1984 Ethics Paper

8

Professional Approaches to Domesticity Visitors who thronged th World's Colum- bian Expo ition in Chicago in 1893 found their fanta ie about home life in th twen- tieth century timulated. Technology ac- compli hed marvel in utopian fiction but it wa at lea t a persuasiv to e th Rumford Kitchen fe ding ten thou and people at the fair a to read Edward Bel- lamy on ociali t B ton . It wa much more convincing to leave on ' chi ldr n at the model kindergarte n in the hildren Building than to tud Marie H wland fiction al child car arrang m nt for a o- cial Pal ac . It wa far mor thrilling to stroll under the electri Ii ht illuminatin the fairground in Chicag th c- tric tramcars and in peel th tric kitchen , than to decipher th dia ram of Henry Olerich' fictional I ctrified ttle- ments on Ma .

The ci nti t who " ork caught th at- tention of many dome tic r formers and hou ewi e at the exp ition " Ell n Swallow Richard (8.1) who rd Kitchen wa part of the Ma achu tt ex- hibit. The public kitchen d igned a a small white clapboard h u e with a peaked roof and a broad inviting front porch promi ed to fit perfectl into an conventional neighborhood of mode t single-family homes. Inside hm ever " as all the equipment of a scientific laboratory designed to extract the maximum amount of nutrition from food sub tance and the maximum heat from fuel. The public kitchen appealed to visitors' wit with mot-

Public Kitchens, Social Settlements, and the Cooperative Ideal

to and humorous quotations about food by famous authors hung on the walls; it appealed to their palates, with Boston baked beans and brown bread, among other pecialties; it appealed to their pock- etbooks with low prices and complimen- tary analy e of the proteins, fats, carbohy- drate and calories in each portion. This e hibit excited housewives, organizers of

ial ettlements and faculty from univer- iti where home economics was part of

th curriculum. The members of the new ational Hou ehold Economics Associa-

ti n found d in Chicago at the exposition, made public kitchen in poor di tricts part of their platform; Jane Addams of Hull- H u ordered the equipment for a public kitchen for her ettlement hou e· Marion Talbot Dean of Women at the University of Chicago carried off the exhibit's equip- m nt for her tudent when the fair was o er. new approach to collective domes- tic life eemed to be emerging, under the leade hip of a mall group of highly edu- cated women trained to use the latest tech- nological in ention .

The excitement about public kitchens centered on two new profes ional fields dominated by women home economics and ocial work which came into being be- tween 1887 and 1910. Together these two field channeled the energies of many newly educated American women into the reform projects of the Progressive Era, and had a profound influence on American home and families especially working- cla and immigrant families. These

women pioneered the use of applied natu- ral science and social science to analyze the problem of urban life; their subject matter ranged over chemistry, medicine, law, ar- chitecture, sociology, and economics, spe- cialization in which many of them were originally trained. They stressed women's collective attempts to improve the public environment and the domestic lives of or- dinary people, and cooperative housekeep- ing was a familiar concept to them.

"We all became acquainted with the ideal picture in the once famous 'Looking Backward' of Edward Bellamy," recalled Mary Hinman Abel, a noted home econo- mist:" ... instead of fifty incompetent buyers at retail, one efficient buyer at wholesale; a chef ... master of his art, and also of the new knowledge in nutrition now available; one kitchen fire instead of fifty; ... the peripatetic housemaid and all other workers responsible to a bureau; the house heated from a central station, where a competent engineer shall extract from each pound of coal all the heat it should yield." 1 During the two decades after Bellamy's novel appeared in 1888, the new generation of professional women like Abel who were engaged in home economics and social settlement work broadened the definition of cooperative housekeeping created by earlier material feminists and utopian noveli ts. As specialists in nutri- tion, sanitation, and social welfare, they were the embodiment of an earlier generation's call for experts to deal with domestic life yet when they examined the domestic world in terms of their new spe-

152 Widening Circles of Reform

cialties, they eventually redefined "cooper- ative housekeeping" in favor of "social housekeeping" and altered the feminist and socialist thrust of earlier theories.

Democracy and scientific standards for the whole society became their slogans, as opposed to Melusina Fay Peirce's call for economic and psychological self- determination for women, or Edward Bellamy's prophecy of evolutionary social- ism. The choice of constituencies, the de- sign of experiments, and the arguments in favor of collective domesticity all shifted to reflect a serious concern for poor urban im- migrants. The new professionals shared the earlier reformers' commitment to the pri- vate home, but they wished to create mu- nicipal facilities and services, rather than neighbors' cooperatives, to complement the home. They believed that such services were compatible with a democratic, capi- tali t society. They saw domestic issues as public issues and domestic skills as public skills: thus was born the concept of "women's public work for the home," un- dertaken by determined women reformers in corrupt, filthy American industrial cities.

The women whose work most reflected this new approach to domestic life were El- len Swallow Richards, Instructor in Sani- tary Chemistry at MIT, and Jane Addams, head of Hull-House in Chicago. As leaders in home economics and social settlement work, they engaged in organizing activities far broader than Peirce's attempts to or- ganize her neighbors and their servants or Howland's communitarian ventures. Rich-

ards and Addams were concerned with build ing coalitions of philanthropists, civil servants, academics, and professionals to deal with the vast physical and social prob- lems of the urban slums. They had a much keener and more realistic sense of class in- terests than any of the reformers who pre- ceded them, and this knowledge ultimately showed itself in mistrust of voluntary coop- eration. These women tended to prefer forms of organizatio n that emphasized the partnership of the state and the skilled pro- fessional, the latter usually an idealistic, university-trained woman who saw herself as an advocate for the needs of poor women and children, especially the single women and married women in the paid la- bor force who were concentrated in city slums. In addition to their own professional recruits, Richards and Addams drew edu- cated women volunteers from groups such as the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Many of these volunteers have been called "social feminists,'' women who believed in women's rights but were most active in campaigns for broad social re- forms2 in the areas of sanitation, housing, health, temperance, and social purity, areas in which they attempted to obey Frances Willard's command to "make the whole world homelike."

