INTRODUCTION
THE HOUSEWIFE AS MANAGER AND PURCHASING AGENT
Several years ago we heard a great deal of talk about women’s place being in the home. The slogan was used as a campaign challenge and as a sneer. It was bandied up and down the country-side until we got pretty tired of hearing it. Since the privilege of voting has been given women and since their weight is being felt in elections, the cry has died down. The simple reason is that neither the employment of women in war-work nor the radical challenges of the ultra-feminist has altered the fundamental fact that the home is a woman’s realm. Now you can banish her to the home and make it such a place of drudgery that she loathes it; or she can abide there as a queenly figure, director of its work.
Thanks to the inventive genius of our manufacturers, the home has ceased to be a place of exile for a woman. The long hours that used to obtain in housework, the wear and tear on nerves and muscles, are being cut down by labor-saving equipment. The shortage of servants is being met with the same devices.
It can never be expected that a big house will be totally servantless. Utopia is still far away. But it can be reasonably expected that every house will get along with fewer servants. The hope of this expectation lies in two salient features of these times: (1) the simplifying of our home life; (2) the position of the housewife as a manager.
One of the reasons for the high cost of living has been the complication of our living. The past generation has been brought up to feel that so many more things are necessary to comfort than was the previous generation. Short cuts to comfort cost money. The grocery order sent over the telephone saves steps but adds to the bill. The dress bought ready-made is a convenience—and an extra expense. The food and drink picked up at shops have added to the cost of living—especially the drink. Nowadays Congress is encouraging the making of drinks at home, sensible women will take a basket on arm and supervise their own buying at grocery stores, and we are forgetting the silly twaddle about clothes not looking tailor-made. The way to meet the high cost of living is to simplify the manner of living. And the way to simplify the manner of living is to live more at home and do more at home.
We’ve reached the ebb-tide. The flood is leaving the restaurant and the cabaret and turning toward home. Make no mistake about that. We are being cleansed with the fire that we ourselves kindled. The home is coming into its own, and with it, the woman in the home.
Taking them by and large, our grandmothers were pretty good managers. They didn’t have vacuum cleaners or electric toasters or telephones or a lot of other equipment that has cut down housework today, but, if you will remember, they did have a very decided system in running and managing their households.
Our mother’s day saw the introduction of labor-saving devices. The household work then stood on the threshold of a new era, but it didn’t have the courage to put a foot across. Moreover, the equipment had not reached the degree of proficiency where it could be considered practical. The machinery of household equipment complicated living.
This present generation has the perfected machinery and much more to come, but it lacks what our grandmothers had—a system. We are dealing with old problems with new equipment. It is a case of old wine in new bottles, and we have to find a way of handling it. The secret, of course, is a system, a policy.
The housewife of today is to her home what a man is to his office. She is a house manager, a Domiologist, as the author of this book suitably coined. To be successful in that sphere she must apply the same principles of management to her work that her husband does to his. She must consider three things: (1) household policy; (2) household equipment; (3) employed personnel.
The employed personnel not only includes the cook and the other servants of the house, but also the grocer from whom the vegetables are bought, the butcher, the dealer in housewares. There is just as much reason for looking into the character of her butcher before she buys from him as for looking into her cook’s reputation before she hires her. In this respect the housewife is a purchasing agent and she should apply the same exacting principles that a purchasing agent of a factory does.
The household equipment can generally be divided into departments, just as office work is divided into departments. There is the cooking department, the laundry department and the cleaning department. These will be large and small according to the size of the family and the house. Each requires its own equipment and each should be kept separate—the cleaning instruments such as brushes, brooms, vacuum cleaner, dust cloths, etc., in their own department or closet; the things appertaining to the kitchen in the kitchen; the laundry equipment, soap, clothes-lines etc. in the laundry. Some household managers may say that this is an old story. Yes, to them. But hundreds of women complicate the household work by not using this departmental idea. So soon as they do, household work begins to straighten out.
A household policy is less easy to define. In an office a policy is the way of conducting business—both the way and the purpose. In a house it should be the same.
It is this that the author of this book reiterates over and over again, a policy and system in the department of the installing of labor-saving and work-doing machinery and devices and operations to reduce the irksomeness of household management. It is this that the readers of House and Garden Magazine, wherein this book appeared serially, have enjoyed. Men and women have profited by its accurate technical discussion and by the delightful presentation with its occasional bits of humor. For these reasons I gladly recommend it to its future public which I feel sure has need of it, consciously or unconsciously.
Richardson Wright