Count as you will, there could hardly be devised a more wasteful way of doing necessary work than this domestic way. It costs on the most modest computation three times what it need cost. Once properly aroused to a consideration of these facts it will be strange indeed if America's business sense cannot work out some system of meeting these common human necessities more effectually and more economically.
The housemaid would be more of a step in advance if the housewife, released from her former duties, then entered the ranks of productive labour, paid her substitute, and contributed something further to the world's wealth. But nothing could be farther from the thoughts of the Lady of the House. Her husband being able to keep more than one woman to do the work of the house; and much preferring to exhibit an idle wife, as proof of his financial position,[4] the idle wife proceeds so to conduct her house as to add to its labours most considerably. The housewife's system of housekeeping is perforce limited to her own powers. The size of the home, the nature of its furnishings and decorations, the kind of clothes worn by the women and children, the amount of food served and the manner of its service; all these are regulated by the housewife's capacity for labour. But once the housemaid enters the field of domestic labour there is a scale of increase in that labour which has no limits but the paying capacity of the man.
This element of waste cannot be measured, because it is a progressive tendency, it "grows by what it feeds upon" (as most things do, by the way!) and waxes greater and greater with each turn of the wheel. If the lady of the house, with one servant, were content to live exactly as she did before; keeping the work within the powers of the deputy, she would be simply and absolutely idle, and that is a very wearing condition; especially to woman, the born worker. So the lady of the house, mingling with other ladies of houses, none of them having anything but houses to play with, proceeds so to furnish, decorate, and arrange those houses, and so to elaborate the functions thereof, as to call for more and ever more housemaids to do the endless work.
This open door of senseless extravagance hinges directly upon the idle wife. She leaves her position of domestic service, not to take a higher one in world service; but to depute her own work to an inferior and do none at all.