, our sixty
sculleries, our sixty pantries; of our one hundred and fifty servants,
and our sixty cooks (and cooks so hard to get and to bear with when
you've got them!). And I think of all our dinner sets, of the twelve
thousand pieces of crockery which we need in our little street. To think
of twelve thousand articles of crockery is to realize our remoteness
from the monkey. And the nurses, as they pass, fill me with wonder, for
some of them attend one child, some two, while sometimes three children
have two nurses--until I wonder what percentage of nurse is really
required to keep in order an obviously unruly generation.

Complex, enormous, it is not even cheap. Privacy, the purest jewel
humanity can find, seems to be the dearest. This inflated individual
home, it is marvelous how it has survived! Like most human
institutions, it has probably survived because it was there. It has
taken woman's time; it has taken much of her energy, much of her health
and looks. Worst of all, it seems to have taken from her some of the
consideration to which as a human being she was entitled. Let there be
no mistake about that. In spite of proclamations as to the sacredness of
the home and the dignity of labor, the fact remains that the domestic
man, the kind that can hang a picture straight, is generally treated by
male acquaintances with sorrowful tolerance; should he attempt to wash
the baby, he becomes the kind of man about whom the comic songs are
written. (I may seem rather violent, but I once tried to wash a baby.)
So that apparently the dignified occupations of the household are not
deemed dignified by man. This is evident enough, for office-cleaners,
laundresses, step-girls, are never replaced by men. These are the
feminine occupations, the coarse occupations, requiring no special
intelligence.

The truth is that the status of domestic labor is low. An exception is
made in favor of the cook, but only by people who know what cooking is,
which excludes the majority of the world. It is true that of late years
attempts have been made to raise the capacity of the domestic laborer by
inducing her to attend classes on cooking, on child nurture, etc., but,
in the main, in ninety-nine per cent of bourgeois marriages, it is
assumed that any fool can run a house. It matters very little whether a
fool can run a house or not; what does matter from the woman's point of
view is that she is given no credit for efficient household management,