Women Need Standards of Value

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 9, 1914

Women Need Standards of Value

What women need most is an educational campaign along the line of standardization of values. The bargain sale makes victims of women at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the storekeeper. That he gets a good percentage of return value on his hundred-million output shows how much

money Mrs. Housewife wastes by confusing yellow price tags with the actual needs of her home. Not knowing standard values is the great bugbear of the American purse. The American woman needs to put her mind to work and determine for herself whether she is buying the real article. The article bearing the yellow bargain tag is almost never cheap.

The big colleges are taking in hand the girl who will be the Mrs. Housewife of tomorrow, and through domestic science courses are teaching her to know values and to make a business of keeping house. Today, science invades and controls the whole house, including laundry and kitchen, says the Mother’s Magazine. In Madison, where the University of Wisconsin is situated, many of the town laundresses have availed themselves of domestic science lectures, and the result is the best grade of laundry work at moderate cost. Before the opening of this course at the university, it was almost impossible to have good laundry work done in the city, or to find trained domestic servants. Scientific laundry work is taught not only here, but at other universities.

There is no part of housework which cannot be performed more easily if only a little common sense is applied, and if the housewife avails herself of only a small part of the good things that are being done by science for the home. Housework is not drudgery—at least it need not be. It is only one kind of human service. We were all born for service, and woman’s best service is given in the home.—Selected.