Dreamers of a New Day (23 page)

Richards testing the algae on Jamaica Pond, Boston
1901 (Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College)

From its inception, the new subject area of home economics contained a strong emphasis on the practical relevance of knowledge. The early generation of social workers and social investigators, who began to work in the slums of large cities during the 1880s, believed that their scientific approaches to nutrition and hygiene could alleviate the poverty of the newly arrived immigrants, drawn by the hope of jobs and prosperity to cross the Atlantic. At the same time, home economics enabled women to assert a gendered area of skill, while extending its scope. An impressive course in household arts at Roxbury High School, Boston, in 1905, included the study of planning, building, furnishing, decorating, lighting, heating, plumbing, water supply, waste disposal and sanitation.
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By the early years of the twentieth century the practical application of home economics was being disseminated
evangelically, not only through training schemes and conferences for specialists but through popular advice books and women’s magazines such as
Good Housekeeping
. Ironically the new housecraft had a larger impact on a new middle-class constituency keen to improve domesticity, than upon the poor who had been the original targets.

Though home economics would be assimilated into modern housewifery, it also contained a critique of competitive market economics. For both Richards and Campbell, home economics was an integral element of an alternative approach to the economy as a whole which drew on John Ruskin’s influential writings. Ruskin’s organic concept of the household and his insistence that wealth was life challenged the model of competing atoms intrinsic to free-market capitalism. It gave priority to human needs, and shifted the motive force of production from profit to welfare. Thus responsibility for others became not simply a matter of personal ethics, but the concern of society. Instead of abstracting economics from social existence, Ruskin gave the household a pivotal significance which made it possible to make connections between differing spheres of life. In
Household Economics
(1896), Campbell theorized the economy of the home as comprising ‘the link between the physical economics of the individual and the social economics of the state’. The household for Campbell was ‘the parent of the state’. Thus the study of home economics, with all its ramifications, investigated the whole ‘business of living’.
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Between 1894 and 1895, when Campbell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman edited the magazine
Impress
, a column initially headed ‘Household Economics’ expanded into ‘The Art of Living’, accompanied by a quotation from Ruskin.
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The Ruskinian concept of a social economy passed into Gilman’s writing and had an impact in academia, notably at MIT, at the women’s college Wellesley in Boston, at the University of Wisconsin, where the economist Richard Ely was sympathetic to women social reformers, and at the University of Chicago where Marion Talbot and Sophonisba Breckinridge were among the prominent women working in sociology and civics.
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The translation of the household into a metaphor for the social economy enabled women to assert a special gendered calling in the reform of life outside the home. The New York Ladies’ Health Protective Association announced confidently in 1894:

It is an eminently proper thing for women to interest themselves in the care and destination of garbage, the cleanliness of the streets,
the proper killing and handling of meats, the hygienic and sanitary condition of the public schools, the suppression of stable nuisances, the abolishing of the vile practice of expectorating in public conveyances and buildings, the care of milk and Croton water, the public exposure of foods and in fact everything which constitutes the city’s housekeeping.
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The consequences of ‘city housekeeping’ were considerable. By 1915 Mary Beard was able to collect an impressive dossier of American women’s local municipal zeal in education, health, housing, social services and civic improvement. She described their surveys, voluntary community projects and participation in settlements, their campaigns for public provision, pure food and sanitation, and their lobbying against smoke and noise pollution. Beard stressed how the impetus was not only about drains and dust, but inspired by an aesthetic of the ‘city beautiful’.
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The political implications of all this reforming enthusiasm were various and extensive. An enlarged notion of housekeeping could bring women to participate in local government, demand action from the state, and strengthen their resolve for the suffrage. It could stimulate questions about the short-term wastefulness which characterized the drive for profit, and could contribute to economic ideas of a social capitalism, capable of taking the long view by conserving and safeguarding resources and establishing the conditions for reproducing healthy citizens. Their ameliorative, evolutionary approach to reform could acquire a sharper radical edge. Middle-class ‘city housekeepers’ could find themselves in conflict with powerful vested interests over the ownership and use of land, when they declared that decent housing was a right and demanded building regulations and town planning. In Chicago the academic Sophonisba Breckinridge struggled against racial prejudice in housing, while Florence Kelley and Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch from the Greenwich House Settlement helped produce a newsletter called
Tenants’ Weekly
, which aimed to lower rents and reduce taxes on homes. Its slogan was ‘The City for the People’.
¹⁰