In the 1880s and 1890s, the earliest years of home economics and social settlement work, professionals and their helpers spent a good part of their time devising collective or cooperative services. For every apart-

153 Public Kitchens, Social Settlements, and the Cooperative Ideal

ment hotel built for the affluent in this era with collective kitchens, laundries, and other facilities, there were fifty tenements crowded with immigrant workers living in kitchenless apartments from need rather than from choice (8.2). In Chicago's tene- ment districts, surveyed by Robert Hunter in 1900, dwelling units averaged under 300 square feet, divided into small , often unventilated rooms, occupied by large families and their boarders, so that an indi- vidual had on the average 28 to 32 square feet of space. At 457 people per acre, these areas were said to be the most densely pop- ulated in the world. 3 In these dwellings, cooking was done in the main room, which was provided with a stove, also used for heating. This room might have a sink, but often shared sinks (or simply pumps) were in the halls or the back yard. Stinking basement privies were shared by an aver- age of eight people; as many as half were illegal privies without proper sewer connec- tion . Ninety-seven percent of the Chicago tenement units were without bathtubs, de- pite the fact that many of their almost

one million residents were employed in laughterhouse work. 4

Under such circumstances, cooperative housekeeping strategies took on a new ignificance. Although residents of tene-

ment districts needed more kitchens, baths, laundries, and kindergartens, it was not clear that simply reorganizing existing re- sources could provide them. The elite of Cambridge, Massachusetts, could afford to buy $50 shares in a cooperative kitchen, but the neediest residents of the Nine-

154 Widening Circles of Reform

8.2 Tenement house residents : photograph by Jacob Riis showing a family of seven crowded into a room with stove and dishes at left , unven- tilated bedroom with interior window at rear

teenth Ward in Chicago had no capital to invest in cooperatives. In this context, co- operative housekeeping often became a philanthropists' slogan, suggestive of the most efficient ways of giving money for fa- cilities in slum districts, rather than a slo- gan of the tenement dwellers themselves. Although housewives in the Knights of La- bor did organize cooperative housekeeping as residents of one New York tenement in the 1880s, such projects were more likely to be initiated by reformers with outside funds. 5 As one reformer, Elisabeth Bisland, explained it in 1889, cooperative hou e- keeping schemes could complement philan- thropic model tenement projects. Public kitchens countered "the numberless ill re- sulting from improperly nurtured bodies"; public baths promoted bathing, as an aid to "mental, moral, and physical sanity"; public laundries (8.3) promoted cleanli- ness; and public kindergartens (6.6, 8.4) lightened the burden of the employed mother.

Since these facilities were usually or- ganized for the poor, not by the poor, they reflected the philanthropists', home econo- mists', and settlement workers' ideas of proper organization. Gone were some affluent women's visions of cooperative kitchens delivering elegant, seven-course dinners and cooperative laundries present- ing rows of snowy ruffles on dress shirts, perfectly ironed. A sufficient supply of hot soup and enough coal to last the week were more to the point. Expertise first developed in total institutions such as the kitchens and laundries of hospitals, poorhouses, and

155 Public Kitchens, Social Settlements, and the Cooperative Ideal

military camps had to be translated into attractive, non-profit services which poor people would voluntarily patronize in urban districts. To reconcile these new services with democratic goals, home econ- omists and settlement workers overlaid the rhetoric and technology of earlier philan- thropic reforms with the rhetoric of cooper- ative housekeeping and the techniques of new physical and social sciences.

Public Kitchens A developed by Ellen Swallow Richards and Mary Hinman Abel, the public kitchen took the form of a scientific labora- tory. The services it offered were advanced in the name of the employed mother, who had no time to prepare cooked food for her family, and the employed father, lured to aloon for food and drink. By offering in-

expen ive, nutritious, cooked food to take home, founders of the public kitchens promi ed to combat malnutrition, the un- economical use of fuel, and the exhaustion of women workers. Most of all, they prom- i ed to replace gin with good dinners. In an era of urban pollution and adulterated food the kitchens were to be spotles ly clean paces for scientific demonstrations of methods of right living.

"It is a part of the New Philanthropy to recognize that the social question is largely a question of the stomach . . . ,'' con- tended Mary Hinman Abel in a leaflet published in 1893, part of a series of publi- cations promoting the establishment of public kitchens in American cities.6 The first public kitchen, The New England

156 Widening Circles of Reform

8.3 Reformer's "before" and "after" sketches: tenement wash day versus a cooperative laundry in a model tenement project, Cosmopolitan, No- vember 1889

8.4 Model tenement house with kindergarten, 338- 344 Cherry Street, New York, Tenement House Building Company, 1887. Dwelling units include two or three rooms. Water closets are shared . Dumbwaiters lift coal from the base- ment. The kindergarten is for the care of chil- dren of employed mothers.

Kitchen designed by Abel and Richards in 1890, improved upon the charitable soup kitchens (8.5 ), which were often opened during times of economic depression and the saloons which sold food only to cus- tomers who bought alcohol as well. The kitchen was intended to complement a neighborhood of tenement house and in- expensive apartment house , and to du- cate both poor people and the slightly more affluent about nutrition.

The philanthropi t who upported the New England Kitchen Pauline Aga iz Shaw, had given money earlier for numer- ous day nurseries and kindergarten in Boston and eventually upported everal settlement hou es. 7 Th recipient of haw's gift, Ellen Swallow Richard wa well known a a cientist concerned with tand- ards of purity in water air and food. 8

Born in Dunstable, Massachusetts in 1842, she was the daughter of a tarmer and storekeeper. A a young woman he had occasionally "hired out' to local families to make some extra money and had taught school but she demon trated a persi tent desire for more education. In 1873 she be- came the first woman to receive a B.S. de- gree from MIT and was al o the fir t woman appointed to the MIT faculty heading a special "Women Laboratory" in 1875, funded by the Boston Women's Education Association. A deceptively frail- looking woman with sparkling eyes and great stamina, she turned her home in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston into an experiment station for new domestic technologies.

157 Kitchens, Social Settlements, and the Cooperative Ideal

Richards's broad scientific and social in- terests which won her the nickname 'Ellencyclopedia," made her a key figure in a network of publi'c-spirited, university- trained women active in education, settle- ment work and government. Her early publications included the results of work on copper and vanadium; on the chemistry of cooking and cleaning; on the testing of water supplies; and on the detection of adulterated foods. In 1890, when MIT es- tabli hed the first program in sanitary e ngin ering in the United States, Richards taught the analysis of water, air, and sew- age.9 In 1892 he chose the term "oekol- ogy to introduce "the science of normal family life or "the cience which teaches the principles on which to found healthy and happy homes." 10 In later years she wa to call this same interdisciplinary field " home economics' (the economics of con- umption ) and " euthenics," (the science of

co ntrollable environment). 11

To assi t her in founding an experimen- tal cientific public kitchen, Ellen Rich- ard recruited Mary Hinman Abel , who had a good knowledge of philanthropic kitchen in Europe, such as the cucini popu- lari in Modena and the Volkskuchen in Vienna Leipzig, and Berlin (8.6). Abel was al o an expert in nutrition. On January 24, 1890, the New England Kitchen, at 142 Plea ant Street in Boston, began selling plain inexpensive, nutritious , Yankee food: beef broth· beef stew; vegetable, tomato, and pea soup; boiled corn and oatmeal mu h· boiled hominy; cracked wheat; fish chowder; Indian and rice pudding. 12 The

8.5 Soup kitchen, 110 Centre Street, New York, one of eight founded by Commodore Jam es Gor- don Bennett, proprietor of the New York Herald, to feed the poor after the Panic of 1873. It opened in February 1874, offering soup prepared by the fashionable chef of Delmonico's Restau- rant, Mr. Charles Ranhoffer, and served 2,000 people in one day with quart-size tin mugs of

soup. According to Frank Leslie's Illustrated News- paper, March 7, 1874, "Experienced philanthro- pists declared the soup the best they had ever tasted in an institution of the kind," and re- porters attributed this to the chef and the fact that "the kettles are cleaned each day, and the rooms are as neat as a New England kitchen."

