Part 13

Central municipal heating is not a wild dream, but a recognized economy in many places. Municipal kitchens are not vague surmisings, but facts achieved in the towns of Europe. They are forms of war thrift. In America no such converting examples of economy are as yet given, and not an appeal has been made to women to save through solidarity.

Uncle Sam has been commendably quick and wise in offering a reservoir to hold the tiny savings, but slow in starting a democratic propaganda suggesting ways of saving the pennies.

If business as usual is a poor motto, so is life as usual, habits as usual.

"AS MOTHER USED TO DO"

Man's admiration for things as mother used to do them is as great an obstacle as business as usual in the path of winning the war and husbanding the race. The glamour surrounding the economic feats of mother in the past hides the shortcomings of today.

I once saw one of her old fortresses, a manor home where in bygone days she had reigned supreme. In the court yard was the smoke house where she cured meat and fish. In the cellar were the caldrons and vats where long ago she tried tallow and brewed beer. And there were all the utensils for dealing with flax. In the garret I saw the spindles for spinning cotton and wool, and the hand looms for weaving the homespun. In her day, mother was a great creator of wealth.

But then an economic earthquake came. Foundations were shaken, the roof was torn off her domestic workshop. Steam and machinery, like cyclones, carried away her industries, and nothing was left to her but odds and ends of occupations.

Toiling in the family circle from the days of the cave dwellers, mother had become so intimately associated in the tribal mind with the hearthstone that the home was called her sphere. Around this segregation accumulated accretions of opinion, layer on layer emanating from the mind of her mate. Let us call the accretions the Adamistic Theory. Its authors happened to be the government and could use the public treasury in furtherance of publicity for their ideas set forth in hieroglyphics cut in stone, or written in plain English and printed on the front page of an American daily.

One of the few occupations left to mother after the disruption of her sphere at the end of the eighteenth century was the preparation of food. In the minds of men, food, from its seed sowing up to its mastication, has always been associated with woman. Mention food and the average man thinks of mother. That is the Adam in him. And so, quite naturally, one must first consider this relation of women to food in the Adamistic Theory.

When the world under war conditions asked to be fed, Adam, running true to his theory, pointed to mother as the source of supply, and declared with an emphasis that came of implicit faith, that the universe need want for nothing, if each woman would eliminate waste in her kitchen and become a voluntary and obedient reflector of the decisions of state and national food authorities. This solution presupposed a highly developed sense of community devotion in women running hand in hand with entire lack of gift for community action. Woman, it was expected, would display more than her proverbial lack of logic by embracing with enthusiasm state direction and at the same time remain an exemplar of individualistic performance. The Adamistic scheme seems still further to demand for its smooth working that the feminine group show self-abnegation and agree that it is not itself suited to reason out general plans.

It is within the range of possibility, however, that no comprehensive scheme of food conservation or effective saving in any line can be imposed on women without consulting them. The negro who agreed "dat de colored folk should keep in dar places," touched a fundamental note in human nature, over-running sex as well as racial boundaries, when he added, "and de colored folk must do de placin'." It might seem to run counter to this bit of wisdom for women to be told that the welfare of the world depends upon them, and then for no woman to be given administrative power to mobilize the group.

But the contest between man's devotion to the habits of his ancestry in the female line, and the ideas of his very living women folk, is as trying to him as it is interesting to the outside observer. The conflicting forces illustrate a universal fact. It is always true that the ruling class, when a discipline and a sacrifice are recognized as necessary, endeavors to make it appear that the new obligation should be shouldered by the less powerful. For instance, to take an illustration quite outside the domestic circle, when America first became convinced that military preparation was incumbent upon us, the ruling class would scarcely discuss conscription, much less adopt universal service. That is, it vetoed self-discipline. In many States, laws were passed putting off upon children in the schools the training which the voting adults knew the nation needed.

In the same way, when food falls short and the victualing of the world becomes a pressing duty, the governing class adopts a thesis that a politically less-favored group can, by saving in small and painful ways, accumulate the extra food necessary to keep the world from starving. The ruling class seeks cover in primitive ideas, accuses Eve of introducing sin into the world, and calls upon her to mend her wasteful ways.

Men, of course, know intellectually that much food is a factory product in these days, but emotionally they have a picture of mother, still supplying the family in a complete, secret, and silent manner.

This Adamistic emotion takes command at the crisis, for when human beings are suddenly faced with a new and agitating situation, primitive ideas seize them. Mother, it is true, did create the goods for immediate consumption, and so the sons of Adam, in a spirit of admiration, doffing their helmets, so to speak, to the primitive woman, turn in this time of stress and call confidently upon Eve's daughters to create and save. The confidence is touching, but perhaps the feminine reaction will not be, and perchance ought not to be just such as Adam expects.

Women have passed in aspiration, and to some extent in action, out of the ultra-individualistic stage of civilization.

The food propaganda reflects the hiatus in Adam's thought. I have looked over hundreds of publications issued by the agricultural departments and colleges of the various States. They tell housewives what to "put into the garbage pail," what to "keep out of the garbage pail," what to substitute for wheat, how to make soap, but, with a single exception, not a word issued suggests to women any saving through group action.

