'Domestic economy' is a favorite phrase.

As a matter of fact our method of domestic service is inordinately wasteful.

Even where the wife does all the housework, without pay, we still waste labor to an enormous extent, requiring one whole woman to wait upon each man.

If the man hires one or more servants, the wastes increase.

If one hundred men undertake some common business, they do not divide in two halves, each man having another man to serve him--fifty productive laborers, and fifty cooks.
Two or three cooks could provide for the whole group; to use fifty is to waste 47 per cent.