US Household Expenses in 1910
"American housekeeping has long been under fire from foreign critics, and the American housewife is constantly arraigned for her careless household management and her scorn for economy. America is a…
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
“Housekeeping Expenditures,” from Home Life in America by Katherine Graves Busbey, 1910.
An Englishman travelling in America not long ago, and scorning the usual methods of the diarist, kept a sort of pocket registry, in which he entered his impressions in “credit, doubtful, and debit” columns. To our credit account he put, I remember, “oysters, waterfalls, parlour-cars, shoes, and skyscrapers.” Under doubtful came “newspapers, mince-pies, millionaires, furnaces in dwelling-houses, and negroes;” while we were judged as owing an apology, or at least an explanation for, “monuments, spring weather, servants, and housekeeping.”
American housekeeping has long been under fire from foreign critics, and the American housewife is constantly arraigned for her careless household management and her scorn for economy. America is a place where fortunes are made, not saved. The American man always found it easier to make money than to save it. When a new want develops in the average American family, retrenchment in other directions is never contemplated as a solution, but a greater income is managed by the nale provider to meet the increased expenditure.
It is not a question of making “a little and spending a little less” in America, but the constant and almost universally successful quest to make much more and to spend it all in the certainty of more to come. The expenditure of the American household depends upon mental rather than material limitations, so it is expecting a good deal to look to the American housewife, whose vision includes an almost assured rise in her fortunes, for the exactitude in shilling and pence account of the oversea households where the economic status of the average woman is established at birth, or certainly on the day of her marriage.
For instance, the economist tells us that the average English working-man earns about £1 4s. a week. He will probably earn the same all his life, and his son will continue the family fortunes on the same modest scale, and they will each maintain a family, and even save.
The average American working-man will earn at least £2 a week, and, with the rapid rise made possible by better industrial conditions and the greater opportunities for earning money, the family should shortly have £3 a week, with £4. in sight as a stimulus to exertion. From this class of intelligent, self-respecting, industrious persons rises, in the next generation, thanks to free schools and democratic plasticity, a group who are typical Americans whatever their grandfathers were. These are the educated persons in the community, young college graduates in business, clerks, tradesmen, and skilled workmen of the highest type. No class barrier “grooves” them socially.
The income of this typical family is from £300 to £600 a year, and such are the possibilities in the industrial conditions of America that the limit of earning capacity is measured only by intelligence and the power to grasp opportunity. The tendency is almost universally upward, and with a constantly shifting basis of household funds, close calculation on the part of the housewife seems a fruitless and unappreciated task. Accounts are rarely kept in the American family, and the housewife seldom has a chance to become skilled in the use of money on any settled scale of income.
This constant readjustment to an increasing scale of income with its attendant temptation to extravagance does not, of course, refer to the very poor nor the very rich, both of which we have always with us, but, as an English writer has said, “paupers and millionaires are alike independent of statistics.”
It is with expenditures of the middle and working classes that the foreign critic confronts us, and I realize that no amount of generalized explanation of conditions will suffice before the two specific charges:
First: That the cost of living for the artisan in America is one and a half times dearer than in England, so that the larger earnings in America are offset by expenses out of proportion to the higher wages.
Second: That the rich man setting the standard of prices here, the “comfortably off” have not the essentials of comfort to the extent that this class abroad have.
In the first place, it is the standard of living, not the cost of the food itself, that is higher among the working class in America. You take the foreign workman coming over here with his “macaroni,” or “bologna,” or "potato-and-tea” standards of diet, and, in a short time, his food expenditure will be represented approximately by the following four weeks’ budget of an Americanized Italian family. The man and wife in this family were born in Italy, but the four children were born in New York. The man was a stone-cutter, and his income for the year was £138.
It is doubtful whether the same variety in adequate nourishment for a family of six could be obtained at the same cost in any large city abroad. There, among the people of this class, it would not have been sought, but in America the demand comes with the ability to gratify it. If the Italian peasant standard of living had been persisted in, there would have been quite munificent savings from the American income.
No doubt the enlarged diet is made necessary to some extent by the change in climate and conditions of living, but to this exigency can hardly be attributed the gaudy plush-covered furniture in the “parlour,” the lace curtains at the windows and the ubiquitous folding-bed, and religious pictures of the saints, the Virgin Mary or The Sacred Heart, which form the interior of the typical working-man’s home of this class, and which became necessities upon adopting the American labourer’s standard of living.
