Part 14

The Adamistic attitude is influenced, perhaps unconsciously but no less certainly, by the fact that the housewife is an unpaid worker. If an unpaid person volunteers to do a thing, it is readily assumed that the particular effort is worth while. "We get the labor for nothing" puts to rout all thought of valuation. No doubt Adam will have to give over thinking in this loose way. Labor-power, whether it is paid for or not, must be used wisely or we shall not be able to maintain the structure of our civilization.

Then, too, the Adamistic theory weighs and values the housewife's time as little as it questions the quality of the home product. Any careful reader of the various "Hints to Housewives" which have appeared, will note that the "simplifying of meals" recommended would require nearly double the time to prepare. The simplification takes into consideration only the question of food substitutions, price and waste. Mother is supposed to be wholly or largely unemployed and longing for unpaid toil. Should any housewife conscientiously follow the advice given her by state and municipal authorities she would be the drudge at the center of a home quite medieval in development.

Let us take a concrete example:--In a recently published and widely applauded cookbook put out by a whole committee of Adamistic philosophers, it is stated that the object of the book is to give practical hints as to the various ways in which "economies can be effected and waste saved;" and yet no saving of the woman's time, nerves and muscles is referred to from cover to cover. The housewife is told, for instance, to "insist upon getting the meat trimmings." The fat "can be rendered." And then follows the process in soap-making. Mother is to place the scraps of fat on the back of the stove. If she "watches it carefully" and does not allow it to get hot enough to smoke there will be no odor. No doubt if she removes her watchful eye and turns to bathe her baby, her tenement will reek with smoking fat. She is to pursue this trying of fat and nerves day by day until she has six pounds of grease. Next, she is to "stir it well," cool it, melt it again; she is then to pour in the lye, "slowly stirring all the time." Add ammonia. Then "stir the mixture constantly for twenty minutes or half an hour."

In contrast to all this primeval elaboration is the simple, common-sense rule: Do not buy the trimmings, make the butcher trim meat before weighing, insist that soap-making shall not be brought back to defile the home, but remain where it belongs, a trade in which the workers can be protected by law, and its malodorousness brought under regulation.

In the same spirit the Adamistic suggestion to Eve to save coal by a "heatless day" is met by the cold challenge of the riotous extravagance of cooking in twelve separate tenements, twelve separate potatoes, on twelve separate fires.

The Adamistic theory, through its emphasis on the relation of food to Eve, and the almost religious necessity of its manipulation at the altar of the home cook-stove, has drawn thought away from the nutritive side of what we eat. While the child in the streets is tossing about such words as calories and carbohydrates with a glibness that comes of much hearing, physiology and food values are destined to remain as far away as ever from the average family breakfast table. Segregating a sex in the home, it is true, centralizes it in a given place, but it does not necessarily train the individual to function efficiently. Mother, as she "used to do," cooks by rule of thumb; in fact, how could she do otherwise, since she must keep one eye on her approving Adam while the other eye glances at the oven. The Adamistic theory requires individualistic action, and disapproves specialization in Eve.

The theory also demands economic dependence in the home builder. Mother's labor is not her own, she lives under the truck system, so to speak. She is paid in kind for her work. Influenced by the Adamistic theory, the human animal is the only species in which sex and economic relations are closely linked, the only one in which the female depends upon the male for sustenance. Mother must give personal service to those about her, and in return the law ensures her keep according to the station of her husband, that is, not according to her ability or usefulness, but according to the man's earning capacity.

The close association of mother with home in the philosophy of her mate, has circumscribed her most natural and modest attempts at relaxation. Mother's holiday is a thing to draw tears from those who contemplate it. The summer outing means carrying the family from one spot to another, and making the best of new surroundings for the old group. The "day off" means a concentration of the usual toil into a few hours, followed by a hazy passing show that she is too weary to enjoy. The kindly farmer takes his wife this year to the county fair. She's up at four to "get on" with the work. She serves breakfast, gives the children an extra polish in honor of the day, puts on the clean frocks and suits with an admonition "not to get all mussed up" before the start. The farmer cheerily counsels haste in order that "we may have a good long day of it." He does not say what "it" is, but the wife knows. At last the house is ready to be left, and the wife and her brood are ready to settle down in the farm wagon.

The fair grounds are reached. Adam has prepared the setting. It has no relation to mother's needs. It was a most thrilling innovation when in the summer of 1914 the Women's Political Union first set up big tents at county fairs, fitted with comfortable chairs for mother, and cots and toys, nurses and companions for the children. The farmer's wife for the first time was relieved of care, and could go off to see the sights with her mind at rest, if she desired anything more active than rocking lazily with the delicious sensation of having nothing to do.

Women must not blame Adam for lack of thoughtfulness. He cannot put himself in mother's place. She must do her own thinking or let women who are capable of thought do it for her.

Men are relieved when mother is independent and happy. The farmer approved the crèche tent at the county fairs. It convinced him that women have ideas to contribute to the well-being of the community. The venture proved the greatest of vote getters for the suffrage referendum.