8.6 Berlin, soup kitchen for the poor, founded by Lina Morgenstern, 1866, shown in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, May 14, 1870, along with the report that in an eighteen-day period, the kitchen, established by order of the Commis- sioners of Charities and Corrections, had sold 111,385 quarts of soup to the poor.

kitchen (8. 7) looked like a scientific labora- tory and was equipped with a new inven- tion, the slow-cooking Aladdin Oven, de- signed by Edward Atkinson, as well as a steam plant, a gas table, and various other experimental equipment. Richards was a consultant for Atkinson's company and an enthusiastic advocate of his oven, which, he believed, would bring about "the ideal

life of the twentieth century, as shown by Bellamy." 13

Using the Aladdin Oven, the kitchen aimed to take "cheaper cuts of meat and impler vegetables," and by slow and thor-

ough cooking, make them attractive and secure "their nutritive value ... for the people who sadly needed more nutritious food." 14 Frequent chemical analyses of the food, under the direction of Richards and Dr. Thomas M. Drown of MIT, supported guarantees of its nutritious value. It fired the enthusiasm of many philanthropists as well as experts in nutrition and domestic technology. In the next four years two similar enterprises were launched in Boston's West End and North End, and others in Olneyville, Rhode Island; at 341 Hudson Street, New York (8.8); and at Hull-House in Chicago. 15

Richards and Abel achieved their greatest publicity from the Rumford Kitchen (8.9) exhibited at the World's Co- lumbian Exposition in 1893. The kitchen was named after Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, whom Richards and Abel admired for his experiments in the design of toves and his attempts in 1790 to feed th poor in Munich "scientifically." In

159 Public Kitchens, Social Settlements, and the Cooperative Ideal

their leaflets, distributed at the fair, they quoted Rumford's comments on wasting energy: "The common kitchen range seems to have been calculated for the express purpose of devouring fuel"; "it is a com- mon habit to boil a dish of tea with fuel sufficient to cook a dinner for fifty men." 16 Where they differed with Rumford was on the question of compulsory feeding. Rum- ford was an authoritarian inventor who had moved the destitute of Munich into a House of Industry to begin his experiments in feeding them, whereas Richards and Abel hoped to persuade women and men to patronize their facilities by choice. Al- though the scientific kitchen was a big suc- cess at the Chicago exposition, where ten thousand visitors passed through in two months, the urban, philanthropic kitchens feeding workers every day had serious problems with popular tastes. 17 Immi- grants preferred their national dishes and spices to the plain, institutional menu which domestic science dictated. As Rich- ards ruefully admitted, a man from South- ern Europe pointed to an Indian pudding, complaining, "You needn't try to make a Yankee out of me by making me eat that." 18

The advocates of public kitchens were undaunted by immigrants' preferences for their own cuisines. They modified their menus. They attempted to find and edu- cate a younger audience through preparing lunches available to children in public schools (taking this business away from school janitors and their wives). They brought lunch to women workers in

8. 7 New England Kitchen, main office, founded by Ellen Swallow Richards and Mary Hinman Abel, 142 Pleasant Street, Boston, 1890. Equip- ment included weights to measure food, insu- lated containers for customers to carry it home, and glassware and gas jets suggesting the scientific laboratories at MIT after which the kitchen was patterned.

8.8 New England Kitchen , branch at 341 Hud- son Street , New York, founded December 1891, showing the bare spaces of a laboratorylike area equipped with apparatus for cooking by steam and gas

8.9 The Rumford Kitchen , an exhibit set up by Ellen Swallow Richards and Mary Hinman Abel for the World's Columbian Exposition , 1893, on the exterior a small, single-family clap- board house with a broad front porch

factories, who were often the worst nourished workers because of low salaries paid to women and because of traditional practices in homes and cafes of giving men more and better food. 19 They offered spe- cial broths to hospitals and to invalids. They provided food as well to the growing numbers of middle-class professionals resid- ing in settlement houses. They began to give cooking lessons to schoolchildren, housewives, domestic servants, and dieti- cians.

Although the home economists managed to get by financially and to keep some of their public kitchens running, they were never able to raise the funds to build the new facilities they dreamed of. One Eng- lish architectural design (8.10) for a public kitchen from the mid-1880s suggests the type of building both European and American experts in nutrition desired to erect. Captain M. P. Wolff, formerly a German military officer, became interested in feeding the poor in England, after learn- ing of various "penny kitchens" and other philanthropic schemes in Scotland and England. With some advice from an Eng- lish architect, William White, he designed a pl blic kitchen and dining room. 20 It in- clu<1ed a waiting hall adjoining the street, wrae customers could buy cooked food to take home, filling their carrying vessels with hot water as insulation. In the same space, cashiers sold tickets for food. Cus- tomers who wished to eat on the premises would proceed to the dining room, passing the lavatories on the way. The dining room was supplied with straight rows of benches

162 Widening Circles of Reform

and tables; at the rear was an exit to sim- plify circulation. The heart of the scheme was a kitchen fitted with roasters, steam kettles, meat cutting areas, and all the spe- cialized equipment of a hotel kitchen. Here was the focus of Wolfrs calculations in his pamphlet, Food/or the Million.

This was also the ideal of Richards and Abel , who hoped that their laboratory kitchens would be found in every town and city. Although the National Household Ec- onomics Association, formed in 1893, made public kitchens part of its national pro- gram, only in the twentieth century have mass production food chains succeeded commercially. Wolfrs ideas about "food for the million " were thought to be a bit am- bitious and authoritarian in 1884, but "the Colonel's face is all over the place," in the Kentucky Fried Chicken campaigns of to- day, and McDonald's boasts of having sold twenty-five billion burgers.

Social Settlements While public kitchens remained demon- stration projects in the 1890s, social settle- ment houses represented the great success of urban cooperative housekeeping in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu- ries. Here advocates of day care centers, public kitchens , and cooperative housing for industrial workers, servants, and profes- sionals, gathered to build innovative resi- dential communities.

