THE SERVANT IN HER HOUSE
According to the findings of the Massachusetts State Bureau of Labor
Statistics, whose investigation into previous occupation of fallen women
was described in a former chapter, domestic service is a dangerous
trade. Of the 3,966 unfortunates who came under the examination of the
Bureau's investigators, 1,115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been in
domestic service. No other single industry furnished anything like this
proportion.
From time to time reformatories and institutions dealing with delinquent
women and girls examine the industrial status of their charges, always
with results which agree with or even exceed the Massachusetts
statistics. Bedford Reformatory, one of the two New York State
institutions for delinquent women, in an examination of a group of one
thousand women, found four hundred and thirty general houseworkers,
twenty-four chamber-maids, thirteen nursemaids, eight cooks, and
thirty-six waitresses. As some of the waitresses may have been
restaurant workers, we will eliminate them. Even so, it will be seen
that four hundred and seventy-five--nearly half of the Bedford
women--had been servants.
In 1908 the Albion House of Refuge, New York, admitted one hundred and
sixty-eight girls. Of these ninety-two were domestics, one was a lady's
maid, and nine were nursemaids.
Of one hundred and twenty-seven girls in the Industrial School at
Rochester, New York, in 1909, only fifty-one were wage earners. Of that
number twenty-nine had worked in private homes as domestics. Bedford
Reformatory receives mostly city girls; Albion and Rochester are
supplied from small cities and country towns. It appears that domestic
service is a dangerous trade in small communities as well as in large
ones.
On the face of it, the facts are wonderfully puzzling. Domestic service
is constantly urged upon women as the safest, healthiest, most normal
profession in which they can possibly engage. Assuredly it seems to
possess certain unique advantages. Domestic service is the only field of
industry where the demand for workers permanently exceeds the supply.
The nature of the work is essentially suited, by habit, tradition, and
long experiment, to women. It offers economic independence within the
shelter of the home.
Lastly, housework pays extremely well. A girl totally ignorant of the
art of cooking, of any household art, one whose function is to clean,
scrub, and assist her employer to prepare meals, can readily command ten
dollars a month, with board. The same efficiency, or lack of efficiency,
in a factory or department store would be worth about ten dollars a
month, without board. The wages of a competent houseworker, in any part
of the country, average over eighteen dollars a month. Add to this about
thirty dollars a month represented by food, lodging, light, and fire,
and you will see that the competent houseworker's yearly income amounts
to five hundred and seventy-six dollars. This is a higher average than
the school-teacher or the stenographer receives; it is almost double the
average wage of the shop girl, or the factory girl. It is, in fact,
about as high as the usual income of the American workingman.
It is true that the social position of the domestic worker is lower than
that of the teacher, stenographer, or factory worker. This undoubtedly
affects the attractiveness of domestic service as a profession. But the
lower social position is in itself no explanation of the high rate of
immorality. At least there are no figures to prove that the rate of
morality rises or falls with the social status of the individual.
In the contemplation of what is known as the "servant problem," I think
we have been less scientific and more superficial than in any other
social or industrial problem. For the increasing dearth of domestic
workers, for the lowered standard of efficiency, for the startling
amount of immorality alleged to belong to the class, we have given every
explanation except the right one.
At the bottom of the "servant problem" lies the fact that it exists in
the privacy of the home. Now, we have reached a point of social
consciousness where we allow that it is right to intrude some homes and
ask questions for the good of the community. "How many children have
you?" "Are they all in school?" "Does your husband drink?" We have not
yet reached the point of sending agents to inquire: "How many servants
do you keep; what are their hours of work, and what kind of sleeping
accommodations do you furnish them?"
Some intelligent inquiry has been made into surface conditions. The
Sociological Department of Vassar College, under Professor Lucy Maynard
Salmon, during the years 1889 and 1890, made an exhaustive study of
wages, hours of work, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages of
domestic service. Professor Salmon's book, "Domestic Service," giving
the results of the inquiry, is a classic on the subject. It deals,
however, almost entirely with the ethical side of the problem, the
social relation between mistress and maid. The relation between the
worker and the industry is hardly examined at all.
A later inquiry into the servant problem was conducted in 1903, in half
a dozen cities, by organizations of women which associated themselves
for the purpose, under the name of the Intermunicipal Committee on
Household Research.