In fact, men themselves are the chief opponents of the Adamistic theory to-day. The majority want women to organize the home and it is only a small minority who place obstacles in the way of the wider functioning of women. It is Eve herself who likes to exaggerate the necessity of her personal service. I have seen many a primitive housewife grow hot at the suggestion that her methods need modifying. It seemed like severing the silken cords by which she held her mate, to challenge her pumpkin pie.

But women are slowly overcoming Eve. Take the item of the care of children in city parks. The old way is for fifty women to look after fifty separate children, and thus waste the time of some thirty of them in keeping fifty miserable children in segregation. The new way, now successfully initiated, is to form play groups of happy children under the leadership of capable young women trained for such work.

Salvaging New York City's food waste was a very splendid bit of coöperative action on the part of women. Mrs. William H. Lough of the Women's University Club found on investigation that thousands of tons of good food are lost by a condemnation, necessarily rough and ready, by the Board of Health. She secured permission to have the sound and unsound fruits and vegetables separated and with a large committee of women saved the food for consumption by the community by dehydrating and other preserving processes.

This was not as mother used to do.

Mother's ways are being investigated and discarded the whole world round. At last accounts half the population of Hamburg was being fed through municipal kitchens and in Great Britain an order has been issued by Lord Rhondda, the Food Controller, authorizing local authorities to open kitchens as food distributing centers. The central government is to bear twenty-five percent of the cost of equipment and lend another twenty-five percent to start the enterprise.

Mother's cook stove cannot bear the strain of war economies.

Dropping their old segregation, women are going forth in fellowship with men to meet in new ways the pressing problems of a new world.

A LAND ARMY

Great Britain, France and Germany have mobilized a land army of women; will the United States do less? Not if the farmer can be brought to have as much faith in American women as the women have in themselves. And why should they not have faith; the farm has already tested them out, and they have not been found wanting. In face of this fine accomplishment the minds of some men still entertain doubt, or worse, obliviousness, to the possible contribution of women to land service.

The farmer knows his need and has made clear statement of the national dilemma in the form of a memorial to the President of the United States. In part, it is as follows:

"If food is to win the war, as we are assured on every side, the farmers of America must produce more food in 1918 than they did in 1917. Under existing conditions we cannot equal the production of 1917, much less surpass it, and this for reasons over which the farmers have no control.

"The chief causes which will inevitably bring about a smaller crop next year, unless promptly removed by national action, are six in number, of which the first is the shortage of farm labor.

"Since the war began in 1914 and before the first draft was made there is reason to believe that more farm workers had left farms than there are men in our army and navy together. Those men were drawn away by the high wages paid in munition plants and other war industries, and their places remain unfilled. In spite of the new classification, future drafts will still further reduce the farm labor supply."

With a million and a half men drawn out of the country and ten billion dollars to be expended on war material, making every ammunition factory a labor magnet, it seems like the smooth deceptions of prestidigitation to answer the cry of the farmer with suggestion that men rejected by the draft or high school boys be paroled to meet the exigency. The farm can't be run with decrepit men or larking boys, nor the war won with less than its full quota of soldiers. Legislators, government officials and farm associations by sudden shifting of labor battalions cannot camouflage the fact that the front line trenches of the fighting army and labor force are undermanned.

Women can and will be the substitutes if the experiments already made are signs of the times.

Groups of women from colleges and seasonal trades have ploughed and harrowed, sowed and planted, weeded and cultivated, mowed and harvested, milked and churned, at Vassar, Bryn Mawr and Mount Holyoke, at Newburg and Milton, at Bedford Hills and Mahwah. It has been demonstrated that our girls from college and city trade can do farm work, and do it with a will. And still better, at the end of the season their health wins high approval from the doctors and their work golden opinions from the farmers.

Twelve crusaders were chosen from the thirty-three students who volunteered for dangerous service during a summer vacation on the Vassar College farm. The twelve ventured out on a new enterprise that meant aching muscles, sunburn and blisters, but not one of the twelve "ever lost a day" in their eight hours at hard labor, beginning at four-thirty each morning for eight weeks during one of our hottest summers. They ploughed with horses, they ploughed with tractors, they sowed the seed, they thinned and weeded the plants, they reaped, they raked, they pitched the hay, they did fencing and milking. The Vassar farm had bumper crops on its seven hundred and forty acres, and its superintendent, Mr. Louis P. Gillespie, said, "A very great amount of the work necessary for the large production was done by our students. They hoed and cultivated sixteen acres of field corn, ten acres of ensilage corn, five acres of beans, five acres of potatoes; carried sheaves of rye and wheat to the shocks and shocked them; and two of the students milked seven cows at each milking time. In the garden they laid out a strawberry bed of two thousand plants, helped to plant corn and beans, picked beans and other vegetables. They took great interest in the work and did the work just as well as the average man and made good far beyond the most sanguine expectations."