d in the
other, and it is at this point that so many perplexed housekeepers,
through the confusion of the two problems, take a difficult and
untenable position.

There are economic as well as ethical reasons for this survival of a
simpler code. The wife of a workingman still has a distinct economic
value to her husband. She cooks, cleans, washes, and mends--services for
which, before his marriage, he paid ready money. The wife of the
successful business or professional man does not do this. He continues
to pay for his cooking, house service, and washing. The mending,
however, is still largely performed by his wife; indeed, the stockings
are pathetically retained and their darning given an exaggerated
importance, as if women instinctively felt that these mended stockings
were the last remnant of the entire household industry, of which they
were formerly mistresses. But one industry, the cooking and serving of
foods to her own family, woman has never relinquished. It has,
therefore, never been organized, either by men or women, and is in an
undeveloped state. Each employer of household labor views it solely
from the family standpoint. The ethics prevailing in regard to it are
distinctly personal and unsocial, and result in the unique isolation of
the household employee.

As industrial conditions have changed, the household has simplified,
from the mediaeval affair of journeymen, apprentices, and maidens who
spun and brewed to the family proper; to those who love each other and
live together in ties of affection and consanguinity. Were this process
complete, we should have no problem of household employment. But, even
in households comparatively humble, there is still one alien, one who is
neither loved nor loving.

The modern family has dropped the man who made its shoes, the woman who
spun its clothes, and, to a large extent, the woman who washes them, but
it stoutly refuses to drop the woman who cooks its food and ministers
directly to its individual comfort; it strangely insists that to do
that would be to destroy the family life itself. The cook is
uncomfortable, the family is uncomfortable; but it will not drop her as
all her fellow-workers have been dropped, although the cook herself
insists upon it. So far has this insistence gone that every possible
concession is made to retain her. The writer knows an employer in one of
the suburbs who built a bay at the back of her house so that her cook
might have a pleasan