Preeminent among social settlement or- ganizers was Jane Addams, the daughter of a banker and politician from Cedarville, Il- linois, born in 1860 and described as

163 Public Kitchens, Social Settlements, and the Cooperative Ideal

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8.10 M. P. Wolff, plan for a public kitchen, 1884. Patrons may buy food to take away, in the waiting hall, or they may eat in the dining hall. Taps in the waiting hall are to fill double-walled tin carrying vessels with hot water to insulate hot food. Dotted lines show circulation paths.

"Saint Jane" and "an American abbess." The reforms undertaken by her settlement house illustrate some of the broader trends in social work and illuminate the ties be- tween the residents of settlement houses, who developed many community outreach programs, and home economists, who were involved in research, teaching, and demon- stration work in nutrition, child rearing, housing, and sanitation. 21

Beginning in 1889 Jane Addams and two associates "settled" in an immigrant neighborhood in Chicago, creating Hull- House, a secular community of dedicated reformers, who lived and worked among the immigrants of the Nineteenth Ward, attempting to gain firsthand knowledge of the poverty, disease, and exploitation they suffered. In 1890 Chicago had a population of one million, three-quarters of whom were immigrants, mostly living in crowded tenements with inadequate light, air, and sanitation and working in squalid factories and sweatshops. Addams recruited idealis- tic doctors, lawyers, academics, and gov- ernment officials to the immigrants' cause. Such outstanding reformers as Florence Kelley, Julia Lathrop, and Dr. Alice Ham- ilton worked at her side, attacking callous factory owners and boodling political bosses. Yet, as Gerda Lerner has noted, "Jane Addams' enormous contribution in creating a supporting female network and new structures for living" has often been ignored by historians, who have concen- trated on her role as a Progressive re- former, or as a representative of a "group

164 Widening Circles of Reform

of frustrated college-trained women with no place to go." 22

Many reforms first initiated at Hull- House were aimed at working women (both factory workers and professionals) and their domestic needs of child care, food , and housing. They were backed up by evening classes of all kinds, musical and literary events, trade-union organizing (es- pecially for poorly-paid women workers), social clubs, a public bathhouse, and a consumers' cooperative for the purchase of coal. Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895) , a pioneer work in urban sociology, reflected the residents' efforts to analyze the prob- lems of the Nineteenth Ward. Because of their understanding of urban life and poli- tics, Hull-House residents did manage to influence social legislation as well as the emerging field of urban sociology. Through the 1890s they lobbied effectively for indus- trial health and safety, the limitation of child labor, and the legal recognition of trade unions.

By the mid-1890s, twenty women were in residence, and forty activities drew 2,000 people per week to the settlement. Addams chose Allan B. Pond to design a physical complex around these programs. The result was aesthetically dreary and socially inno- vative, heavy red brick buildings of an in- stitutional mien surrounding an urban block, lightened by the first public play- ground in Chicago. 23 Meeting rooms at Hull-House were complemented by apart- ments, as many of the social workers, re- formers, and scholars who came to visit stayed to live and work at the settlement,

dining together every night while exchang- ing news and information about reform

By 1911 there were over four hun- dred settlement houses in the United States, and Addams was president of the national association they formed. 24 A dis- tinctive building type to house the settle- ments' collective living and community services had emerged as well, emphasizing a combination of residential and social spaces (8.11 ).

Among Hull-House's many successes, Jane Addams 's earliest domestic reform programs are most significant for this study. When Addams arrived in Chicago in 1889, she , along with her friend, Ellen Gates Starr, and their housekeeper, Mary Key er, "early learned to know the chil- dren of hard-driven mothers who went out to work all day, sometimes leaving the lit- tle things in the casual care of a neighbor, but often locking them into their tenement rooms." 25 In 1891 , with the help of Jenny Dow , she organized a day nursery for these children.

The kindergarten and day nursery move- ment was already well established, through the efforts of Elizabeth Peabody, Mary Peabody Mann, Mary Hemenway, Emily Huntington, and others. At Hull-House, Jane Addams hung the kindergarten walls with reproductions of Italian madonnas and cherubs, adding culture to child care. The other furniture and equipment were rather casually assembled, however, and she ought none of the carefully designed play equipment available in either Froebe! kindergartens or progressive utopian com-

165 Public Kitchens, Social Settlements, and the Cooperative Ideal

munities. By 1907 the Mary Crane Creche was added to the Hull-House complex, providing more extensive play space and rest areas. Along with the nursery in this new building came demonstration rooms for domestic science activities.

After the day nursery proved successful, in 1893 Addams and Starr undertook the establishment of a public kitchen. "An in- vestigation of the sweatshops had disclosed the fact, that sewing women during the bu y eason paid little attention to the feeding of their families, for it was only by working steadily through the long day that the canty pay of five, seven, or nine cents for finishing a dozen pairs of trousers could be made into a day's wage; and they bought from the nearest grocery the canned goods that could be most quickly heated, or gave a few pennies to the chil- dren with which they might secure a lunch from a neighboring candy shop." 26 The re idents of Hull-House carefully re- searched the dietary deficiencies immi- grant suffered from. One resident, Julia Lathrop, then went to Boston to learn cientific food preparation at the innova-

tive New England Kitchen from Abel and Richard . The Public Kitchen at Hull- House was launched after her return in 1894.

At Hull-House, Addams found that im- migrant working women might buy the scientifically cooked food when it was taken around and sold in neighborhood factories at lunchtime or at the end of the day, and that a few households would buy from the kitchen itself, marked with a large

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ign, "Public Restaurant and Bakery .. oup , Stews ... All Ready Cooked to

Take Home." 27 Many more immigrant f milies were di inclined to use the public r staurant or buy the cooked food, because it did not conform to the male workers' tastes. Addams eventually replaced the public restaurant with a coffeehouse, as an alternative to the local saloons, and the

ientific kitchen served both this coffee- house and residents' dining room, where nutritious Yankee food was quite accept- able. Even if immigrant families did not patronize cientific cooking, professional women working in the immigrant districts wanted to simplify their own housekeeping.

