Part 7
My desk is covered always with pamphlets entitled The Profession of Home-making, Food Values, Freehand Cooking on Scientific Principles, and so on, but does this knowledge reach the people? Does it reach the 388,000 school girls? Recently I heard an hour’s talk by a member of the Board of Health on how we ought to know good milk from bad, how careful we should be about canned vegetables, and the horrors of buying tainted meat: but when I asked how the common people could know these facts I could get no satisfaction other than that the way to know whether the milk was good or not was to examine the barns where the cows were milked or have the milk tested; but the people I know are ignorant as to how to wash milk bottles, or why it is wrong to leave the milk uncovered, or why the nipple from the milk bottle can’t be played with, fall on the floor and then be used. This representative from the Board of Health told startling facts about candies and ice cream, sold on push carts, but the audience at this lecture were land owners along the Hudson River, and I doubt if one of them had ever seen an East Side push cart, and I know that not one was ever tempted to buy. Why can’t these facts reach the thousands of children who do buy dyed ice cream and varnished candy, and whose fathers sell these very things?
[Illustration:
A COOKING LESSON ]
We not only have to establish an up-to-date, scientific way to live, but we cannot do this without the help of the tenement house woman. We contribute the ideals, the theories and the science; she must contribute experience. We are up in the air with our castles, she is down in the thick of the fight where the smallness of the tenement room presses upon her, where every day she faces the high price of food and an insufficient income, where a gentle love for her children is constantly at war with a nervous irritability, the product of disorder, noise and confusion.
Do you think this woman does not want a real home? Look at the energy and thought she puts into furnishing her house, the scrimping that preceded the buying of the ugly red carpet and the plush chairs. There were hours of work given to hemming and hanging the ruffles over every door, around every shelf and even around the bath tub. Look at the tarletan festooned around the chandelier and over the pictures; see the dozens of calendars collected and pinned on the wall. Isn’t this a reaching out with all the power that is in a woman to express to her family and her neighbors what, in her ignorance, she believes to be a home? We need the energy and the courage and the experience of these tenement housekeepers, but we must add education; and do we?
Take the daily life of any one of our thousands of little school girls and see how much chance she has to know the science of home-making or even to acquire respect for housework. She is born with the controlling desire to copy. She sees high-heeled shoes on another’s foot; she longs for and saves until she gets shoes like them. Her tight skirt, her big hat, her very walk, are seen first and admired somewhere else, and so the home, whether it is perfect or imperfect, and the school, and the teacher, and what the teacher stands for, make the same vivid pictures in her mind; and some day she is going to grow up and copy as nearly as she can.
This little girl wakes in the morning in one of our crowded tenement houses, wakes to the vivid blue walls, to rooms filled with feather beds which have been thrown all over the floor the night before for the family and the possible boarders to occupy. The dusty carpets, stuffed furniture, long lace curtains and draped mantle meet her eye, and in this home of unrest there is always the crying baby, the naturally cross father and the demand (so well known to every little girl) to hurry up and go to the store and buy breakfast. Poor little tenement girl, she does not even know that in well-managed homes breakfast is bought the day before. She may learn to respect the energy in her home, but she will never forget the disorder, the picture of congestion and confusion and of overwrought, tired nerves that has been stamped forever upon her mind. And no right idea of home is given her to correct this wrong impression.
Everyone knows the way work is done in our tenement homes; how the beds are so large that it is impossible to move them out in the small rooms and make them properly, and how the bed clothes are pushed across, often with a broom handle kept for the purpose; how often the small income makes it necessary to rent out the beds in the day time to night workers, so they are always occupied and never aired. And every one knows how all these things make a girl lose respect for her home, then for her family and, finally, for herself; and how the street seems a peaceful place in comparison.
Ideals of right home-making should in the school correct the home mistakes, but as it is now, not until she reaches the seventh grade does this little tenement girl get her first idea that making a home is a part of education. After she leaves home in the morning she gets only a picture of a schoolroom with forty or fifty desks; of a teacher who in no way is associated in her mind with any house, who, as I heard Mrs. Kelley say not long ago, often brings her lunch in a music roll so that no one will suspect that it is food.
