art first of the urban movement and
second of that movement away from housekeeping which has been sketched
in the Introduction.

The home has been praised as the nucleus of society, its center, its
heart. Its virtues have been so unanimously extolled that one need but
recite them. It is the embodiment of family, the soul of mother, father,
and children. It is the place where morality and modesty are taught. In
it arise the basic virtues of love of parents, love of children, love of
brothers and sisters; sympathy is thus engendered; loyalty has here its
source. The privacy of the home is a refuge from excitement and struggle
and gives rest and peace to the weary battler with the world. It is a
sanctuary where safety is to be sought, and this finds expression in the
English proverb, "Every Englishman's home is his castle." It is a
reward, a purpose in that men and women dream of their own home and are
thrilled by the thought. Throughout its quiet runs the scarlet thread of
its sex life. Home is where love is legitimate and encouraged.

Yet the home has great faults; it is no more a divine institution than
anything else human is. Without at all detracting from its great, its
indispensable virtues, let us, as realists, study its defects.

On the physical-economic side is the inefficiency and waste inseparable
from individual housekeeping. Labor-saving machinery and devices are
often too expensive for the individual home, and so small stoves do the
cooking and the heating, each individual housewife or her helper washes
by hand the dishes of each little group. Shopping is a matter for each
woman, and necessitates numberless small shops; perhaps the biggest
waste of time and energy lies here. The cooking is done according to the
intelligence and knowledge of nutrition of each housewife, and
housewives, like the rest of the world, range in intelligence from
feeble-mindedness to genius, with a goodly number of the uninformed,
unintelligent, and careless. Poets and novelists and the stage extol
home cooking, but the doctors and dietitians know there are as many
kinds of home cooking as there are kinds of homekeepers. The laboratory
and not the home has been the birthplace of the science of nutrition,
and we have still many traditions regarding the merits of home cooking
and feeding to break from.

Take as one minor example the gorging encouraged on Sunday and certain
holidays. The housewife feels it her duty to slave in a kitc