apartments, seeking cool air; the total impression was that of being placed in a pigeonhole in a huge, heated, filing-case, where each separate space was occupied by a family. One felt the pressure of heated, crowded kitchens, suffocating little dining-rooms; one knew that the babies lay crying in their beds at night, gasping their very lives away, and that the young folks were wandering off to amusement parks and moving-picture shows. Here was an entirely different picture. How long could family life persist under these conditions where privacy was almost gone and comfort almost unknown?
In the village separate home integers appear ideal; in the city they are possible only to the few. The many, at present, find them a crushing burden. Desirable as privacy is, it can be purchased at too high a price. It costs too much to maintain separate kitchens and dining-rooms under city conditions.
§ 2. COMMUNAL TENDENCIES
Present conditions spell waste, inefficiency, discomfort. The woman lives all day in stifling rooms, poorly lighted, with the nerve-racking life of neighbors pouring itself through walls and windows. The men come from crowded shops and the children from crowded schoolrooms to crowd themselves into these rooms, to snatch a meal, or to sleep. How can there be real family life? What joy can there be or what ideals created in daily discomfort and distress? Little wonder that such homes are sleeping-places only, that there is no sense of family intercourse and unity. Little wonder that restaurant life has succeeded family life.
Many hold that we are ready for a movement into community living, that just as the social life of the separate house porches in the villages has become communized into the amusement parks in the cities, so all the activities of the family will move in the same direction. How long could the family as a unit continue under these conditions?
The village life will persist for a long time; it may be that, when we apply scientific methods to the transportation of human beings in the same measure as we have to the moving of pig iron, we can develop large belts of real village life all around our industrial centers. But more and more the village tends to become like the city; in other words, highly organized communal life is the dominant trend today. Just as business tends to do on a large scale all that can be more economically done in larger units, so does the home. We must look for the increasing prevalence of the city type of life for men and women and for families.
§ 3. THE ECONOMICAL DEVELOPMENT
It is worth while to note, in some brief detail, just what changes are involved in the tendency toward communal living. At the beginning of the industrial revolution which ushered in the factory period, each family was a fairly complete unit in itself. The village was little more than a nucleus of farmhouses, with a few differing types of units, such as workers in wood, in wearing apparel, and in tools. The home furnished nearly all its own food, spun and made its clothes, trained its own children, and knew scarcely any community endeavor or any syndication of effort except in the church.
The industrial revolution took labor largely out of the home into the factory. Except for farm life, the husband became an outside worker and the older boys followed him to the distant shop or factory. Earning a living ceased to be a family act and became a social act in a larger sphere. But in this change it ceased to be a part of the family educational process. Boys who, from childhood up, had gradually learned their father's trade in the shop or workroom, which was part of the house, where they played as children in the shavings, or watched the glowing sparks in the smithy, now missed the process of a father's discipline and guidance as their hands acquired facility for their tasks. The home lost the male adults for from nine to twelve hours of each day, more than two-thirds of the waking period, and thus it lost a large share of disciplinary guidance. In the rise of the factory system, to a large extent the family lost the father.
When the workshop left the home its most efficient school was taken from it. The lessons may have been limited, crude, and deadly practical, but the method approximated to the ideals which modern pedagogy seeks to realize. Among the shavings children learned by doing; schooling was perfectly natural; it involved all the powers; it had the incalculable value of informality and reality. The father gone and the mother still fully occupied with her tasks, the children lost that practical training for life which home industry had afforded. On the one hand, the young became the victims of idleness and, on the other, the prey of the voracious factory system.
This condition gave rise to the public-school system. It appealed to Robert Raikes and others. The school appeared and took over the child. Of course schools had existed, here and there, long before this, but now they had an enlarged responsibility; they must act almost in the place of the parents for the formal training of children. Having lost the father and older males for the greater portion of the day, the home now loses the children of from seven to the "'teen" years for five or six hours of the day. The mother is left at home with the babies. The family, once living under one roof, now is found scattered; it has reached out into factory and school. Its hours of unified life have been markedly reduced.
But the factory system soon had a reflex influence on the home. That which was made in the factory came back into the home, not only in the form of the articles formerly made by the men, but in those made by the women. Clothes, candles, butter, cheese, preserves, and meat—all formerly home products for the use of the family producing them—now were prepared in larger quantities, by mechanical processes, and were brought back into the home. Woman's labor was lightened; the older girls were liberated from the loom and they began to seek occupation, education, and diversion according to their opportunities in life.
That last step made it possible for people to think of the communization of home industry, to think of eating food cooked in other ovens than their own, to think of one oven large enough for a whole village. Many interesting experiments in co-operative living immediately sprang up. But the next step came slowly and, even now, is only firmly established in the cities, in the actual abandonment of the family kitchen for the community kitchen in the form of the restaurant. In such families we have unity only in the hours of sleep and recreation.
Along with abandonment of the separate kitchen there has proceeded the abandonment of the parlor in the homes of the middle classes. To lose the old, mournful front room may be no subject for tears, but the loss of the evening family group, about the fireside or the reading-lamp, is a real and sad loss. The commercialized amusements have offered greater attractions to vigorous youth. The theater and its lesser satellites, amusements, entertainments, lectures, the lyceum, and recreation-by-proxy in ball games and matches have taken the place of united family recreation. Of course this has been a natural development of the older village play-life and has been by no means an unmixed ill.
Now, behold, what has become of the old-time home life! The family that spent nearly twenty-four hours together now spends a scarce seven or eight, and these are occupied in sleeping! Little wonder that the next step is taken—the abandonment of this remainder, the sleep period, under a domestic roof, as the family moves into a hotel!
Along with the tendency toward communal working and eating we see the tendency to communal living by the development of the apartment building. Since roof-trees are so expensive, and since in a practical age, few of us can afford to pay for sentiment, why not put a dozen families under one roof-tree? True we sacrifice lawns, gardens, natural places for children to play; we lose birds and flowers and the charm of evening hours on porches, or galleries, but think of what we gain in bricks and mortar, in labor saved from splitting wood and shoveling coal, in janitor service! The transition is now complete; the home is simply that item in the economic machinery which will best furnish us storage for our sleeping bodies and our clothes!
We are undoubtedly in a period of great changes in family life, and no family can count on escaping the influence of the change. The one single outstanding and most potent change, so far as the character of family life is concerned, is, in the United States, the rapid polarization of population
