can get. Similarily, let the ladies in the towns combine their housekeeping, and so save to the community the expense of the retail trade. Connected with their co-operative kitchens, they could easily have preserving rooms for the preparation of the sweetmeats and other delicacies peculiar to their climate, and which, if made by the quantity, could be thrown upon the market as cheaply as the Shaker and English and French and India preserves, and so compete for an equal sale with them. Perhaps no women in the world are so fitted at this moment to attempt co-operative housekeeping as the impoverished women of the South; their sufferings and hardships have united them to an extraordinary degree. There is a spirit of mutual help and sacrifice and generosity among them that is just the spirit needed for such an enterprise; and though they may be as yet ignorant of the rules of business, they are rapidly acquiring its habits and its ambition, since all who can are working for their daily bread, teaching, sewing, embroidering and preserving,—doing anything that will bring them money.
I now leave general considerations, which I am in truth too ignorant properly to discuss, and return to the effect of co-operative housekeeping upon the household.
The Servants.
In the first place, as all the cooking and washing are to be done out of the house, and as much of the sewing also as the mistress chooses, no cook or laundress or seamstress will ever come into it. Housework and table-work only will remain to be attended to; and as this can easily be undertaken by one person, many families that have hitherto kept three servants will now keep only one, while those that have kept one or two, by employing a woman to come in for a few hours in the morning, to put the house in order, need keep none at all.
Co-operative housekeeping, then, will almost entirely blot out from our domestic life the servant element! Those