The Woman's Municipal League of New York, the Educational and Industrial
Union of Boston, the Housekeepers' Alliance, and the Civic Club of
Philadelphia were the moving elements in the investigation. Co-operating
with them were the College Settlements Association and the
Association of Collegiate Alumnae, which together established a
scholar ship for the research. This research was most ably conducted by
Miss Frances Kellor, a Vassar graduate, and nine assistant workers, all
of whom were college women. The report of the investigation was
published a year later in the volume "Out of Work."[1]
This investigation by organizations of educated and expert women was the
first survey ever made of domestic service _as an industry_, the first
scientific study of domestic workers _as an industrial group_. It was
the first intelligent attempt to review housework as if it were a trade.
The most important conclusion of the investigators was that housework,
domestic service, although carried on as a trade, is really no trade at
all. The domestic worker is no more a part of modern industry than the
Italian woman who finishes "pants" in a tenement, or the child who stays
from school to fasten hooks and eyes on paper cards.
Do not let us make a mistake concerning the underlying cause of the
servant problem. Let us face the truth that we have two institutions
which are back numbers in twentieth century civilization: two left-overs
from a past-and-gone domestic system of industry. One of these is the
tenement sweat shop, where women combine, or try to combine,
manufacturing and housekeeping. The other is the private kitchen--the
home--where the last stand of conservatism and tradition, the last
lingering remnant of hand labor, continues to exist.
No woman who is free enough, strong enough, intelligent enough to seek
work in a factory or shop, is ever found in a sweat shop or seen
carrying bundles of coats to finish at home.
Exactly for the same reason the average American working woman shuns
housework as a means of livelihood. You will find in every community a
few women of intelligence who are naturally so domestic in their tastes
and inclinations that they shrink from any work outside the home. Such
women do adhere to domestic service, but, broadly speaking, you behold
in the servant group merely the siftings of the real industrial class.
In a tentative, halting sort of fashion we are learning to humanize the
factory and shop. Factory workers, mill hands, department store clerks,
have been granted legislation in almost every State of the Union,
regulating hours of work, sanitary conditions, ventilation, and in some
cases they have been given protection from dangerous machinery. In
department stores they have been granted even certain special comforts,
such as seats on which to rest while not actually working.
Of course, we have done no more than make a beginning in this matter of
humanizing the factory and the shop. But we have made a beginning, and
the movement toward securing better and juster and healthier conditions
for workers in all the industries is bound to continue. So long as
manufacturing was carried on in the home, no such protective legislation
as workers now enjoy was dreamed of. We had to wait until the workers
came together in large groups before we could see their conditions and
understand their needs.
Housework, because it is performed in isolation, because it is purely
individual labor, has never been classed among the industries. It has
rather been looked upon as a normal feminine function, a form of healthy
exercise. No one has ever suggested to legislators that sweeping and
beating rugs might be included among the dusty trades; that bending over
steaming washtubs, and almost immediately afterwards going out into
frosty air to hang the clothes, might be harmful to throat and lungs;
that remaining within doors days at a time, as houseworkers almost
invariably do, reacts on nerves and the entire physical structure; that
steady service, if not actual labor, from six in the morning until nine
and ten at night makes excessive demands on mind and body.
Such conditions exist because the workers are too weak, too inefficient,
too unintelligent to change them. Yet the demand for servants so far
exceeds the supply that they are in a position, theoretically, to
dictate the terms of their own employment. If they elected to demand
pianos and private baths they could get them; that is, if instead of
remaining isolated individuals they could form themselves into an
industrial class, like plumbers, or bricklayers, or carpenters. Even as
isolated individuals they are able to command a better money wage than
more efficient workers, which proves how great is the need for their
services.
The housekeeper clings to her archaic kitchen, firmly believing that if
she gave it up, tried to replace it by any form of co-operative living,
the pillars of society would crumble and the home pass out of existence.
Yet so strong is her instinctive repugnance to the medieval system on
which her household is conducted, that she shuns it, runs away from it
whenever she can. Housekeeping as a business is a dark mystery to her.
The mass of women in the United States probably hold, almost as an
article of religion, the theory that woman's place is in the home. But
the woman who can organize and manage a home as her husband manages his
business, systematically, profitably, professionally--well, how many
such women do you know?