The windows in the schoolroom are washed after school hours (and at that only once or twice a year) by the janitor, the floors are swept by men, swept badly, and always after school. And if this pupil happens to be one of the twenty thousand who leave school each year before reaching the seventh grade, she goes into business not knowing that there is such a thing as scientific knowledge regarding food and air and sun and cleanliness.
And yet this girl is going to marry, bear children and rear them, and you and I are going to hold her responsible if those children are not good citizens. Surely this is not a fair placing of responsibility.
Eleven years ago I started the first housekeeping center in New York. These centers are ordinary tenement flats which find their motive power and are successful by means of the universal love in every little girl to play at keeping house, and the universal desire in every one to copy that which is just above her.
A girl wants her kitchen messes, her dishes, her make-believe baby and her tiny bed or broom just as every boy wants his bat and ball. A housekeeping center takes these natural desires and cultivates them. It is furnished as a home should be furnished, and such questions are answered there as: What shall be done with the floors to insure health and save labor; what with the walls? What curtains are the best to admit light, give beauty to the room and wash easily? What proportion of the sum laid aside for furnishing should go into the buying of pots and pans, what part into mattresses, and is there any reason to spend money for ruffles? What are the proper and necessary tools to work with?
In the housekeeping center the neighbors and the scientifically trained teacher work out these problems together. The teacher’s training in chemistry has taught her that a certain quality of water and a certain kind of soap are necessary for perfect laundry work. The tenement house woman adds what she has learned from bitter experience; that it is hard to heat enough of any kind of water on the stove with coal at ten cents a pail and the stove crowded with pots and pans.
[Illustration:
A LESSON IN BED-MAKING ]
Regular lessons are given in these housekeeping centers morning, afternoon and evening, and as the flat is like the home from which the pupils come (only perfected) its lesson is not dissociated with the daily home duties but is performed under home conditions and, therefore, easy of imitation. Do the pupils want this instruction? The answer is that every class is full and there is a waiting list, and every girl pays for the lessons.
I find it often difficult in selling luncheons in the public schools to persuade the children to give up three cents for a full meal, and yet the children under fourteen in the housekeeping centers are ready always to pay three cents a lesson, and the working girls five cents. And what do they pay for? To learn to clean the sink so that the pipes will not get clogged, to learn to cook substitutes for meat (for meat is too high for many of them), to scrub closets and floors, to make and clean beds. Only last week a class of working girls came to one of the centers and asked for a bedbug lesson. “The people above us are moving out” they said, “and we want to prevent the bugs getting into our house.” A bedbug lesson is not a lecture, it means to roll up one’s sleeves, put on a big apron, get on your knees and scrub, this after working hard all day in a factory or shop. The desire for this knowledge must be very real to make a girl willing to do this extra labor, and to pay for the privilege of doing it out of her scanty wages.
In a housekeeping center it is easy and natural to borrow a baby from the neighbor across the hall when the lesson is “how to bathe and dress a baby.” There is nothing embarrassing about being the patient when the lesson is “how to give a bath in bed and how to change the sheets without disturbing the patient.” Then there are the dinner classes where the pupils make out the menu, do the marketing and cook the meat, and there are lessons in food values.
What I feel that we need today is a housekeeping center in every settlement, so that every girl who is a part of the settlement will feel it almost compulsory upon her to take the course before she marries, and if she is enjoying the intellectual life of the settlement, or the play side, or the social side, she must be learning the home-making side too. We must make our settlement girl feel that the home-making training is more important than mere recreation. The public school will follow the settlement and then, not for one-ninth of our girls will home-making instruction be given, but for every one.
[Illustration:
A KITCHEN-CLEANING LESSON ]
Then there will be in every school the cooking-room, with its individual equipment (necessary, but nothing in it to suggest the kitchen at home). Next to this will be the model flat or center, this to resemble the homes from which the children come, but furnished on scientific lines. For eight years every school girl will see this home, this home made right, and she will work in it. It will be no smattering of cooking at the end of the school course,—but in the beginning, when the love of playing house is strong, then the training will begin. Even in the lowest school grade a child could dust her desk with a damp duster and be told why it should be damp; she could wash her own cup, if milk is served; learn to handle dishes carefully; and train the eye to see things straight and the hand to steadiness.