Cooperative Living and the Unionization of Women Factory Workers In addition to feeding women workers, the Hull-House settlement workers tried to help them organize trade unions and de- velop adequate housing. When Mary Ken- ney, a young Irish woman working in the b okbinding trade in Chicago, first met Jane Addams, she decided that Addams and her associates were "all rich and not friends of the workers." 2s Yet Addams ofli red to help Kenney with organizing a union , and the two became friends. Ken- n y, born in Hannibal, Missouri, in 1864, was four years younger than Addams, but air ady cynical about working girls' clubs, whi h oft r d only outings or charity. Lat r in h r career he was an organizer for th Am rican Federation of Labor and

und r of th National Women's Trade

167 Public Kitchens, Social Settlements, and the Cooperative Ideal

Union League, but even in 1891 she was committed to militant demands for higher wage . Together with Addams, she began to advocate her version of workers' cooper- ative housekeeping as a tool to help win strikes, a significant new use of the concept directed at a new constituency, single women workers. This strategy emerged when Kenney began to hold union meet- ing at Hull-House for women in the bookbinding and shoe trades. As Addams recalled: "At a meeting of working girls held at Hull-House during a strike in a large shoe factory, the discussions made it clear that the strikers who had been easily frightened, and therefore first to capitulate, were naturally those girls who were paying board and were afraid of being put out if they fell too far behind. After a recital of a case of peculiar hardship one of them ex- claimed: 'wouldn't it be fine if we had a boarding club of our own and then we could tand by each other in a time like this?' " 29

Kenney organized "six members, with a cook and a general worker," who shared one apartment at 253 Ewing Street. Ad- dams supplied furnishings and the first month's rent. On May 1, 1891, the experi- ment began. As Kenney described it: "We spent one evening each week discussing ways and means and management ... We had no rule or by-laws. We elected a presid nt, who was also steward, and a treasurer ... We vot d to tax ourselves $3.00 each for wc kly dues, which covered exp n for food, quart rs, and ervice." 30 Th organizati n, which call d it elf the

Jane Club, grew and prospered. By the end of three months the membership had tri- pled, and they had taken over several apartments. Even in lighthearted moments the labor struggle was not forgotten: Ken- ney reported that when women members of the boarding club went to dances to- gether, they first checked their escorts' hat- bands and cigarbands for the union label. By 1893, the club impressed the skeptical head of the U.S. Department of Labor, who claimed before his visit there that he had never before seen women cooperate successfully. 31 By 1894, thirty members oc- cupied all six apartments of the original building on Ewing Street. 32

The Jane Club's cooperative housekeep- ing filled the needs of young, single, female factory workers living on very meager wages, whose only alternatives were to live at home, find a cheap boardinghouse, or perhaps apply to a philanthropic home for women. The Young Women's Christian Association, beginning in the 1860s, had organized some pleasant hostels which sup- ported wage-earning women, but by the end of the century many such homes were overcrowded and run in a manner to make mature inhabitants feel like children. "I don't know which is worse," wrote one working woman, "the cramped, and awful loneliness of a hall bedroom, or the humil- iating soul-depressing charity and rules of a Home." 33 Perhaps the strictest limits on space were found by one researcher in 1915 who described a New York women's home as a "hen coop," where the beds were sepa- rated by partitions made of chicken wire. 34

168 Widening Circles of Reform

The strictest rules were those of A. T. Stewart, a millionaire dry goods merchant who established a rather nauseatingly gen- teel 'Women's Hotel," "a home for women who support themselves by daily labor," in 1878 on Fourth Avenue in New York (9.7). Stewart's Women's Hotel charged a then extravagant $6.00 per week for room and full board, but the YWCA women called it "a gigantic failure" because " stringent rules made the Hotel not a home, but an asylum.' They stated: "Women will not re- linquish liberty for grandeur. It is too poor an equivalent .... " In the end , the rates were too high for it to be a financial suc- cess. 35 Since Stewart had made his fortune paying women clerks in his dry goods store low wage , his beneficence stank of hypoc- ri y. Other employers who paid women low wage might even justify their pay scales by contributions to such charitable homes.

Mary Kenney's Jane Club, managed by the residents, was unique in its relative cheapnes , independence from philan- thropic a si tance, and freedom from fussy rules. When the group reached fifty resi- dents and the Ewing Street building was too small, Jane Addams suggested incor- porating the project into Hull-House. She began trying to raise money for a perma- nent building for the Jane Club and a parallel project for men, the Phalanx Club (a Fourierist name that recalls the com- munitarian socialist influence on these projects). In 1898 the new building opened, and the Jane Club (8.12) existed as a self- supporting project for several decades,

8.12 Jane Club, plans of basement and first floor by Pond and Pond, 1898: l , bedroom ; 2, reading room ; 3, social room ; 4, dining room; 5, kitchen ; 6, scullery ; 7, pantry ; 8, laundry room; 9, linen closet ; 10, trunk room ; 11 , bicycle stor- age ; 12, entrance hall and stairs . Second and third floors were all bedrooms.

169 Public Kitchens, Social Settlements, and the Cooperative Ideal

recreating some of the cohesive atmosphere of the company boardinghouses in Lowell for young women without any of the pater- nalistic atmosphere. Private rooms for most re idents permitted individual privacy. Again and again the thirty residents em- phasized their autonomy their pride in managing their own housing as self- supporting adults.

Women of all classes yearned for the self- ufficiency of making their own hou - ing arrangements . The success of the Jane Club spurred wide discu sion of coopera- tive housekeeping arrangements among small and large groups of single working women. 36 In the years between 1885 and 1920 any group of women who chose to rent an apartment or a house together and hare the expen e of cooking, cleaning,

and laundry might call this cooperative hou ekeeping.3 7 ome were young, some middle-aged and some even retired workers.

Cooperative boarding club formed by employed women and student introduced many organizing and building projects in the e decade . In 1902 seven art students formed a succes ful boarding club in New York· around the same time Viola Rich- mond founded the working women's Turner-Balderston Club for cooperative boarding in Philadelphia, which occupied three houses in the city and a vacation hou e in the country; the Randolph Club wa another self-supporting women's enter- prise in that city. 38 In 1919 the Interna- tional Ladies' Garment Workers Union es- tablished Unity House in New York on a

similar model. 39 The desire of women to control their own housing was expressed again and again. 40 Whether they were fac- tory workers , clerical workers, or even pro- fessionals, 41 none of them earned enough to enjoy the independence and security en- joyed by single men of their own social class, unless they formed clubs to "cooperate" toward that end.

Cooperative Living and the Unionization of Domestic Servants Just as settlement workers concerned them- selves with helping factory workers organ- ize cooperative boarding schemes, so they tried to help domestic servants, whose so- cial standing was even lower than the fac- tory workers '. Domestic service was the major occupation for women workers; there were one and a half million servants in the United States in 1900, 95.4 percent of them women, and they were employed by approximately one family in ten. They often worked twelve- and thirteen-hour days, seven days a week, for which they earned an average of $3.16 per week, or less than 4 cents an hour. Over two fifths of the servants were native-born whites, a third were native-born blacks , and about a quarter were immigrants. 42 (Over the next forty years the percentage of white women decreased, and black women increased , as white workers successfully sought other jobs, from which black women were restricted because of race.) 43

As late as 1940 there were more domes- tic servants than workers in the railroad, coal, and automotive industries combined,

170 Widening Circles of Reform

but one would never know this from the paucity of reports about their conditions by labor economists and statisticians, or the meager efforts of trade unionists to or- ganize them. 44 Although the Knights of Labor included assemblies of housewives and of servants in the 1880s, in general trade unions ignored these workers. The problem of encouraging trade unions among servants employed by many dif- ferent mistresses, who required them to " live in," was taken up more assiduously by home economists and settlement workers.

