Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/559

Rh in which the household employés have no family ties, doubtless a remedy against social isolation would be the formation of residence clubs, at least in the suburbs, where the isolation is most keenly felt. Indeed the beginnings of these clubs are already seen in the servants' quarters at the summer hotels. In these residence clubs the household employé could have the independent life which only one's abiding place can afford. This, of course, presupposes a higher grade of ability than household employés at present possess; on the other hand it is only by offering such possibilities that the higher grades of intelligence can be secured for household employment. As the plan of separate clubs for household employés will probably come first in the suburbs, where the difficulty of securing and holding "servants" under the present system is most keenly felt, so the plan of buying cooked food from an outside kitchen and of having more and more of the household product relegated to the factory will probably come from the comparatively poor people in the city, who feel most keenly the pressure of the present system. They already consume a much larger proportion of canned goods and baker's wares and "prepared meats" than the more prosperous people do, because they cannot command the skill nor the time for the more tedious preparation of the raw material. It is comparatively easy for an employer to manage her household industry with a cook, a laundress, a waitress, etc. The difficulties really begin when the family income is so small that but one person can be employed in the household for all these varied functions, and the difficulties increase and grow almost insurmountable as they fall altogether upon the mother of the family, who is living in a flat, or worse still, in a tenement house, where one stove and one set of utensils must be put to all sorts of uses, fit or unfit, making the living room of the family a horror in summer, and perfectly insupportable in rainy washing days in winter. Such a woman is living in a complicated age, totally without the differentiation of functions and utensils which that age demands.