It would seem as if in the newer generations, the average housekeeper is
not in the professional class at all. Usually she lacks professional
training. If she was brought up in a well-to-do home where there were
several servants, she knows literally nothing of cooking, or of any
department of housekeeping. Even when she has had some instruction in
household tasks, she almost never connects cooking with chemistry, food
with dietetics, cleanliness with sanitation, buying with bookkeeping.
She is an amateur. And she takes into her household to do work she
herself is incapable of doing, another amateur, a woman who might, in
many cases, do well under a capable commander, but who is hopelessly at
sea when expected to evolve a system of housekeeping all by herself.
This irregular state of affairs in what should be a carefully studied,
well-organized industry is reflected in the conditions commonly meted
out to domestics. Take housing conditions, for example. Some
housekeepers provide their servants with good beds; of course, not quite
as good as other members of the household enjoy, but good enough. Some
set aside pleasant, warm, well-furnished rooms for the servants. But
Miss Kellor's investigators reported that it was common to find the only
unheated room in a house or apartment set aside for the servant. They
found great numbers of servants' rooms in basements, having no sunlight
or heat.
At one home, where an investigator applied for a "place," the
housekeeper complained that her last maid was untidy. Then she showed
the applicant to the servant's room. This was a little den partitioned
off from the coal bin!
In another place, the maid was required to sleep on an ironing board
placed over the bathtub. In still another, the maid spent her night of
rest on a mattress laid over the wash tubs in a basement. A bed for two
servants, consisting of a thin mattress on the dining-room table, was
also found.
Unventilated closets, rooms opening off from the kitchen, small and
windowless, are very commonly provided in city flats. Even in spacious
country homes the servants' rooms are considered matters of little
importance.
"One woman," writes Miss Kellor, "planned her new three-story house with
the attic windows so high that no one could see out of them. When the
architect remonstrated she said: 'Oh, those are for the maids; I don't
expect them to spend their time looking out.'"
I remember a young girl who waited on table at a woman's hotel where I
made my home. One morning I sent this girl for more cream for my coffee.
She was gone some time and I spoke to her a little impatiently when she
returned. She was silent for a moment, then she said: "Do you know that
every time you send me to the pantry it means a walk of three and a half
blocks? This dining-room and the kitchens and pantries are a block
apart, and are separated by three flights of stairs. I have counted the
distance there and back, and it is more than three blocks."
"But, Kittie," I said to her, "why do you work in a hotel, if it's like
that? Why don't you take a place in a private family?"
"I've tried that," said the girl. "I had a place with the ----family,"
mentioning an historic name. "They had sickness in the family, and they
stopped in town all summer. My room was up in the attic, with only a
skylight for ventilation. During the day, except for the time I spent
sitting on the area steps after nine o'clock, I was waiting on the cook
in a hot kitchen. They let me out of the house once every two weeks.
Here I have some freedom, at least."
I have told this story to dozens of domestics, many of them from homes
of wealth, and they agree that it is a common case. It is very rare,
these girls say, to find a mistress who is willing to allow her maids to
leave the house except on their days out. They concede certain hours of
rest, it is true, but those hours must be spent within doors. "Why, if
you went out I should be sure to need you," is the usual explanation.
Imagine a factory girl or a stenographer being required to remain after
hours on the chance of being needed for extra work.
There is an aspect to this phase of the servant question which is
generally overlooked by employers. This is an isolation from human
intercourse to be found in no other industry. When the household employs
only one servant the isolation is absolute. The girl is marooned, within
full sight of others' happy life. Even when kindness is her portion she
is an outsider from the family circle. Important as her function is in
the life of the household, she is socially the lowest unit in it.
During the course of a great strike of mill operatives in Fall River,
Massachusetts, a few years ago, a considerable group of weaver and
spinner girls were induced, by members of the Women's Trade Union
League, to take up domestic service until the close of the strike. As
the girls were in acute financial distress they agreed to try the
experiment. These were mostly American or English girls, some of them
above the average of intelligence and good sense.
Housework with its great variety of tasks made severe draughts on the
strength of girls accustomed to using one set of muscles. The long hours
and the confinement of domestic service affected nerves adjusted to a
legal fifty-eight-hour week.