In 1885, Florence Kelley, later an activ- ist on labor issues at Hull-House, suggested the creation of servants' boarding clubs as a way to create the social structure neces- sary to domestic workers ' trade unions. 45

She believed that such housing for servants would make it possible to insist upon the eight-hour day and the six-day week and to give servants, half of whom were single women under twenty-five, more "home life. " In 1893, Jane Addams, who worked with Kelley, predicted that "the house servant was to pass out of existence just as the family blacksmith had done, and that cooperation would succeed present methods of housekeeping. " Ten years later she elaborated this position, arguing that all individuals, even those engaged in serv- ice, had a right to experience the "fullness of life" in a democracy. She repeated Kelley's idea of building suburban resi- dences for domestic servants, suggesting that it would help them to feel part of a

community of their peers as living in with employers could not. 46

In the same year, Ellen Richards helped the Association of Collegiate Alumnae and the Woman's Education Association to or- ganize the Household Aid Company, a co- operative residence for twenty servants, rather like the Jane Club, with a training and placement program and a mediation service to deal with employers. Mary Hin- man Abel conducted a session of the 1903 Lake Placid Conference, which criticized the "homelessness" of servants who live "in but not of a family of a different social grade." She saw the Household Aid Company's residence project, along with more home economics classes for school- girls, as promising lines of change. 47 And who should be found to run the servants' residence but the elderly Emily A. Hun- tington, founder of the Kitchen Garden movement. After two years, however, it was clear the project was not a financial success, despite the promise that "every effort will be made to excite the ambition of the aid by advancing her position at least once in three months .... " 4 a Only in the fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, discussed in the next chapter, did a cooper- ative boarding club for servants, entitled Union House, appear to be a social success and generate a workers' union.

The difference between the voluntary co- operation of the Jane Club, run by its members, and homes for domestic servants that included placement services, run by home economists and social workers, was profound. Even with hourly wages and

171 Public Kitchens, Social Settlements, and the Cooperative Ideal

specialized tasks, the social stigma of being "in service" was great. More to the point were the inexpensive boarding clubs for domestic servants and other workers who were between jobs, such as the Working Woman's Society, run by Alice L. Wood- bridge in New York, and the Woman's Lodging House in Chicago, run by Louise Schultz. 49 Yet these were transient homes, so by definition they did not solve servants' housing problems, or help to establish sta- ble trade unions.

Cooperative Living for Settlement Workers In addition to attempting to alleviate the domestic difficulties of women workers by offering married women day care and cooked food and encouraging single women to organize various types of cooper- ative boarding clubs, Jane Addams offered a cooperative domestic life to profes ional women at Hull-House (8.13). In its earliest days, Hull-House consisted of two profes- sional women and their housekeeper, but it developed by 1895 into a residential com- munity of twenty women, and then by 1911 into a residential community of some fifty-one residents, which included some married couples. In that year thirty-one of the residents were women and twenty, men. 50 As Addams described it, "We have worked out during our years of residence a plan of living which may be called cooper- ative for the families and individuals who rent the Hull-House apartments have the use of the central kitchen and dining room so far as they care for them .... " 51 As an

8.13 Residents' dining room , Hull-House with Jane Addams at right end of center table . Women professionals predominate among the residents.

L 72 id nin

8. 14 Cookin cl at Hull-House 1916: " sci- ence' on the Bunsen burners and teaching jobs for home econ mi t .

8.15 Cooking cl at Tu kcegee Institute, train- ing black f cm ale tu dents to be domestic serv- ants. By 1920 40 percent of American servants were black.

idealistic community living in one complex of buildings, Hull-House resembled earlier communitarian ex periments that drew members together into a community man- sion, such as the Oneida Community or the Social Palace at Guise, but in its eco- nomic organization Hull-House eventually was closer to the cooperative boarding ar- rangements of the Unitary Household in New York. At Hull-House the majority of residents supported themselves by business or professional work in Chicago, paying for their share of the domestic costs and giving their remaining time to settlement projects.

At first the settlement worker played down cooperative living a an aspect of their enterprise because of the as ociations with free love or socialism that it might provoke. One early Hull-House critic ob- jected to "those unnatural attempts to un- derstand life through cooperative liv- ing," 52 but since the earliest residents were all women, complaints about sexual license were minimal. By the time men came to live at Hull-House, the community was far too distinguished to provoke idle gossip about free love, and single men and single women residents occupied separate build- ings. 'i3

Of the residents at Hull-House in 1910, a large number had been there for more than twelve years, and the group included "the secretary of the City Club , two prac- ti cing phys icians , several attorneys, news- paper men, business men , teachers, scientists, artists, musicians , lecturers in the School of Civics and Philanthropy, officers in the Juvenile Protective Association and

173 Public Kitchens, Social Settlements, and the Cooperative Ideal

in The League for the Protection of Immi- grants, a visiting nurse, a sanitary inspector and others." H The families and individu- als who rented Hull-House apartments could order food served in their own quar- ters by the central kitchen but many residents dined every evening in the Hull- House dining room, where lively dis- cussions of "the science of society,'' and political equality were likely to take place. Indeed, it is significant that Hull-House's first resident was an elderly Mrs. Sedge- wick, who had in her youth lived at the Fourierist experiment at Brook Farm and "w ished to live once more in an atmos- phere where "idealism ran high." 55 Some fastidious visitors , like the British Fabian ocialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb, de-

scribed the dining room as "higgledypig- gledy' and the service as ' rough and ready. " Despite these cavils, the liveliness and political acumen of residents' dinner table conver ations left many more visitors and temporary residents impressed, among them the anarchist Kropotkin; the future President of General Electric, Gerard Swope; and the soon-to-be-prominent femi- nist, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Addams's pleasure that " the domestic economy is all under one skilled management" 56 no doubt helped shape the thinking of Gilman, a resident for three months in 1895 , as well as the young Pauline Schindler, resident about 1912, who with her husband, the architect Rudolph Schindler, was later to experiment with "a cooperative dwelling" in Los Angeles.

Hull-House's success influenced other settlement houses' domestic arrangements. The presence of some former communitar- ian socialists in the settlement movement may have helped to support collective liv- ing, but feminist activism was a more significant force behind new domestic ar- rangements. Many of the professionals at Hull-House were single women, pioneers in their fields, who chose university training for a career at a time when thi choice of- ten implied a rejection of marriage and family. Dozens of such single-minded ca- reer women , like Addam herself, found that domestic life in a settlement solved the logistical problems of spinsterhood by providing a respectable, adult home life autonomous yet collective. It was more independent than living with relatives and far more congenial than living alone.

