Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - Women of the Future - 1916.pdf/22

 upon its cooks as much as upon its doctors. In social standing as well as in professional knowledge those cooks of the future will differ radically from the cooks of to-day. Instead of being ignorant persons looked down upon as domestic servants, they will be educated persons respected as social servants. Their important profession, specialized and socialized, will be valued as highly as every other honorable work, But the greatest social gain achieved by the reform of cooking will be a greatly improved state of public health. As advanced medical knowledge is gradually overcoming numerous diseases of dirt and ignorance, so advanced culinary knowledge will gradually overcome the countless unnecessary ailments of humanity's much-abused digestive organs.

The three other domestic occupations, washing, ironing and cleaning, will be socialized just like cooking. The central kitchen will be supplemented by a central laundry, supplying the neigbborhood with immaculate linen, and the laundry, like the kitchen, will be conducted by experts; the laundress, like the cook, will be a skilled worker at her trade, and will labor with the aid of the most advanced, mechanical devices. As surely as stoves, pots and pans, washtubs, and ironing-boards will disappear from the individual homes, so also will brooms, dust-pans, feather-dusters and other antiquated implements of house cleaning disappear. Skilled workers, equipped with vacuum cleaners and other machinery perhaps still to be invented, will enter the homes at fixed hours of each day and will remove every speck of dust by the quickest and simplest methods. It does not even require a great stretch of imagination to picture this socialized house cleaning. Why should dust removal be less of a social concern than garbage removal is even to-day?

With industry completely removed from the home, with every domestic occupation specialized and socialized, the homes of the future will be just homes in the best and sweetest sense of the word. They will be healthful, cheerful, pretty abodes, places for physical and mental comfort, peace and rest, giving each individual perfect privacy, or undisturbed intimacy with those who are