Article from Social-Demokraten from May 1, 1899

By Nina Bang

Would that all women would rally around the 8-hour requirement, everyone, the wife and the servant, the factory worker, the seamstress, the shopkeeper – everyone!

For no one has a greater right to it than they, and the implementation of the demand would bring about a social upheaval that would bring bright and happy times for the man too. If the man suffers from too long working hours, the woman suffers even more, for even if the man’s working hours are long, they are fixed, and what is left of the day is his own, but how many women can say that about theirs, especially how many married women can say that?

The woman probably now feels the burdens of home heavier than before. They do so because the young women, not only in the lower classes, but also higher up in society, have become gainfully employed; it may often be a small matter with the sum of enjoyment of life which their occupation affords them, but it develops in them the demand for a certain time of work and the demand for a certain time of rest which is their own, and in which they freely dispose of their own personality. But what the home in its present form above all does not offer the woman is precisely a definite time for work and a definite leisure time flowing from it; a housewife can only rarely say that she is finished, and even if she can, the fatigue is in her, and when the time comes when she and her husband should have some intercourse, she longs only for rest. It is not only in the poorest classes that this difficulty in reconciling a real cohabitation with the present forms of the home is felt; the better-off classes also feel the strain.

They take help for the house, get a girl, and they transfer the irregular and long hours of work which the running of the house now necessarily requires to a third man, but this does not end the happiness of marriage, for now come the girl’s sorrows. It is certainly inherent in the development of society that it is associated with ever-increasing difficulties for a family with children to get good maids; firstly, where will these girls learn to be good? and secondly, who will wonder that a clever girl prefers to seek an independent position where she can have her working hours and leisure time regularized? But even if the girl is good enough, she is still a strange person, who hears everything and knows everything, who not only sees when you are happy, but from whom you cannot hide when you are sad.

The arrangement of our home had its justification when the home was the place of production, when a man’s business was connected with it, and when almost everything that was used in it was made in it; but as production increasingly moves away from the home, its arrangement becomes less and less up-to-date, and the misfortunes it causes men are greater and greater, precisely because the separation between the place of work and the place of rest develops men’s sense of difference and makes them demand more.

He who works eight or ten hours outside his home will have a very different sense of what he requires of a home when he returns to it than he who sits all day in it and works. The better advice people have, the more work they will do outside the house, e.g. sewing, washing, and housework. Sewing, washing, and the wife’s work will be lightened thereby, but a full and complete marriage, a marriage which contains no other obligations than to love and to be faithful, can only be achieved when everything that does not affect this real life together is separated from the home. How much time and energy is wasted when the fuel has to be carried up many stairs and distributed in many stoves instead of having a central heating apparatus in the cellar, so that you only have to turn a tap to get the hot air to flow in. And as with the heating, so it is with the lighting; it takes time and care to keep kerosene lamps in proper condition, while the electric light only requires one turn to satisfy our requirements.

And now the cooking. A great many housewives have in reality no knowledge of cooking, they do not know the nutritive value of the various foodstuffs; but even where they do, economic conditions force them to make small purchases, which are always more expensive than large ones, and as the children, where there is no maid, are left entirely to themselves while the mother is out, she has to hurry and often take the first best thing offered to her; if she does not go herself, but sends the girl or a child, it goes even more out of her purse. After the shopping comes the cooking, which requires no small amount of time and effort if it is to be reasonably proper. At the same time, perhaps a thousand women in the same town are bending over a thousand pots of yellow peas and pork. How differently sensible it would be if there was a large kitchen at the top of the house, where the families of the house could order their food, and from which it could come down through elevators into the apartment. The large expenses for kitchen equipment could be saved, the apartment could have an extra room, as there was no longer any need for a kitchen. A relatively small number of people could cook for a large number of families. But these are not just dreams. In America, such communal households, to which one must not attach the idea of communal homes, are quite widespread, and everywhere in the large cities of Europe there are hotels where married people live permanently in order to be free from the masses of things that occupy the married woman’s time and strength, and which, especially where she is gainfully employed, threaten her with complete ruin.

Nothing will be able to prevent the woman from becoming gainfully employed like the man, but she must then be freed from the burdens she has from old times, and it is so much easier to do so as these burdens no longer correspond to the times and are costly to maintain. Only when all the daily housework is done on a large scale will it be possible to provide the woman with a definite working time and a definite resting time, the only real foundation for a real cohabitation between husband and wife, parents and children. The husband will then not see his wife’s youth fade before her time, and the children will not, when they come to maturity and age, see their mother worn out and unable to live a proper cohabitation with them.

Much will rise up against the woman’s demand for a normal working day. “The dissolution of the home”, “the decline of manners” etc. will be shouted at her when she arms herself to fight for what is precisely the preservation of the home, the raising of manners. It is then important for her to keep her goal clearly in mind; she will then, strong with the help of the united proletariat, carry her struggle through.

8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for sleep.