TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes havebeen placed at the end of the relevant section.
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have beencorrected after careful comparison with other occurrences withinthe text and consultation of external sources.
Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original hasbeen retained: for example, overcrowded/over-crowded,saucepans/sauce-pans, and subtile/subtle, etc.
Duplicate headings have been removed to eliminate repetition.
PROGRESS IN THE HOUSEHOLD
PROGRESS IN THE
HOUSEHOLD
BY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1906
COPYRIGHT 1906 BY LUCY MAYNARD SALMON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published October 1906
In 1897 the author of these sketches publisheda book entitled “Domestic Service.”It was an attempt to consider certain historicaland economic aspects of a commonoccupation and its aim was to induce othersto investigate by scientific processes a neglectedfield of inquiry. It distinctly disclaimedany and all attempts to square thecircle by proposing a plan to do away withall difficulties in the present condition ofhousehold service.
The book was not one of “the six bestsellers” of the season, it was never duplicatedby a public library, and it neversecured a lodgment at the Tabard Inn.A modest second edition, not yet exhausted,represents its present rating in the authors’“Bradstreet’s.” The book was a disappointmentto many housewives who had noted[vi]its appearance because they had hoped tofind in it a sovereign remedy for all domesticills. Instead of that they found onlyrather repellant footnotes, statistical tables,appendices, and bibliographies. “Whatconnection,” they probably asked, “existsbetween the far-away fact that there is onedomestic employee to every one hundredand fifty-six inhabitants in Oklahoma andthe near-at-hand fact that there is a dearthof good cooks in Pantopia?” But MosesCoit Tyler, beatissima memoria, once instructeda class of college seniors about tobegin the study of certain works in Englishliterature that the initial step in all literarycriticism was to find the author’s object andto judge him by his success in attaining thatobject; that an artist who intends to painta landscape must be judged by his successin landscape painting, and not criticisedbecause the landscape is not a figure piece.To the charge therefore that a book ofthree hundred odd pages contained nopanacea with virtues attested by hundreds[vii]of housekeepers whose domestic ills hadbeen cured by its