The cost of living : as modified by sanitary science / by Ellen H. Richards.

  • Richards, Ellen H. (Ellen Henrietta), 1842-1911.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The cost of living : as modified by sanitary science / by Ellen H. Richards. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    common end and not try to make as much work as possible for the other members or to frustrate their endeavors. It is this loss of unity of purpose which has per- mitted the family to fall apart and has caused the collection of individuals under one roof to assume the character of a boarding-house in which each member feels at liberty to complain of every other and to exact service of every other without giving in return. If there is not to be found some ideal which will again serve for the binding cord, then we may as well take up life in single cells or in huge caravans. If women are unwilling to acquire that knowledge of scientific and business principles needful for the organization of the twentieth-century household, then the extension of the apartment house where the men do most of the real housekeeping (the janitor, the choreman, the elevator-boy) is inevitable, and possi- bly, when the woman becomes quite passive, engineers will turn their attention from bridges to stairways, from tunnels to cellars; the chemists from patent medicines to food; the architects will think less of mere outside ornament and more of inside arrange- ments for useful purposes. Then the work of the household will be a knowable quantity and can be planned for. The housewife now says it cannot be known, that it is the emergen- cies, the unexpected, which cannot be counted upon,