This exception, which stood out as a beacon light in an ocean of literature worthy of the Stone Age, was a small pamphlet issued by the Michigan Agricultural College on luncheons in rural schools. Sound doctrine was preached on the need of the children for substantial and warm noon meals, and the comparative ease and economy with which such luncheons could be provided at the school house. Children can of course be better and more cheaply fed as a group than as isolated units supplied with a cold home-prepared lunch box. And yet with the whole machinery of the state in his hands, Adam's commissions, backed by the people's money, goad mother on to isolated endeavor. She plants and weeds and harvests. She dries and cans, preserves and pickles. Then she calculates and perchance finds that her finished product is not always of the best and has often cost more than if purchased in the open market.

It may be the truest devotion to our Allies to challenge the individualistic rôle recommended by Adam to mother, for it will hinder, not help, the feeding of the world to put women back under eighteenth century conditions. Food is short and expensive because labor is short. And even when the harvest is ripe, the saving of food cannot be set as a separate and commendable goal, and the choice as to where labor shall be expended as negligible. It is a prejudiced devotion to mother and her ways which leads Adam in his food pamphlets to advise that a woman shall sit in her chimney corner and spend time peeling a peach "very thin," when hundreds of bushels of peaches rot in the orchards for lack of hands to pick them.

Just how wide Adam's Eve has opened the gate of Eden and looked out into the big world is not entirely clear, but probably wide enough to glimpse the fact that all the advice Adam has recently given to her runs counter to man's method of achievement. Men have preached to one another for a hundred years and more and practiced so successfully the concentration in industry of unlimited machinery with a few hands, that even mother knows some of the truths in regard to the creation of wealth in the business world, and she is probably not incapable of drawing a conclusion from her own experience in the transfer of work from the home to the factory.

If they are city dwellers, women have seen bread and preserves transferred; if farm dwellers, they have seen the curing of meat and fish transferred, the making of butter and cheese. They know that because of this transfer the home is cleaner and quieter, more people better fed and clothed, and the hours of the factory worker made shorter than those "mother used to work." With half an eye women cannot fail to note that the labor which used to be occupied in the home in interminable hours of spinning, baking and preserving, has come to occupy itself for regulated periods in the school, in business, in factory or cannery. And lo, Eve finds herself with a pay envelope able to help support the quieter, cleaner home!

All this is a commonplace to the business man, who knows that the evolution has gone so far that ten percent of the married women of America are in gainful pursuits, and that capital ventured on apartment hotels brings a tempting return.

But the Adamistic theory is based on the dream that women are contentedly and efficiently conducting in their flats many occupations, and longing to receive back into the life around the gas-log all those industries which in years gone by were drawn from the fireside and established as money making projects in mill or work-shop. And so Adam addresses an exhortation to his Eve: "Don't buy bread, bake it; don't buy flour, grind your own; don't buy soap, make it; don't buy canned, preserved, or dried food, carry on the processes yourself; don't buy fruits and vegetables, raise them."

Not a doubt seems to exist in Adam's mind as to the efficiency of functioning woman-power in this way. According to the Adamistic theory, work as mother used to do it is unqualifiedly perfect. This flattering faith is naturally balm to women's hearts, and yet there are skeptics among them. When quite by themselves women speculate as to how much of the fruit and vegetables now put up in the home will "work."

They smile when the hope is expressed that the quality will rise above the old-time domestic standard. The home of the past was a beehive in which women drudged, and little children were weary toilers, and the result was not of a high grade. Statistics have shown that seventy-five percent of the home-made bread of America was a poor product. I lived as a child in the days of home-made bread. Once in so often the batch of bread "went sour," and there seemed to be an unfailing supply of stale bread which "must be eaten first." Those who cry out against a city of bakers' bread, have never lived in a country of the home-made loaf. It is the Adamistic philosophy, so complimentary to Eve, that leads us to expect that all housewives can turn out a product as good as that of an expert who has specialized to the one end of making bread, and who is supplied with expensive equipment beyond the reach of the individual to possess. But there are rebellious consumers who point out that the baker is under the law, while the housewife is a law unto herself. Against the baker's shortcomings such brave doubters assure us we have redress, we can refuse to patronize him; against the housewife there is no appeal, her family must swallow her product to the detriment of digestion.

It may be the brutal truth, taking bread as the index, that only a quarter of the processes carried on in the home turn out satisfactorily, while of the other three-quarters, a just verdict may show that mother gets a "little too much lye" in the soap, cooks the preserves a "little too hard," "candies the fruit just a little bit," and grinds the flour in the mill "not quite fine enough."

But perhaps even more than the quality of the product does the question of the economical disposition of labor-power agitate some women. They are asking, since labor is very scarce, whether the extreme individualistic direction of their labor-power is permissible. The vast majority of American homes are without servants. In those homes are the women working such short hours that they can, without dropping important obligations, take over preserving, canning, dehydrating, the making of bread, soap, and butter substitute? Has the tenement-house dweller accommodation suitable for introducing these industrial processes into her home? Would the woman in the small ménage in the country be wise in cutting down time given, for instance, to the care of her baby and to reading to the older children, and using the precious moments laboriously to grind wheat to flour? My observation convinces me that conscientious housewives in servantless or one-servant households, with work adjusted to a given end, with relative values already determined upon, are not prepared by acceptance of the Adamistic theory to return to primitive occupations.

But even if business and home life could respond to the change without strain, even if both could easily turn back on the road they have come during the last hundred years, commerce yielding up and the home re-adopting certain occupations, we should carefully weigh the economic value of a reversion to primitive methods.