Kitchen Utopia Coming

Southland Times, Issue 22728, 2 November 1935, Page 17

Kitchen Utopia Coming

FREEDOM FOR HOUSEWIVES. Ten million housewives in Britain, most of them almost resigned to being “nobody’s business” when it came to hours and conditions of work, were recently made the very special business of the scientists, two thousand of whom from almost every country in the world tried to evolve plans for the abolition of kitchen slavery. For years women in industry have bpen given special attention by psychologists and now they have discovered, that the greatest industry of all is that of home-making. In Britain they put the number of housewives at ten million, Many or tne housewives, according to a special census taken by psychologists, work more that sixty hours a week, without the care of chjldren! Sixty per cent of their waking time is spent in the kitchen where most of the women are burdened with unnecessary labour due to badlyplanned kitchens.

A Well-Planned Kitchen. The scientists say that a good sequence of arrangement would be to have the larder and dry store cupboard near the back door. The table on which the meals are prepared should be near the cupboard and also near the stove, which in turn should be near the service hatch into the living room (for the scientists are almost unanimous in condemning the practice of using the kitchen as living room); the sink in the scientist’s kitchen would have two draining boards with a cupboard for china and glass above. In fact, so seriously do the scientists consider the arrangement of kitchen equipment that some of them would like to take measurements of an aver-age-sized woman; length of arm, her reach, width even, and then build shelves, windows and cupboards at the proper level so that no longer would the housewife need to indulge in terrible gymnastics every time she wanted to open a window, put money in the gas meter, or lift the rice from the larder shelf. Cupboards would be made big enough for a woman to walk into them when arranging her groceries instead of squeezing herself sidewise like a crab, and they plan to show how much better it would be if passages to the kitchen were big enough for an average-sized woman to walk along carrying a tray, without fear of knocking the passage walls. They condemn steps between kitchen and dining room, and insist on service hatches. Where the Scientist Comes hi. But as you will have seen, scientific household management is more an attitude of mind than any particular set of rules. There is nothing the scientists have thought about that has not occurred to every housewife, only she did nothing about it. Industry put its house in order when new machinery came in to demand a new type of labour, and industrial psychologists got busy reminding employers that the men and women operating the machine were still flesh and blood. But homes are like millions of small, privately-owned concerns outside the orbit of unions and national organization. Wives and mothers, many of them forced to sleep with the family purse beneath their pillow, are afraid to make an outcry about their own slavish work in case it means an outlay of money they cannot afford. This is where the scientists are really coming in. They intend to throw their weight on the home-makers’ side by urging builders local authorities and all who rule the building of the nation s houses to build nothing but their specially planned type of kitchen. Yes, a kitchen Utopia is coming.