hands of the individual houseworker, who is wont to scrub, sweep and
dust in the intervals between marketing, cooking, laundry-work or
sewing, and by whom it is performed well or ill, but always according
to the standards of the individual household, which means that
there are no accepted standards in sweeping, scrubbing and dusting.
House-cleaning is becoming a specialized, skilled trade, performed by
the visiting expert and his staff of professionally trained employés.
Even if as yet these skilled and paid workers enter an ordinary home
only at long intervals, when the mystic process of spring cleaning
seems to justify the expense, the day is plainly in sight when the
usual weekly cleaning will be taken over by these same visitors.
At present the abruptness of the change is broken for us by the
introduction into the market, and the use by the house-mother
of various hand-driven machines, a vast improvement upon the
old-fashioned broom, and accustoming women to the idea of new and
better methods of getting rid of dirt. Few realize the tremendous
import of this comparatively insignificant invention, the atmospheric
cleaner, or what a radical change it is bringing about in the thoughts
of the housewife, whose ideas on the domestic occupations so far have
been mostly as confused as those of the charwoman, who put up on her
door the sign: "Scrubbing and Window-Cleaning Done Here." In the same
way the innumerable electric appliances of today are simplifying the
labors of the housewife; but their chief value is that through them
she is becoming accustomed to the thought of change, and being led on
to distinguish between the housework that can be simplified, and still
done at home, and the much larger proportion which must sooner or
later be relegated to the professional expert, either coming in
at intervals or performing the task elsewhere. And this is true,
fortunately, of women in the country as well as in the cities.