Page:Solution of the Child Labor Problem.djvu/68

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61
SOCIAL COST OF CHILD LABOUR.

routine of a properly conducted home, and the change from one to the other is difficult to make. There are a thousand things which girls who grow up at home learn, but which never become a part of the education of a factory child. There are arts of cooking and of cleaning, arts of care-taking and home-making that come only from the actual contact with these problems in the home. This contact the factory child has never had. An eleven-hour day in the factory precludes the possibility of any housework except the merest drudgery.

This lack of home-making knowledge has its inevitable consequences. There is a very definite relation between tough meat and underdone potatoes for supper, and a long session in the saloon for the husband after supper. A washerwoman who did much of the drying of her clothes in the two small tenement rooms in which the family sat, ate, and slept, was offered an opportunity to do the work at stationary washtubs in a Neighborhood House close by. Her ground for refusal was that she had always done her washing in her own room, and that it was too much trouble