"Edward Bellamy. Lookimg Backward From 2000 to 1887" - читать интересную книгу автора

the rest, that we could easily provide a corps of domestic servants
such as you never dreamed of, if we needed them," replied Dr.
Leete. "But we do not need them."

"Who does your house-work, then?" I asked.

"There is none to do," said Mrs. Leete, to whom I had
addressed this question. "Our washing is all done at public
laundries at excessively cheap rates, and our cooking at public
kitchens. The making and repairing of all we wear are done
outside in public shops. Electricity, of course, takes the place of
all fires and lighting. We choose houses no larger than we need,
and furnish them so as to involve the minimum of trouble to
keep them in order. We have no use for domestic servants."

"The fact," said Dr. Leete, "that you had in the poorer classes
a boundless supply of serfs on whom you could impose all sorts
of painful and disagreeable tasks, made you indifferent to devices
to avoid the necessity for them. But now that we all have to do
in turn whatever work is done for society, every individual in the
nation has the same interest, and a personal one, in devices for
lightening the burden. This fact has given a prodigious impulse
to labor-saving inventions in all sorts of industry, of which the
combination of the maximum of comfort and minimum of
trouble in household arrangements was one of the earliest
results.

"In case of special emergencies in the household," pursued Dr.
Leete, "such as extensive cleaning or renovation, or sickness in
the family, we can always secure assistance from the industrial
force."

"But how do you recompense these assistants, since you have
no money?"

"We do not pay them, of course, but the nation for them.
Their services can be obtained by application at the proper
bureau, and their value is pricked off the credit card of the
applicant."

"What a paradise for womankind the world must be now!" I
exclaimed. "In my day, even wealth and unlimited servants did
not enfranchise their possessors from household cares, while the
women of the merely well-to-do and poorer classes lived and died
martyrs to them."

"Yes," said Mrs. Leete, "I have read something of that;
enough to convince me that, badly off as the men, too, were in
your day, they were more fortunate than their mothers and
wives."