possess. But there are rebellious consumers who point out that the baker
is under the law, while the housewife is a law unto herself. Against the
baker's shortcomings such brave doubters assure us we have redress, we
can refuse to patronize him; against the housewife there is no appeal,
her family must swallow her product to the detriment of digestion.

It may be the brutal truth, taking bread as the index, that only a
quarter of the processes carried on in the home turn out satisfactorily,
while of the other three-quarters, a just verdict may show that mother
gets a "little too much lye" in the soap, cooks the preserves a "little
too hard," "candies the fruit just a little bit," and grinds the flour
in the mill "not quite fine enough."

But perhaps even more than the quality of the product does the question
of the economical disposition of labor-power agitate some women. They
are asking, since labor is very scarce, whether the extreme
individualistic direction of their labor-power is permissible. The vast
majority of American homes are without servants. In those homes are the
women working such short hours that they can, without dropping important
obligations, take over preserving, canning, dehydrating, the making of
bread, soap, and butter substitute? Has the tenement-house dweller
accommodation suitable for introducing these industrial processes into
her home? Would the woman in the small ménage in the country be wise in
cutting down time given, for instance, to the care of her baby and to
reading to the older children, and using the precious moments
laboriously to grind wheat to flour? My observation convinces me that
conscientious housewives in servantless or one-servant households, with
work adjusted to a given end, with relative values already determined
upon, are not prepared by acceptance of the Adamistic theory to return
to primitive occupations.