housewife must insist that all applicants be willing and able to perform
any part of the housework she may assign, and their duties ought not
to be specified otherwise than by the term HOUSEWORK. The employee who
refuses to wait on the table during the absence of the waitress, or to
cook, or to do the laundry work, or to answer the telephone, or to carry
packages from her employer's automobile to the library, because she does
not consider it "her place to do these things," should be instantly
discharged.

These very important conditions being understood and conceded, the
choice and arrangement of the eight hours' work must necessarily lie
with each individual housewife. Each family is different and has
different claims upon its time. The "rush hours" of social life are
sometimes in the evening, and sometimes in the afternoon, and again in
some families, especially where there are small children, the breakfast
hour seems the most complicated of the day. All these details have to be
carefully thought of when making an eight hour schedule. At the end of
this book a set of schedules is placed. Any intelligent housewife can
understand them, imitate them, and in many instances improve them. They
are merely given as elementary examples.

According to the number of employees she engages, the housewife will
have eight, sixteen, or twenty-four hours of work to distribute among
them, and to meet her peculiar needs she will find it necessary at the
outset to devote some hours to a satisfactory scheme. After testing
several, she will probably have to begin all over again before she
finally succeeds in evolving one that is available. But the problem is
interesting in itself, and always admits of a solution.

It may not be amiss to make this final suggestion for the woman who is