The furniture as well as the clothes worn in America by this family would represent a much higher grade of society in the land of their birth. The same clothing could hardly have been bought cheaper abroad than from the small shop and sidewalk (pavement) merchants of lower New York, but in the former peasant state it would not have been aspired to. It amounts to this: that a large proportion of working-men in America, beginning life as peasants, become middle-class citizens in the land of their adoption, and, with the transformation, the peasant’s penury and thrift disappears with the peasant’s clothes and surroundings. Balancing his cost of living with the comfort obtainable in comparison with the same class abroad, the results would, I think, be decidedly to the advantage of living in the United States.
The one item of expenditure which draws heavily upon the workman in America is his drink. Wine and beer are higher here than abroad, and the Americanized foreign workman is obliged to pay a luxury price for what he has been accustomed to consider as a part of his food. To the above budget, for example, should be added £1 9s. 8d., which was spent for wine for family use during the four weeks.
The native American household regard "drink” as a luxury, and in hearing of its cheapness abroad it is reasoned that, as luxuries are cheap so the staples of diet must be cheap, not realizing that while the foreign workman at home could get his wine cheap, if of very inferior quality, his diet would be black bread, macaroni, and chestnuts.
The workman’s family in America where butter and meat is not regularly served is rare.
I have two budgets from typical American families of the lower middle class in a large city. They lie in the stratum above the very poor, whose struggle is rehearsed in the record of charitable societies, and below the class of highly skilled artisans’ families. One point here must be noted. In America, in the large cities, the “black coat” man, the great clerk class, is rather worse off than the artisan in a strongly unionized trade. Counting-room clerks, bank clerks, book-keepers, are paid from £3 to £6 a week; while bricklayers, thanks to their union, earn from a pound to twenty-eight shillings a day; carpenters, plumbers, electrical workers, and other members of skilled trades from twelve to sixteen, eighteen, and, occasionally, twenty shillings a day.
The first family consists of father, mother, and two children. The only source of income is from the father, who is a draftsman in an architect’s office, and earns £3 a week. He also makes a few dollars extra in drawing plans and specifications, and this amounts to about £14 a year. The home consists of three rooms, the rent of which is £2 12s. a month. The sanitary conditions are good, and while the bedroom is small, with only one window, the kitchen is conveniently arranged, and the parlour has two large windows. The rooms are well furnished. The furniture cost £42 , bought “on time” when the man married, and was paid for in two years. The Englishman’s reflection on American housekeepers holds particularly true of this class, and this case is typical.
The rooms are never in order; everything is untidy, but not dirty. The wife is pretty, bright, and ambitious, but entirely untrained and without system in her work. She cannot sew—few women in America of this class know how to—so all the clothing is bought “ready-made,” and is thrown away when worn out, very little mending being done. She is, however, a devoted wife and mother.
Their expenditure for recreation was most carefully estimated. They went regularly once a week to a theatre all winter. This cost about £3 for the season. They also went to six or seven balls (2s. each) as the wife is very fond of dancing. In the summer they take the children several times a week on trolley car (electric tram) rides in the evening besides trips to a nearby resort. Last summer they spent two weeks at the seaside, where they paid £2 for two furnished rooms and boarded themselves. In all, they have a good deal of pleasure and recreation, and are, I believe, typical of many households of this class—extravagant in some ways and provident in others, with a fair degree of comfort and prosperity, but with very little provision made for the future; but, it may be repeated, Americans are not a saving nation. Here is the budget—
Three things in this budget may be noted as characteristic of this class in America.
First, in a family of most shiftless procedure in regard to clothing, where the premeditated poverty of patches and darns is foresworn in favour of the impromptu smile of gaping holes, great concern is given to keeping the children’s teeth in condition. In this account a large part of the £6 dentist’s bill was incident to straightening irregular front teeth for one of the children, and it is not an unusual consideration. The American workman's child has, as a rule, much better teeth than the British child in this class, or even the peasant child abroad, for which, of course, American dentistry must be thanked in part.
The second item of significance is the small expenditure for drink. The seventeen-pence a week is quite typical of this class, and rather a contrast to the average sum devoted to drink by families of the working classes of England.
The third noteworthy feature is the insurance payment. It is somewhat above the average amount in this budget, but it is rare to find a family in this class without some expenditure for life insurance. And this is due almost entirely to a desire to have a “decent ” or even fine funeral. The standard of these people in regard to funerals—the ostentatious display of flowers and the number of carriages—produces a startling and tragically grotesque effect when one considers the humble abode from which the cortege of pomp and circumstances usually starts.
Funerals are a form of dissipation among this class. There is no orgy of grief and stimulated cheer before the burial, but in the display of decorative coffin and hearse and stream of attendant coaches the family proclaims its social status to the neighbourhood. A family frequently submits to being dispossessed, or to going on a pinched allowance of food and clothing or fuel, to keep up the insurance; and the insurance is almost invariably devoted to the funeral, it becoming a ghastly gamble as to which members shall hold a policy.