In one sense settlement hou es were the great practical success of cooperative housekeeping in the period between 1890 and 1920 the middle-cla s reformers proof that collective cooking, cleaning, laun- dering, and central heating, supported by a new , socially conscious approach to resi- dential architecture, could really work. Yet settlement house residents rarely praised and publicized the forms of cooperative housekeeping they developed to support their own careers. Why? Were they avoid- ing gossip about their private lives? Were they too engrossed with the larger issues of low wages, inadequate housing, and un- sanitary conditions, which harassed the neighborhoods they lived in? Kathryn Kish Sklar has concluded that it was the cooper-

174 Widening Circl of Reform

ativ hou k ping f th ett l ments which nabled reformers uch a Addams, Kelle and Lathr p to xert uch influenc on meri an o iet , but this in- vention ha r iv d very littl publicity.5 7

We knm Jan Add am a a leader in legi - lati e r fi rm and ial -. lfar , a uffra- gi t, and a pa ifi t. P rhap h r greatest a hi Hou

m nt ' a a th er a tor of Hull- first of all a ial and phy ical

fram w rk for fi ma! car ond a nt r f ommunit

Id ali m and Pragmati m

and only sec- rvice.

... Th ultimat Jory of th ettle- ment , .. rot th archit ctural critic Fi ke Kimball '' ill b t ha rend red ettle- ment unne . ary. ' 58 Th fi t generation of profi ional horn conomi t and ettle- ment work ould hard! b xpe ted to find th ir ultimat th m Iv unn ou ht wa to in c r a the d mand for

th ir kill and xt nd th ir influence, re- placing communit erv1 with broad educational pr gram . If the were not need d to run publi c kit hen at lea t they could teach i ntific co king (8.14 8.15); if th wer not n ded t pro ide emer- genc child car th could teach mothers about cientific child care· if the were not needed to organize hou ing for young women workers or dome tic ervants they could run evening clas e for them in self- help or kills.

A the profe ional shifted from the direct provi ion of ervices toward the de- velopment of legi lative reform education,

and counseling, they beca me more cau- tious. Although many home economists and settlement workers had enthusiasti- call y upported all kind of cooperative ventures (defining "cooperative" very loosel y) in the 1880 and earl y 1890s by the end of the 1890s they were beginning to support only those projects that were in- itiated and directed by trained specialists. Furthermore, many professional were pre- pared to make use of convent ional argu- ment about ' woman place in the home to justify their own careers.

Caroline Hunt a protegee of Ellen Rich- ards , was an influential home economi t who lived at Hull-Hou e before becoming a professor at the Univer it y of Wisconsin and then head of the Bureau of Home Ec- onomic in the Department of Agriculture. She was an important theoretician for the new profe ion of home economic and so- cial work. In 1908, in Home Problems/ram a

ew Standpoint, she justified women's man- date to undertake work out ide the home, especially in the areas of "the labor prob- lem," factory legislation welfare and local government, by saying that hou ehold used manufactured product depended on town water and garbage systems, and re- quired pure food . Women, Hunt claimed, were the home's "natu ral ' protectors, and should add "to their work for it in private, public work demanded by its changed po- sition." .'> 9 Citing changes in the housewife's role, from producer to consumer, she envi- sioned an extremely militant woman who understood that " .. . household commod- ities which had in the past represented her

175 Public Kitchens, Social Settlements, and the Cooperative Ideal

loving and willing service now represented the broken lives of others." In helping worker to fight for better conditions , women would need a ' spirit of cooperation and mutual aid" " the spirit of the best and most helpful family life ." 60

She was ju tifying women ' activism by their traditional roles in the home , explain- ing political work as ' municipal house- kee ping," or social housekeeping. Many uffragists were then making similar argu-

ment for women suffrage. Frances Wil- la rd of the Woman's Christian Temper- ance Union complained to Susan B. Anthony in 1898: " Men have made a dead failure of municipal government, just as they would of hou ekeeping on the broade t ca le. ' 61 Jane Addams wrote in favor of woman suffrage in 1907, develop- ing thi metaphor: ' May we not say that cit y hou ekeeping has failed partly because women the traditional hou ekeepers, have not been consulted as to its mutliform ac- tivities?" 62

Thi argument for suffrage , based on women ' ability to make municipal govern- ment and urban life " clean" again , proved to be extremely successful in gaining both male and female support for women's right to vote. In the same way, advocacy of woman " public work for the home" helped make careers for women in social work and home economics acceptable. But in both cases, those suffragists and special- ists who chose to argue on the basis of ex- pediency rather than on the basis of justice found that the domestic stereotypes they u ed to upport votes or careers for women

remained to erode many of the gains they made.

As specialists doing "women's work" in professional form , social workers and home economists remained relatively low-paid. In an attempt to highlight the advantages of scientific child care, cooking, and house- keeping, some of these professionals began to try to distinguish their contributions from the unpaid labor rendered by the or- dinary housewife, or the collective effort s of groups engaging in "cooperative house- keeping" in a spontaneous , nonscientific way. Therefore some home economists and settlement workers not onl y moved away from their early enthusiasm for cooperative housekeeping; they also began to attack untrained women 's cooperative ap- proaches. Hunt proposed " women's public work for the home," or municipal house- keeping, as " an ethical substitute" for co- operative housekeeping among neighbors in 1909. Thus cooperative housekeeping was merged with the goals of women's con- sumer organizations, a strategy consistent only with cooperative housekeeping seen as consumers' cooperatives, not producers ' co- operatives. The problem was that families were not ready for cooperation, hinted Hunt: "At present human beings are un- able to overcome the difficulties attendant upon the voluntary association of family groups for housekeeping purposes. They lack both the goodness and the wisdom." 63 (She forgot to mention how well Hull- House itself worked , perhaps because of the residents ' wisdom.)

176 Widening Circles of Reform

She wa reiterating conclusions reached a t a ess ion of the Lake Placid Conference on H om e Economic in 1907 , which had decided that many women found it difficult to coop rat because of house- wive lack of uniform standard , their phy ical i olation and th ir lack of educa- tion .64 M ary Hinman Abel had come to imi lar conclu ion a few years earlier:

"Th exp rien d an element of da nger in t he in t imacy of th rel ation between the cooperator and th p rsi tent call on such q ua litie a ju tice ner ity, and unft aggin int r t in a principle." 65 Abel claimed that cooperati e hou ekeeping wo ul d nev r ucc d until women had bet- ter bu ine training and more respons ibil- ity in keeping a contract 66 qualitie which, perh a p home conomi course could teach th m .

