Because of the limited space and the desire of the modern well-to-do woman to escape as much as possible from housekeeping, because of the smaller families (which idea has been fostered by landlords), the number of rooms and the size of the rooms have grown less.  The kitchenette apartment is a new departure for those who can afford more room, for it is well known that the poor in the slums have long since lived in one or two rooms serving all purposes.  The huge modern apartment house, the huge modern tenement house, are part first of the urban movement and second of that movement away from housekeeping which has been sketched in the Introduction.

The home has been praised as the nucleus of society, its center, its heart.  Its virtues have been so unanimously extolled that one need but recite them.  It is the embodiment of family, the soul of mother, father, and children.  It is the place where morality and modesty are taught.  In it arise the basic virtues of love of parents, love of children, love of brothers and sisters; sympathy is thus engendered; loyalty has here its source.  The privacy of the home is a refuge from excitement and struggle and gives rest and peace to the weary battler with the world.  It is a sanctuary where safety is to be sought, and this finds expression in the English proverb, “Every Englishman’s home is his castle.”  It is a reward, a purpose in that men and women dream of their own home and are thrilled by the thought.  Throughout its quiet runs the scarlet thread of its sex life.  Home is where love is legitimate and encouraged.

Yet the home has great faults; it is no more a divine institution than anything else human is.  Without at all detracting from its great, its indispensable virtues, let us, as realists, study its defects.

On the physical-economic side is the inefficiency and waste inseparable from individual housekeeping.  Labor-saving machinery and devices are often too expensive for the individual home, and so small stoves do the cooking and the heating, each individual housewife or her helper washes by hand the dishes of each little group.  Shopping is a matter for each woman, and necessitates numberless small shops; perhaps the biggest waste of time and energy lies here.  The cooking is done according to the intelligence and knowledge of nutrition of each housewife, and housewives, like the rest of the world, range in intelligence from feeble-mindedness to genius, with a goodly number of the uninformed, unintelligent, and careless.  Poets and novelists and the stage extol home cooking, but the doctors and dietitians know there are as many kinds of home cooking as there are kinds of homekeepers.  The laboratory and not the home has been the birthplace of the science of nutrition, and we have still many traditions regarding the merits of home cooking and feeding to break from.