Secondly, that housekeepers should bring themselves to a willingness to adopt the hour plan, the worker coming in, and work being done and paid for by the hour according to kind or skill involved in accomplishing it.

The immediate objections to this plan are, first, its expense, and then the seeming strain upon the housekeeper, who must either piece out or piece together this patchwork scheme. Then arises the question: "Where shall we get the workers ?" for in many places this is a problem.

As to expense, in only a few cases has it been compared, hence there is a lack of sufficient data. In general it may be computed in this way: Take first into account the wages of the maid or maids, add board and what may be called room rent, including light, etc., used. One family living in the West has carefully kept account of the expenses with and without a maid and have concluded that in general a maid of all work costs $5 a week above her wages. This is higher than Mrs. Abel's estimates, which were based on the actual experience of a family of seven.

The family lived in a small town in New York, and consisted of five men and boys and two women. These estimates are the comparison of two successive summers. In both cases the laundry was done outside, hence has no place in the comparison.

First Summer.

The exact amount of room rent could be known, as the house was too small for the maid and a room was rented outside for her.

Second Summer.

(Work done by the hour.)

From these and other data it might be determined that in general a maid costs her wages; that is, if paid $5.00 a week, the conditions are such that the probable cost for her board and lodging is $5.00 also; if paid $3.00, it cost another like amount for her "keep."

In Chicago so many of the very good apartment houses are constructed without accommodation for maids that the hour plan is popular. The general concensus of opinion is that the hour plan is less, not more, expensive, and has advantages not reckoned in dollars and cents. By those who have tried it the advantages of the hour system are stated to be that the work is in general better and more rapidly done; there is not such waste of material, and that the freedom from the responsibility and presence of an actual alien in the house, especially in an apartment, is incalculable.

The question of where to get these workers remains to be solved. That is a very individual one, belonging to the conditions of each city or town. As club women take this up, bureaus such as the Household Aids Company of Boston will be established, and even now from guilds and industrial unions, often from bureaus of charity, such workers are easily obtainable.

One young woman in Brooklyn, after desperate times with incompetent help, advertised for a married woman with children who could leave her home for a certain number of hours a day. She obtained a refined woman in reduced circumstances, untrained for any definite work, whose experience made her of the greatest assistance. She goes to the house for a stated number of hours each day to care for the babies, while the mother performs her social duties. This mother does her own cooking, having the dishwashing done by the hour. The expense is lessened, her home is charming, she feels she is leaving the children in safe, "grammatical," understanding hands, and she has leisure for profit and pleasure, for the higher life, which she says she never had in the old plan, even with a smaller family.

We must realize that natural, industrial progress has taken one by one from the home the occupations formerly carried on there, until housekeeping no longer means the making of many things, but the proper expending of money for things already made.

Where to Obtain Workers

Natural Progress

We should not resist this tendency, but recognize and fit into it.

It must be remembered that the sanctity of the home is not preserved by the industries carried on there. To preserve one home at the expense of several others is neither economic nor ethical. When clubwomen talk about the sanctity of the home they should ask the question, "Whose home ?"

Mrs. Mary Hinman Abel, who is a close student and a wise observer of economic conditions as they affect the home, says that the solution of present troubles must come in part from reducing the kinds of work done in the home. This is along the line of industrial progress as well as that of the least resistance in this case.

The laundry is disappearing from the house, following soap and candle making. True, there are many more poor laundries than good ones, but that there are good ones, and that these have been run with a profit, proves there can and should be more.

The establishment of laundries is one step, and a perfectly possible one. A well-educated Southern woman, after taking a course in household science at a Northern institution, started a laundry in a Northern city. The work was entirely done by hand and a fair price charged for it. She supervised the work and employed competent people to do it. It paid well in every sense for both owner and patrons. When circumstances forced her to lay aside the work her customers were as homeless people; they had no other place to go. What one woman has clone other women can do, and it should be emphasized that this woman was well born, delicately brought up, educated and a Southerner, with the inevitable shrinking from labor outside that such a bringing up entails. She says that her patrons became her friends, that work she took up with shrinking became really delightful, simply because it was well done.

Another step is the establishment of more properly run employment agencies. Too many cases are known of employment agencies that encourage their maids to change often, to the end that they may gain additional fees. Employment agencies where references are required and looked up, where the maid is actually investigated and known as well as the housekeeper, where honesty is considered not only the best but the only policy are not castles in Spain. They can be established, supported and run by women and women's clubs.