Page:This side the trenches, with the American Red cross (IA thissidetrenches00desc).pdf/50

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

involves carrying a bucket from a hydrant in the yard or from a faucet in the basement or in the hall of a tenement, cleanliness becomes so difficult as frequently to be neglected.

Particularly important to the moral welfare of the family is privacy. What sort of home life is possible when parents and children can never be alone together? What sort of morals is it possible to maintain when, as frequently happens, four or five, sometimes as many as eight or nine, people sleep in the same room?

To be sure, it is not often that the families of soldiers and sailors are to be found living under such conditions, but these things exist; and the Home Service worker who desires to protect the children of the men in the army and navy must have a knowledge of what she may meet in the course of her work.

The lodger comes as an additional problem to many families. In a desire to add to the income which is received from the government allowance, the mother or the wife is often tempted to rent one of her rooms. The inducement to do this is especially strong in towns where unusually large numbers of men are engaged in the manufacture of munitions or in shipbuilding or in the production of other war materials. For some women the taking of lodgers may be a desirable thing. None the less, there are dangers involved. Keeping a lodger may mean overwork for a woman who is already as busy as she ought to be. It may mean overcrowding a home that already has as many occupants as it ought to have. Usually the lodger arrives from the family knows not where. He becomes an intimate acquaintance of the household when perhaps if his