MORE PLEASURE FOR THE PRODUCER OF HOUSEHOLD STUFF

MORE pleasure for the producer of household stuff! And who is he or she? He used to be the village cabinet maker at work in a little shop, with a few friends, making furniture for his neighbor’s use. She used to be the housewife working at home, with her daughters, at spindle or at loom, making tablecloths and napkins, bed furnishings, and carpets for use in her own family. Now the cabinet maker, having deserted his little shop, has moved up to town and become an employee in a great manufacturing establishment; and the housewife, having ceased entirely from producing, is trying to content herself with buying and with using. The producer of household stuff today is neither housewife nor village cabinet maker, but a factory “hand.”

The producer of old had pleasures of which the producer of the present knows not. He had the quiet and safety and healthfulness of a small shop. He had common interest with fellow-workers and apprentices in village politics or in church affairs. Best of all, perhaps, there was a personal quality in his work, because it was done for friends or for acquaintances, and an ever present sense of its importance, because it met needs which he had seen and recognized and which his own manner of life, similar to that of the consumer and on the same social plane, prepared him to understand. He had, for example, possibly known for months that his neighbor was saving money with which to hire him to make the chest of drawers upon which he was working, and there was a zest and a delight in his labor because he knew just how much she needed the piece of furniture, just where it was to stand, and just what purpose it was to serve. The favorable conditions of the work, the pleasant surroundings, the personal quality of labor, the feeling of its direct usefulness, were intensified in case of the housewife who worked in her own house with and for those she loved.

Now conditions are different. The factory hand spends his working day in a great, dingy shop, with the maddening din of machinery in his ears. His associates are strangers, with whom he has little or nothing in common besides his work. He labors for an indefinite, far-away consumer whose manner of life is unknown to him. He has with this consumer neither the fellow-feeling which comes from sharing life in the same community, nor its only substitute, the ability which comes from broad education and from travel to project one’s self in imagination across space and to put one’s self in the place of a stranger and to realize his needs.

The industrial changes which have taken from the producer a large part of his pleasure in work have not, of course, been without their compensating advantages. Of these the chief, perhaps, has come to the housewife, and consists in the opportunity to buy, ready made and at low cost, most of the articles which it used to be necessary for her to make at home. This advantage, with its corollary, increased leisure, comes to her, however, in her capacity as consumer and not in that of producer. When we consider the amount of pleasure which it is possible to derive from one’s own useful, well-directed labor, compared with that which comes from buying and using the results of other people’s work, we know that the permanent substitution of the consumer’s advantage for the producer’s joy in labor cannot be a part of progress. If the world is to move forward, the consumer’s leisure, which is the chief advantage of the present system of production, must be made the means of restoring the maker’s pleasure in his work.

Without attempting to analyze all the changes which resulted in the worker’s present hapless condition, it may be said that the loss of his joy in labor was directly due to loss of sympathy between him and the consumer of his wares. This loss of sympathy was in turn due to a separation which was partly physical and partly spiritual. The physical separation took place when the producer went to live in a factory town or in a city district devoted to manufacturing interests, and when the consumer sought refuge in a suburb or in a city district boasting of its freedom from factories. Ignorance on the part of each of the daily life and needs of the other was the inevitable consequence of this form of separation. The separation in spirit took place when the world divided itself sharply into two groups—brain workers, on the one hand, who joined themselves with the leisure classes to form a consuming public; and manual laborers, on the other, who assumed all the handwork of production. With the difference in the character of work and the loss of common interests and aims which followed this division, there came an estrangement more profound than that which mere distance has power to effect.

If the producer is again to have delight in his work, sympathy between him and the consumer must be restored. This will never take place so long as the latter contents himself with good-natured, patronizing expression of interest. The two must again know the fellow-feeling which can come only from sharing a common life, common associations, and common aspirations.

At present, when the workers are huddling themselves together around the factories, and the buyers and users are withdrawing themselves to country homes, while part of the consuming public is actively hostile to the welfare of the producer, while another part is indifferent, and while still another part, though neither hostile nor indifferent, is handicapped by poverty and the pressure of daily needs, and almost compelled to buy commodities in the cheapest market, without reference to the conditions of their production, it seems idle to talk about restoring sympathy. And yet, in spite of the apparent hopelessness of the present situation, there is an occasional promising sign which points to a better state of things in the future.