In 1903 Jane ddam criticized the ig- nora nce of hou w1v participating in a coope rat iv exp riment in an Iowa tow n : T he lack of intelligent con umption and

the con equent variet of demand has had much to do w it h the failur of various at- te m pts to adju t hou ekeeping on collect ive line .... T he experiment really failed beca use t here was no common standard of foo d value among the women ." To sup- port thi he quoted an earlier report spon- ored b y Ell en R ich ards: "When 'standards

of foo d have been recognized by many per ons . . . it wi ll be pas ible for cooper- ative experiments in t he purchase and preparatio n of food to ucceed as they can- not without co mmon agreement and stand- ards. 67 In an unu sua l and es peciall y re-

vealing fit of pique Adams went on in the same article to lambaste the sat isfied mem- bers of a successful cooperative dining club in an Illinois town, young women who gave their time to art and music, but were not interested in scientific principles of nu- trition. Successful cooperative domestic life without scientific standards grieved profes- sional even more than failed cooperative experiments.

Thee critiques were discu sed at some length , ince many women within both profes ions were still fascinated by the challenge of collective domestic organiza- tion. Ellen Richards's New England Kitchen Magaz ine ran many articles on cooperative housekeeping in the 1890 .68 Mary Hin- man Abel remained a keen advocate of public kitchen all her life and Alice Pe- loubet Norton, a well-known educator who followed Abel as editor of thejournal of Home Economics, spent the last years of her life running a community kitchen for Ethel Puffer Howes. Debates on cooperative housekeeping at conferences were well at- tended, but the National Household Eco- nomics Association, between 1893 and 1903, was more supportive than Ellen Richards's Lake Placid conferences, be- tween 1899 and 1908, or her American Home Economics Association, which she formed in 1909. 69 Although Mrs. Melvil Dewey, who had organized the Lake Placid Conferences on Home Economics with Richards, sponsored a special meeting on Group Living in 1920,70 and Caroline Hunt herself wrote confidently of the ex- periments in housekeeping and cooked

177 Public Kitchens, Social Settlements, and the Cooperative Ideal

food delivery which represented the hope of the future, 71 the professionals could not risk being associated with unconventional experiments, which were technical or financial failures, or with unconventional people who might show sympathy for so- cialism or challenge conventional sexual morality. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a divorced woman and a Fabian socialist, might have become a real problem for the domestic professionals when she cham- pioned collective domesticity in Women and Economics in 1898, but she was very careful to support only professional approaches to housekeeping, as "good business."

All of the professionals had a ready rem- edy for untrained housewives' attempts at cooperation : education in home economics. If ordinary housewives were too ignorant to succeed in cooperative endeavors, they mu t be educated by the professionals to under tand scientific standards. In the mean time, the professionals would com- mand the large-scale institutional kitchens, bakerie , and laundries that were evolving in connection with colleges, hospitals, asy- lums prisons , and hotels. To this end pro- fessionals held conferences, made activity schedules, swapped institutional recipes. That these projects would not be owned cooperatively nor exclusively controlled by women gave home economists and settle- ment workers very little anxiety, as long as they did not fall into the hands of the most mercenary and dishonest capitalists. While the professionals stressed "the gentle art of mutual aid," what they lost in socialist ide- ology, they hoped to pick up in efficiency;

what they lost in sisterhood, they hoped to gain in professional status.

Directing their services to the working class was an important but never fully ana- lyzed part of this stance. When developing domestic services and domestic models, Ad- dams, Richards, and their disciples inevita- bly asked for modest improvements for modest incomes. Often there was an ele- ment of condescension, as they tried to raise minimum standards for the deserving poor; first by providing services and then by educating poor women to make the most of a minimum income as good con- sumers. 72 They criticized deprivation but they did not usually explicitly challenge the existence of economic inequality or at- tempt to identify its causes. They presented a higher standard of living to the poor as both a right (in terms of new government services) and a duty (in terms of self-help projects). They did not , however, speak of domestic revolution.

Thu the development of a group of pro- fessional women concerned with domestic life resulted in, first, explicit consideration of the domestic needs of immigrants, work- ers, and domestic servants , and second, an attempt to reconcile those needs with the economic structure of industrial capitalist society. Home economics was the "econom- ics of consumption," according to Rich- ards. For Abel, home economics meant seeking answers to these questions: " ... what are the material conditions that afford the proper setting for ideal home life, where the adult worker is rested and refreshed, where the child is prepared

178 Widening Circles of Reform

for effective citizen hip, and where hospi- tality may exert it cheering and refining influence?' 73 The 'economic of consump- tion with it concern for effective workers and good citizen hip, thu anticipates the slogan of a later era, Good Homes Make Contented Workers. It was far less mili- tant than Melu ina Fay Peirce's demand that women u e th ir latent power as con- um rs to gain economic independence

from men. P irce had nvi ioned a female elite running ' woman pher ' for the ben fit of all worn n. The professional de- veloped a female lite ager to collaborate with m n on philanthropic, municipal, cor- porate and uni er it acti itie promoting d mocra y. Peir effort had ended in

defeat at the hand of a Council of Gentle- men who wer xpe ted to approve her group financial d al in but many of the new profe ional were far too tactful and pragmati to provoke uch confrontations with pow rful men in government, busi- ne and uni ersitie . R forming' woman's phere for th m wa a mean not an end.

Reform of the larg r society became their aim rath r than control of woman' sphere.

Thu worn n public work for the home b came a civic-minded extension of pri ate hou ekeeping activitie with muted feminist implication . That "public work" ultimately implied female suffrage, eco- nomic independence for women, and col- lective hou ekeeping was clear to many of its advocates, but these were arguments they chose to underplay. Although they never completely forgot the vision of coop- erative housekeeping they consigned it to

the distant future, when goodness and wis- dom characterized every housewife in the land. When Ellen Richards, creator of the first public kitchen in 1890, described an ideal single family suburban house in The Cost of Shelter in 1905, and when Jane Ad- dams , who created cooperative living at Hull-House in 1887, built model rooms for a single-family house inside the settlement as a "demonstration center" for lessons in housework technology in 1907, these ac- tions presaged just how far American housing policy for workers' families would ultimately diverge from cooperative house- keeping.74 But meanwhile, the early en- thusiasm of the home economists and settlement workers for cooperation was percolating through other groups, includ- ing suffragists, social feminists, women's club members and architects, under the charismatic influence of a former settle- ment worker and member of the National Household Economics Association, Char- lotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman would give material feminism greater ideological force by demanding new forms of domestic organization in the name of improved motherhood.

179 Public Kitchens, Social Settlements, and the Cooperative Ideal