A social vision of a homely commonwealth could intimate new human relations and a better society. By pushing the idea of ‘home’ outwards, some reformers subverted existing assumptions about a woman’s sphere. ‘Home is not contained within four walls of an individual house,’ declared social reformer Rheta Childe Dorr in 1910. ‘Home is the community.’
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At the same time, their notions of improvement could be
patronizing. Some social housekeepers were inclined to view those they sought to help from a great distance. Mabel Kittredge, who introduced model housekeeping centres in New York to supplement domestic education in schools, recognized that ‘Our immigrants must have better homes’, and was prepared to support ‘Fights for open plumbing, running water in each apartment, decent sinks, more space’. But, she remarked, ‘While we rejoice that the Italian and the Russian and the Pole are to realize better home equipment, we forget that these dazed people have no knowledge as to the way to use the improvement.’
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Patronage could be couched in tones of kindly thoughtlessness. Martha Bensley Bruère and Robert Bruère, two Progressive advocates of education in housecraft, chronicle what happened when girls prepared an all-American luncheon at a Chicago school which included ‘well-to-do’ as well as poorer Jewish, Polish and Russian children. While the ‘brisk little American’ girl confidently set the table for the menu of goldenrod eggs on toast; corn-bread cakes; milk; cornstarch pudding and super cookies, the ‘little Russian Jewess’ was clumsy and unsure of what was ‘required’ for such a complex feast. The teacher whispered to the investigators, ‘“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.”’
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American democracy might beckon Sophie, yet in becoming ‘Americanized’, she would be subtly taught her place –
sotto voce
.

In Britain, working-class women who were the recipients of advice from philanthropists, reformers and radicals often resented the efforts of improvers, being well aware that the middle-class ‘experts’ were ignorant of the actual circumstances of working-class life. The specialists’ knowledge of housecraft was likely to be purely theoretical: middle-class households operated on servants’ labour, and reformers who were not married would not even have experience of running a middle-class household themselves.
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Some of the more radical women did get the point. During World War One, when Clementina Black extolled the virtues of co-operative housekeeping for the middle class, she was careful to stress that working-class women were best equipped to define their own needs.
¹⁵

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women within the labour movement were being encouraged to affirm their own understanding of the problems of daily life. ‘You would speak eloquently on the agonising discomforts of washing day or the trials of working-class home life under present conditions,’ insisted ‘Scotia’, writing in
the
Accrington Labour Journal
’s ‘Our Women’s Corner’.
¹⁶
The Women’s Co-operative Guild encouraged its members to apply the system and efficiency of home economics while validating their existing skills. This kind of domestic education was popular because it enabled women to save time as well as money; and instead of being instructed by lofty middle-class lecturers, the women exchanged knowledge on a mutual basis. The household routine of Mrs Bury, a WCG member from Lancashire at the turn of the century, shows how this was done. It also provides an insight into the labour involved in maintaining a home on top of shopping and cooking for the family. Each day was allocated to a specific task. On Monday she tidied and brushed, and put clothes to soak for the Tuesday wash. Wednesday was for starching, ironing, darning and mending. On Thursday she baked bread and cleaned the bedrooms. On Friday the parlour, lobby and staircase along with the living room were cleaned. ‘Saturday is left for all outside cleaning – windows and stonework – besides putting all the clean linen on the beds.’
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The working-class labour women whose opinions started to appear in socialist papers, on local councils or in women’s organizations linked to the co-operative or trade union movement, put forward demands for material changes in everyday living conditions as well as in the routines of housework. ‘How can a woman make a comfortable home in a badly-built, ill-drained house?’ asked ‘Scotia’ in the
Accrington Labour Journal
in 1914.
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Labour women’s efforts to improve the home tended to take the existing role of working-class women for granted. As Pat Thane remarks on the outlook of the Labour Party’s Women’s Labour League: ‘They saw the home . . . as potentially a base for the empowerment of women rather than as necessarily the source of their inescapable bondage.’
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There were, however, dissenting voices among some politically aware working-class women who had aspirations other than home-making. The socialist feminist Hannah Mitchell, married in 1895, bitterly resented the thrifty but time-consuming ‘makeshifts’ which were part of respectable working-class family life; a bottle instead of a rolling pin, dishcloths from ‘material left over from dressmaking stitched together and hemmed’, beds covered with quilts she had to make from ‘bundles of cotton prints’. Far from rejoicing in household crafts, she protested: ‘I hated them all – and longed to go out and buy something new and pretty. Besides, I grudged the time and labour which might have been spent on books and study.’
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Ada Nield Chew also rejected the idealization of the homemaker prevalent among socialists as well as conservatives. One of
her sketches, published in the
Accrington Observer
in 1913, reflected on the psychological pressure on women to be homemakers. She makes one of her characters declare rebelliously, ‘“The feminine touch”? . . . Must a woman scour her own doorstep, and wash her own saucepans, in order to have a home? . . . It’s not the glueing of the wife to the hearthstone which makes home.’
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In 1908 Mary Macarthur, the trade union organizer who worked with Chew in the Women’s Trade Union League, also criticized people who argued that a woman’s true place was in ‘the home’, saying they really meant ‘the cage’ because ‘they denied women the right to an independent role in the public world’.
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Like Ada Nield Chew, Mary Macarthur had achieved an independent life as a working-class woman through work and politics outside the home. Another woman who entered politics through trade unionism, Margaret Bondfield, insisted in 1919 that working-class housewives needed time ‘to cultivate their minds and plan their lives on large spacious lines’.
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