From these small tasks, the children would graduate to larger duties in the housekeeping center; making beds and washing many dishes. From dusting one desk, the pupil would soon be able to give the flat a thorough cleaning. We find in our center that the love of playing house disappears if it is not cultivated, and the girl of fourteen never drops entirely the wrong way of doing housework, which she need never have acquired if the domestic science teacher could be in her training early enough.
Scientific management means more than “having system.” You may be ever so systematic in the way you do things, but if you happen to be doing them the wrong way, you are doing the way that is unnecessarily expensive in time, energy, money, comfort and beauty.
I believe that the labor in the kitchen will become more and more professionalized. It is too serious a work to be handled by unskilled hands, and we must lose the nervous, irritable, overtired slave of housework and make woman more of a child-trainer and cheerful home-maker. She must guide her home with the quiet and skill and delight with which the engineer drives his engine or the chauffeur his car. This, some day, will be brought about by centralizing the work and by an army of trained workers who will expeditiously and noiselessly do a large part of what each woman is now trying to do herself. But that day can come only when women through universal home-making education push forward and demand this better management of the home.
We must have restlessness and dissatisfaction first. This comes from a realization of the right way and a disgust with the wrong way, and then will come the push from the home-maker herself, not from a few outside reformers. The tenement house occupant now is too ready to accept the fallen plaster, the dish-water that leaks through from the flat above and the dirty and dark halls. Her own senses are dull and she does not see or think about these things, and the tenement house reformer sometimes feels his work has been accomplished by a few bath tubs and a little more light, and then wonders at the indifference with which these gifts are received and blames the abuse of them. Train a girl to know a home of order from one of unrest. Teach a woman to be miserable at the thought of a close room or an unaired bed for her baby, and the social worker can go off and do something else. The power of action is where it ought to be, in the awakened tenement house mother. She will not be content to crowd her family into dark rooms; she will work until she gets space enough and light enough for her children. She will be driven to action because she knows the value of what she has to fight for. When the suffrage comes to women, how naturally then these intelligent, orderly home-makers will take their part in municipal housecleaning!
Let us not be satisfied to force through bills at Albany that improve our tenements; at the same time the tenement girl must be receiving her scientific home training, so that she too, can take her part in this great home-making profession.
A YIDDISH POET
MARY BROWN SUMNER
Whither, whither, pretty child? The world is not yet open. Oh, see how quiet is all around! ’Tis before daybreak, the streets are mute, whither, whither, do you hurry? ’Tis now good to sleep, and do you see, the flowers are still dreaming; every bird’s nest is still silent? Whither pray are you driven now? Whither do you hurry, tell me, and what to do?
To earn a living.
Whither, whither, pretty child walking so late at night? Alone through the darkness and cold? And everything is at rest, the world is silent. Whither does the wind carry you? You will yet lose your way. Scarcely has day smiled on you, how can the night help you? For it is mute and deaf and blind. Whither, whither, with easy mind?
To earn a living.[5]
Thus, ten year before vice commissions began to probe into the connection between white slavery and low pay, wrote Morris Rosenfeld, the Yiddish poet. In March the fiftieth anniversary of his birth was celebrated in Carnegie Hall by a great gathering of the Jewish East Side, under the auspices of the Jewish _Daily Forwards_, to which he is a contributor.
Morris Rosenfeld, as a boy a fisherman on the shores of a Polish lake, early an emigrant from home, and until his health broke down a few years ago a worker in the sweatshops of London and New York, expresses in verse the cry of suffering from persecuted and broken Jew and from exploited and broken worker.
He is no pitiful East Sider struggling for expression, “found” by a Harvard scholar. He is a poet offering no halting rhymes for which apologies are necessary. Yiddish literature has many poets of real genius, but the major part of Rosenfeld’s verse alone, in his Songs from the Ghetto, has been presented to us in English prose, in the translation of Leo Wiener, instructor in Slavonic literature in Harvard.
Through the medium of a language in which, in the expression of Mr. Wiener, German, Polish, Russian and English—the tongues of all countries through which the Jew has passed—contend with Hebrew for the possession of each word, Rosenfeld expresses his meaning with the note of inevitableness and the adaptation of form to thought that is seen only in the work of a great poet.
