woman, either for herself or for some other woman, does know* Mothers as Mothers, Not House- ' workers.— But during those years of the birth and the early rearing of the children the time of the mother is to be given to no work save that of the children—a condition not possible to most mothers now. The home and the food preparation will be looked after, "as now are the laundry and th. 6 plumbing, by professionals serving a group of families. Thus for the first time in the history of the world tho average mother will have leisure for the bringing up of her children. It is this new Toutine which may inn volve, even as Dr C. W. Saleeby, the English writer quoted here, says, that first fundamental of society, a "normal" birthrate. He pleads for the amelioration of the home life, not so much for the sake of the fuller life of women, but to in* crease the prospect for the survival and health of the children. Thus this ©conomist is ranged on the opposite side to those who argue that the organisation of housework and feeding on a principle of centralisation would " break up the home." And to the generic objectors there arc two generic answers, over and above the specific: First, the fitness of women to labour and earn has, during the great war, beett demonstrated for all time. Second, in any case, while we talk the phenomenon of women in industry is going on in thousands of homes where the wife and mother is already employed—and the home not broken up. But to work and to carry on her household under the existing system is a handicap cruel to he* and unsafe for the children. j Simply Phases of Democracy.— I There remains, then, to organise the home to meet these new conditions and, by the kitchen upheaval, to make the movement conscious. This will come about commercially, as the public laundries have begun to come. It will come, moreover, with that efficiency which modernbusiness, such as hotel-keeping, prides itself upon achieving. Feeding and caring for the home has been the woman's job during the long period of the world's pioneering. Considering her lack of training, she has dona her work nobly—and has brought to it and taken from it spiritual values whica are the triumphs often won from hardship. But also, in this pioneering; woman, has suffered untold deprivation and waste. And in a civilising world nobody desire* that hardship and waste continue. We can have the new routme in our own time if we will. But whether wo do or not, away ahead there' we can see the man and the woman of the future in equality—economic, social, political, and intellectual; when the woman is free at last to develop and use her intellect, as the average woman knows that she has never yet been free to do. And these equalities are simply phase* of democracy. $