Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - Women of the Future - 1916.pdf/21

 serving, baking and brewing were to be done in all the individual homes again we would not thereby obtain better and more desirable homes. The only domestic industries that remain in our day are cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing. But to these we have become so accustomed that we cling to them as if they were the spirit and the purpose of the home itself, Many of us cannot picture a home without a cooking stove and a washtub, and many also cannot picture the wife or mother in any other capacity than as a domestic worker. Yet a cooking stove and a washtub are not any more essential to domestic happiness than a spinning-wheel and a hand-loom, nor does a wife and mother become less lovable for being engaged in other than domestic labors. Even at the present time it would be quite possible to have homes without cooking stoves and washtubs. The wonderful mechanical devices that are already in existence and the detailed division and organization of labor as applied in other industries could give us such homes without delay. But under capitalism, machinery is not applied and labor is not specialized and organized unless there are profits to be gotten. The great mass of people, who are the great mass of home-makers, are not in a position to apply modern inventions and modern methods in their own homes to provide for their own comfort, convenience and happiness. But in a society organized for the collective benefit of all its members, new inventions and improved methods will be applied to every kind of human labor, and nothing will be done individually and with antiquated tools that can be done socially and with machinery.

Instead of keeping twenty women in twenty homes confined to their twenty individual kitchens, a well-ordered society will employ three or four women to đo the cooking collectively for those twenty families. Their workshop will be a centrally located kitchen, equipped with every known device to save time, lighten labor, and obtain the best possible results. The cooks themselves will not be amateurs, cooking from a sense of devotion to their families, but highly skilled professional workers. They will be trained for their occupation as carefully as the physician is trained for his, since the health of a community depends