Encouragement lies not so much in what has already been accomplished as in certain conditions and circumstances which provide that ever happy and hopeful combination, the will and the way. The will is shown in the growing disposition of the home-maker, who of all consumers exercises greatest control over the producer, to assume responsibility not only for the one who labors in her kitchen or sewing room, but also for the one who works for her in the far-off factory. The way has already appeared in the rough in the form of leisure, and it is interesting to note that certain changes which are taking place in society are smoothing out the path and giving the home-maker a fair chance of accomplishing something when she chooses to devote her leisure to the effort to restore sympathetic relations between the makers and the users of household stuff.

The first condition of sympathy is knowledge. The housekeeper used to get acquainted with the one who made the articles in use in her home naturally and in the course of her ordinary daily occupations. Now she can get acquainted only by an effort independent of her regular work. This effort must usually take the form of reading and study. Here, of course, is where the advantage of her new-found leisure appears, but even the desire to learn and the time in which to learn would avail little if it were not for the fact that the means of securing information are continually improving. The student of social conditions has come out of his library and is living among men as well as among books. He is going down where the industrial war is being waged most fiercely, and is gaining at first hand knowledge concerning the toiling masses. The information thus secured he is giving to the public partly through his college class work. There was a time, even after colleges were opened to girls, when knowledge so given would have been unavailable for the housekeeper. Now no one is ever too old to go to school, and no one feels out of place in school. But the woman who cannot take systematic courses in economics and sociology still has a chance to learn. She can get information by residence in settlements, from books and periodicals, and through summer assemblies and university extension lectures. Thus the will which is manifested in a quickened social conscience is finding the way in improved methods of spreading information.

It is not, however, enough for the consumer to know the producer. The latter also must have opportunity to get acquainted with the world for which he labors. If he is to feel the usefulness of his work he must have a good general education and a broad outlook. These no boy or girl has at the age of ten or even fourteen, and few are able to obtain if taken from school at that early age. The years of childhood must, as Mrs. Kelley says, “be held sacred to the work of education and free from the burden of wage-earning.” A second hopeful sign of the times lies in the fact that women are uniting in the effort to extend and to enforce laws against child labor and in favor of compulsory education, and are striving to improve the public school system and to adapt it to the needs of the children of those whom we call “the working classes.”

But if children are to become intelligent and joyful workers they must have good physical and mental and moral inheritance and good home care. They must have healthy and wise mothers. Among the means of producing such mothers we may not include night work in factories for women and girls, nor long hours of day work, nor even short hours at certain harmful and dangerous occupations. The investigations which are being made in the United States at present into the conditions of women’s work are most significant. To encourage such investigations and the legislation for the protection of future mothers, which will inevitably follow, is as much the duty of the home-maker as to provide a comfortable room for her household helper. Her home profits by the work of women in factories quite as much as it does by that of domestic servants.

But second-hand information concerning the toilers can lead to nothing further than measures for the alleviation of their woes. If real fellow-feeling is to be restored, producer and consumer must get acquainted through actual contact. They must share the same life. This immediately suggests, of course, life for the consumer under the pall of factory smoke. But the conditions under which commodities are made ought not to be so hideous as they are. There is no place too beautiful to be the workshop of a human being. Our ideal for the future must be for every man to have a little plot of ground, and to live and to work where he can say:

When the producer finds a place like that, the consumer will be glad to live next door to him.

And is this an idle dream of a Utopia beyond all possibility of realization? Well, there is earth enough surely, and every day the electric cars and telephones are making it possible for us to spread out over the land without getting out of communication with the world. It may be possible for the producer of the future to live next door to the consumer without being very close to him.

