he family, are shrinking in importance, prior to
vanishing before our eyes, because now they do not for the most part
represent an economical expenditure of energy. Meanwhile, however,
they linger on, a survival in culture, and in millions of homes today
the patient housewife is striving with belated tools to keep her
family fed and clothed and her house spotless.

Take the cleaning process, for example, and watch what is happening.
Dr. Helen Sumner draws attention to the fact that we ourselves are
witnessing its rapid transformation. It is being taken out of the
hands of the individual houseworker, who is wont to scrub, sweep and
dust in the intervals between marketing, cooking, laundry-work or
sewing, and by whom it is performed well or ill, but always according
to the standards of the individual household, which means that
there are no accepted standards in sweeping, scrubbing and dusting.
House-cleaning is becoming a specialized, skilled trade, performed by
the visiting expert and his staff of professionally trained employes.
Even if as yet these skilled and paid workers enter an ordinary home
only at long intervals, when the mystic process of spring cleaning
seems to justify the expense, the day is plainly in sight when the
usual weekly cleaning will be taken over by these same visitors.
At present the abruptness of the change is broken for us by the
introduction into the market, and the use by the house-mother
of various hand-driven machines, a vast improvement upon the
old-fashioned broom, and accustoming women to the idea of new and
better methods of getting rid of dirt. Few realize the tremendous
import of this comparatively insignificant invention, the atmospheric
cleaner, or what a radical change it is bringing about in the thoughts
of the housewife, whose ideas on the domestic occupations so far have
been mostly as confused as those of the charwoman, who put up on her
door the sign: "Scrubbing and Window-Cleaning Done Here." In the same
way the innumerable electric appliances of today are simplifying the
labors of the housewife; but their chief value is that through them
she is becoming accustomed to the thought of change, and being led on
to distinguish between the housework that can be simplified, and still
done at home, and the much larger proportion which must sooner or
later be relegated to the professional expert, either coming in
at intervals or performing the task elsewhere. And this is true,
fortun