The Worcester spy. [volume] (Worcester, Mass.) 1898-1904, 1898-11-27
ORGANIZED HoUsEwoRK.


Ideal Homes for Professional Women.
(From women and Economics.
If there should be built and opened
in any of our large cities today a com
modious and well served apartment
house for professional women with
families it would be filled at once. The
apartments would be without kitchens
but there would be a Kitchen belong
ing to the house from which meals
could be served to the families in their
rooms or in a common dining room, as
preferred. It would be a home where
the cleaning was done by efficient
workers, not hired separately by the
families but engaged by the manager
of the establishment; and a roof gar
den, day nursery and Kindergarten.
under we'll trained professional nurses
and teachers would insure proper care
of the children.
The demand for such provision is in
creasing daily and must soon be met
not by a boarding house or a lodging
house, by a hotel a restaurant. or any
makeshift patching together Of these
but by permanent provision for the
needs of women and children and of
family privacy with collective ad-
vantage.
This must be offered on a business
basis to prove a substantial business
success. and it will so prove, for it is a
growing social need. There are hun
dreds of thousands of women in New
York city alone who are wage earners,
and who also have families, and the
number increases. This is true not only
among the poor and unskilled, but
more and more among business women.
cot 60
school teachers, who form a consider
able class, are not entirely without rel
atives.
To board does not satisfy the needs
of human soul.
These women want homes, but they
do not want the clumsy tangle of ru-
dimentary industries that are supposed
to accompany the home. The strain I'M
der which such women labor is no
longer necessary. The privacy of the
home could be as well maintained in
such building as described as in any
house in a block, any room, flat, or
apartment, under present methods.
The food would be better, and would
cost less, and this would be true of the
service and of all common necessities.
In suburban homes this purpose could
be accomplished much better by a
grouping of adjacent houses, each dis
tinct and having it's own yard, but all
kitchenless and connected by covered
ways with the eating house. No de-
tailed prophecy can be made of the
precise forms which would ultimately
prove most useful and pleasant; but
the growing social need is for the sps-
cializing of the industries practiced in
the home and for the proper mechan-
zeal provision for them.
The cleaning required in each house
would be much reduced by the removal
of the two chief elements of household
dirt-grease and ashes.
Meals could Of course be served in the
house as long as desired; but when peo-
pie become accustomed to pure. clean
homes, where no steaming industry is
carried on, they win gradually prefer
to so to their food instead Of having
it brought to them. 1t is a perfectly
natural process, and a healthful one
to so to ones food. And, after all, the
changes between living in one room,
and so having the cooking most abso-
-lutely convenient, going as far as the
limits Of large house permit, to ones