[Illustration:
MORRIS ROSENFELD
_From an etching by Herman Struck_ ]
His poems are cries of pain out of his own life interpreted in terms of the life of his class. He is always lyric, he is always personal, but he is never egotistical. The story runs that at his machine in the midday hour he would write a lyric of the workshop instead of eating his meager lunch. The song to the working-girl prostitute is one of these workshop poems which like a flash reveal working and living conditions such as in less revealing form have been put before us by investigators.
The twelve-hour day may be said to be the subject of My Boy. The tailor’s baby was always asleep when his father got home from work:
MY BOY
I have a little boy, a fine little fellow is he! When I see him it appears to me the whole world is mine.
Only rarely, rarely I see him, my pretty little son, when he is awake; I find him always asleep, I see him only at night.
My work drives me out early and brings me home late; oh, my own flesh is a stranger to me; oh, strange to me the glances of my child!
I come home in anguish and shrouded in darkness—my pale wife tells how nicely the child plays.
* * * * *
I stand by the cradle.
I stand in pain and anguish and bitterness, and I think: “When you awake some day, my child, you will find me no more.”
Seven-day labor is the burden of the song Despair:
DESPAIR
Is it not allowed to rest even one day in the week and to be at least one day free from the angry growl of the boss, his gloomy mien, his terrible looks; to forget the shop and the cries of the foreman; to forget slavery, to forget woe? You wish to forget yourself and be rested? Never mind, you will soon go to your rest!
Soon the trees and flowers will have withered; the last bird is already ending his song; soon there will be cemeteries all around! Oh, how I should like to smell a flower and feel, before the grass is dead, the breath of zephyr in the green fields! You wish to be in the fields where it is airy and green? Never mind you will be carried there soon enough!
The brook is silvery and glistens beautifully; the waves are covered with a heavenly grace. Oh, how good it is to bathe there! How I should enjoy leaping into it! My body is weakened from the dreadful work,—how they both would refresh me! Oh, you wish to make your ablution in the brooks? Be not frightened, you will soon receive your ablution!
The sweatshop is dark and smoky and small. How can my white blouse be clean there? In the dirty shop cleanliness is unknown to me. How a pure white shirt adorns a man! How proper for a noble body it is, in order to be free to work humanely and be clean withal! You wish now to dress yourself in white? They will dress you, and dress you quickly enough!
The woods are breezy, in the woods it is cool. How good to dream there quietly! The little birds sing pleasantly; but in the shop there is noise, and the air is suffocating! Oh, you wish to be cool?
Of what avail is a forest to you? It will not be long before you will be cold.
’Tis good to have a dear companion. In adversity he gives hope, in misery—courage. A dear companion sweetens your being, and he gives you a zest for life. And I am orphaned alone like a stone, there are no companions, I am all by myself—you will soon have companions without end; they swarm already and are waiting for you!
The Pale Operator gives a hint of the ravages of tuberculosis in the garment trade:
THE PALE OPERATOR
I see there a pale operator all absorbed in his work. Ever since I remember him, he has been sewing and using up his strength.
Months fly, and years pass away, and the pale faced one still bends over his work and struggles with the unfeeling machine.
I stand and look at his face; his face is besmutted and covered with sweat. I feel that it is not bodily strength that works in him but the incitement of the spirit.
And the tears fall in succession from day break until fall of night and water the clothes and enter into the seams.
Pray how long will the weak one drive the bloody wheel? Who can tell his end? Who knows the terrible secret?
Hard, very hard to answer that! But one thing is certain: when the work will have killed him another will be sitting in his place and sewing.
A desire for life—if it is a feast, he would sit at it; if it is a dream he would have it a beautiful one—a love of the outdoor country life which he knew as a boy and which he believed all should enjoy, mingled with a sense of impotence and despair, varying with outbursts of wailing and outbursts of hate, these things characterize the poetry of Morris Rosenfeld. For all his power to vizualize and voice the world about him, he is never constructive, never militant, and seldom even virile.[6] In few poems does he express any hope for the future. In a mood of despair he writes the beautiful workshop poem:
A TEAR ON THE IRON
I groan and cough and press, and think My eye grows damp, a tear falls; the iron is hot, My little tear it seethes and seethes and will not dry up.
I feel no strength, it is all used up; the iron falls from my hand, and yet the tear, the silent tear, the tear, the tear boils more and more.
My head whirls, my heart breaks. I ask in woe: “Oh, tell me, my friend in adversity and pain, O tear, why not dry up in seething.”