DOMESTIC SCIENCE, CANCER AND UNEMPLOYMENT.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIT4,—It seems to me the questions of unemployment and the causation of cancer are both more or less the result of false ideas of the " worth-while-ness " of domestic work. I am neither sentimental nor reactionary, but I can't help thinking that if a girl eminently suited for domestic service refuses to do domestic work and insists on being a junior clerk displacement of labour must follow if these instances arc endlessly multiplied as they are ; also that the contempt of University women for domestic duties is the cause of errors in diet and neglect of elementary health laws, which result in the incessant taking of commercial salts, patent medicines and drugs.
The remedy seems to me to be in a realization of the part household administration plays in national welfare and prosperity. This, of course, can only be fully understood by the trained thinker. I wish some great woman would make it her life-work. For, if household economics were a recognized university and school subject, and teachers were trained to teach its principles, the new knowledge and its values would in time undo the evils of the last fifty years without destroying their undoubted good.
By " household economics " I do not, of course, mean
stall in cooking, cleaning, washing, mending, nor the arts and sciences involved in household administration, such as architecture, decoration, physics, bio-chemistry, bacteriology, physiology, psychology and dietetics. I mean the relation domestic work and household administration bear to the industrial, commercial, agricultural, health, wealth, and financial resources of the nation. It seems to me if this relation were presented in popular language and generally understood, that household administration and domestic work would take their proper places as occupations very much worth while from every standpoint, and that unemployment and cancer cases would in time lessen.
No one likes to be despised by " superior " persons. When I was a cook-general nothing seemed to me more pathetic than the way young servants tried to pass as girl clerks, or any other old thing. It was touching to hear a bright, eager, nice girl say : " I don't look like a servant, do I, cook ?" Such a mental attitude is the result of false pride, snobbery, wrong thinking and teaching in every class of society, and leads to all sorts of social evils : betting, free love, suicide, murder, as well as unemployment and cancer.—I am, Sir, &c.,
Axsr POPE.
[We regret that we are unable to continue the corres- pondence on Cancer.—En. Spectator.]
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