The cost of the average funeral among our working people is £20. Going to funerals of friends is considered an obligation, but at the same time a kind of outing. Each family supplies its own coach, outside the chief mourners, and the usual price is £12 s. So that when a family has gone several times in the year, the fact will be mentioned with pride among the other recreations the family has had. Yet the knowledge of the insurance held by one of these households fosters' a spirit of independence and the commendable horror of a pauper funeral.
My second budget of £273 yearly income is from the family of an assistant shipping clerk, whose income is increased by the earnings of a daughter nineteen years old. There were two children at home, including a son, who died during the year. The working daughter is a fitter in a large clothing shop and earns £1 16s. a week. She keeps eight shillings a week for her clothing, but turns over the rest into the family treasury. The income, therefore, may be stated—
This is an example of a family in the first year of an increased income. Up to that time the father had been a porter in the office where he now works as clerk and received £160, and the daughter, as an apprentice, was unpaid.
In this instance the deficit might not have occurred but for the emergency of sickness and the funeral. They are ambitious, fairly educated people, and the father has opportunities still further to advance. The horizon of comfortable living is broadening. Their wants keep pace and overstep the growing income. The failure to make ends meet is not regarded as ominous. Next year they will have adjusted themselves to their conditions, and expenditures will be less reckless. It is a typical case, and a modest example of the uncertainty of household accounts, through the optimistic transition of fortunes in the United States.
The family had moved from a flat, for which they paid £2 6s. a month, to a flat of five good-sized rooms with well-equipped bathroom at £4. The expense for food mounted from £1 8s. as a weekly average to £2 4s. But their diet was as attractive and abundant as that of families on a much higher income, and to see the mother and daughter on the street, one might easily judge their clothes the expression of a £700 household.
The wonder to me was, not that they had failed to save—for the longer you live in the United States the firmer becomes your conviction that about the only evidence of saving is in our magazine articles on "household economy”—but that, frankly, they got as much as they did for their money. They had a piano and a sideboard, which must have been purchased even in the poor days, and the furnishings and bric-a-brac gave the atmosphere of a well-to-do family in a small town.
Of course, for the same money they could have rented a house in the small town; but, unless they had their own garden for raising vegetables, table expenditures would have been as high and not as varied as in the crowded sections of New York. The cost of living in the suburbs of a large city is considerably higher than in the city markets.
The foreigner seldom fails to express amazement at the income of the skilled artisan in America, which places him materially above the professor in a small college and on an equality with the moderately successful professional man. “Your mechanic's home is merely a cloth-bound edition of the millionaire’s Edition de luxe,” was an Englishman's observation. Free from class distinction, the artisan aspires to the same tastes as the rich man, and his income has become adjusted to gratify this ambition to follow luxurious tastes rather than to meet the actual cost of living, as accepted by his class abroad.
The heating of American houses always falls under foreign criticism, and does not entirely escape native comment. It is an open question, on which much can be said on both sides. The American says that his much calumniated method of heating his entire house by a central stove, from which the heat is coaxed into every nook and cranny by steam or hot water circulating in radiators, or by the direct piping of hot air, is the only comfortable condition for an interior from December to well into March. He recalls to you the continual procession of coal-scuttles going upstairs in an English home, and the roasting on one side, freezing on the other, of the open-grate system.
He avers there are as bad throat and lung troubles in Old England as in the incubator homes of New England, and that if he must take cold and die, he prefers to do it comfortably.
The American woman delights to wear the most summery kind of clothes indoors in winter, and claims that is the tactful way to meet the wintry blasts, with lace in her super-heated house and furs on the street. She will never admit that her house is heated above 70°, although I venture to say more household thermometers register 80° than below, and 80° of artificial heat, even in a lingerie frock, is enervating.
This revives the question of the comparative cost and extent of comfort in the moderately well-off families. The cost of gas is higher in America, being about four shillings a 1000 cubic feet, contrasted with sixpence less for the same quality in London; but the London gas bills are generally larger, perhaps because a greater use of artificial light is necessary. This does not hold true, of course, of the bills in the families where the cooking is done by gas, the use of which is increasing in the United States. Electric lighting, like the telephone, is much more general, cheaper, and better in America than abroad.
Water rates in large American cities are only about half those in London, and in a comfortable home in the United States, there will be two bathrooms, and the sidewalk (American for front pavement) will be washed with a hose spray every day. Coal, for heating, averages twenty-five shillings a ton.
Busbey, Katherine Graves. Home Life in America. MacMillan Co., 1915.
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