Then half, at least, of the machinery which makes the worker an undesirable neighbor is unnecessary, whether we consider his needs or the consumer’s. From the point of view of the latter, this unnecessary machinery is being used in manufacturing abominable trash, or in making articles to take the place of others which were badly made and faded or fell to pieces, or wore out before their time. From the point of view of the worker, much of our modern machinery saves labor which it would be life and health and happiness for him to perform by hand. All the assistance he needs from machinery is a little power to take the place of his muscular energy and to save his strength and vitality for brain work. He wants a machine which shall be his slave as he works out his designs into useful and beautiful articles, not a tyrant which he must “tend” all day long. A small machine is a much better slave than a big one. If the workers should spread themselves out over the country with their small machines, this would not mean the sacrifice of any real good in the present system. Improved methods of transmitting power are making it possible for each community to have a central power plant from which energy may be sent to run the seamstress’s sewing machine, the carpenter’s lathe, the potter’s wheel, and the rug-maker’s loom. Thus the present desire to simplify life and the present dissatisfaction with the flimsiness of the average factory-made article, which create a demand for a smaller and better product, combine with improved means for transportation, for communication, and for transmission of power to make it practicable for small workshops to take the place, to a certain extent, of large factories, and to make it possible for the producer of household stuff to become a desirable neighbor.

The shops that are springing up all over the country in connection with technical schools show the advantages of labor under good conditions. In addition to the students’ workrooms there is usually, in connection with these schools, a shop where men are employed to make furniture and other articles for the institution. The demands of instruction make it possible to equip these shops with apparatus which would otherwise be too costly. Such places offer a man pleasant conditions for work, a stimulus to mental activity, and an opportunity to see the direct results of his labor. I have in mind such a school and shop. There, one day, the girls of the cooking class served orange ice and rolled wafers to the engineer and the carpenter. I felt sure that, good as the ice and wafers were, they tasted better to the carpenter because they were passed on a tray he had made, and to the engineer because he had made the tins on which the wafers were baked. There is a satisfaction in seeing the products of one’s labor in actual use.

Another hopeful sign lies in the fact that illustrated magazines which are published in the interests of the Arts and Crafts movement and of household decoration are spreading knowledge of design and are making it desirable to hire work done by local cabinet makers. In the Northwestern University Settlement, in Chicago, there is good furniture, including a beautiful round table for the reading room, which was made in a small shop after designs furnished by one of the residents.

It is not even enough, however, for the producer and consumer to come into contact. They must have the same interests. These common interests the manual training schools are supplying. Such schools are training the children of the rich to work with their hands. At the same time they are offering an education of more immediate practical value than was the purely cultural education of old, and are for this reason attracting the children of the poor, who used to be put early to work. The young people who are to be the manual laborers of the future are getting their apprenticeship under conditions which give culture and general information. Thus the technical school tends to destroy the class distinction between brain workers and hand workers.

There is, however, a suspicion that some manufacturers, under the cloak of interest in technical education, are advocating the extension of manual training courses for their own selfish purposes, rather than for the general good; that they are seeking to increase the number of skilled workers among whom they may choose, and to make themselves independent of labor organizations. It is fair to the labor organizations to hear both sides in this, as in other matters where there seems to be a conflict of interests between employer and employed. Through the Woman’s Trade Union League, which has branches in most of our large cities, housekeepers may learn the women workers’ side as it is presented by themselves.

There is encouragement also in the revival of the handicrafts. A few people are making articles of household utility because they like the work. These people are living examples of joy in labor. The movement is important, also, because it tends to the establishment of democratic relations. Experience has shown that when a woman whose connections have been entirely with those who shared her ability to buy and to spend becomes seriously interested in some form of handiwork her whole manner of life changes. She is no longer free to participate in purposeless social functions. To her studio teas she is likely to welcome those who are working at her own or at similar crafts without reference to their social position. Thus gradually and naturally and without any sudden severing of relationships she passes from the aristocracy of those who have to the aristocracy of those who do. It may be that in this way real sympathy between classes is to be restored.

In spite of hopeful signs, the great mass of those who produce our household stuff still work under conditions which arrest bodily and mental development, shorten life, and crush out happiness. There is not enough encouragement in the present situation to lull to inactivity any one who is interested in the improvement of the producer’s conditions, but just enough to prevent complete discouragement and to suggest promising fields for future work in the interest of those who make what others use.