But the girls' real objection to housework was its loneliness. Hardly a
single house in Boston, or the surrounding suburbs, where the girls
found places, was provided with a servants' sitting room. There was
absolutely no provision made for callers. For a servant is supposed not
to have friends except on her days out. On those occasions she is
assumed to meet her friends on the street.
In England people recognize the fact that they have a servant class.
Every house of any pretentions provides a servants' hall.
In the United States a sitting room for servants, even in millionaires'
homes, is a rarity.
More than this, in many city households, especially in apartment
households, the servants are prohibited from receiving their friends
even in the kitchen. "Are we allowed to receive men visitors in the
house?" chorused a group of girls, questioned in a fashionable
employment agency. "Mostly our friends are not allowed to step inside
the areaway while we are putting on our hats to go out."
There is no escaping the conclusion that a large part of the social
evil, or that branch of it recruited every year from domestic service,
is traceable to American methods of dealing with servants. The domestic,
belonging, as a rule, to a weak and inefficient class, is literally
driven into paths where only strength and efficiency could possibly
protect her from evil.
Servants share, in common with all other human beings, the necessity for
human intercourse. They must have associates, friends, companions. If
they cannot meet them in their homes they must seek them outside.
Walk through the large parks in any city, late in the evening, and
observe the couples who occupy obscurely placed benches. You pity them
for their immodest behavior in a public place. But most of them have no
other place to meet. And it is not difficult to comprehend that
clandestine appointments in dark corners as a rule do not conduce to
proper behavior. Most of the women you see on park benches are domestic
servants. Some of them, it is safe to assume, work in New York's
Fifth Avenue, or in mansions on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive.
[Illustration: AN UNTHOUGHT-OF PHASE OF THE SERVANT QUESTION]
The social opportunity of the domestic worker is limited to the park
bench, the cheap theater, the summer excursion boat, and the dance hall.
Hardly ever does a settlement club admit a domestic to membership;
rarely does a working girls' society or a Young Women's Christian
Association circle bid her welcome. The Girls' Friendly Association of
the Protestant Episcopal Church is a notable exception to this rule.
In a large New England city, not long ago, a member of the Woman's Club
proposed to establish a club especially for domestics, since no other
class of women seemed willing to associate with them. The proposal was
voted down. "For," said the women, "if they had a clubroom they would be
sure to invite men, and immorality might result."
But there is no direct connection between a clubroom and immorality,
whereas the park bench after dark and the dance hall and its almost
invariable accompaniment of strong drink are positive dangers.
The housekeeper simply does not realize that her domestics are _girls_,
exactly like other girls. They need social intercourse, they need
laughter and dancing and healthy pleasure just as other girls need them,
as much as the young ladies of the household need them.
Perhaps they need them even more. The girl upstairs has mental resources
which the girl downstairs lacks. The girl upstairs has the protection
of family, friends, social position. The last is of greatest importance,
because the woman without a social position has ever been regarded by a
large class of men as fair game. The domestic worker sometimes finds
this out within the shelter, the supposed shelter, of her employer's
home.
[Illustration: ANOTHER SERIOUS CONTRIBUTION TO THE SOCIAL QUESTION]
Tolstoy's terrible story "Resurrection" has for its central anecdote in
the opening chapter a court-room scene in which a judge is called upon
to sentence to prison a woman for whose downfall he had, years before,
been responsible. A somewhat similar story in real life, with a happier
ending, was told me by the head of a woman's reformatory. This official
received a visit from a lawyer, who told her with much emotion that he
had, several days before, been present when a young girl was sentenced
to a term in a reformatory.
"She lived in my home," said the man. "I believe that she was a good
girl up to that time. My wife died, my home was given up, and of course
I forgot that poor girl. She never made any claim on me. When I saw her
there in court, among the dregs of humanity, her face showing what her
life had become, I wanted to shoot myself. Now she is here, with a
chance to get back her health and a right state of mind. Will you help
me to make amends?"
The head of the reformatory rather doubted the man's sincerity at first.
She feared that his repentance was superficial. She refused to allow
him to see or to communicate with the girl, but she wrote him regularly
of her progress. Several times in the course of the year the man visited
the reformatory, and at the end of that period he was allowed to see the
girl. This institution happens to be one of the few where a rational and
a humane system of outdoor work is in vogue. The girl, who a year back
had been almost a physical wreck from drugs and the life of the streets,
was again strong, healthy, and sane. The two forgave each other and were
married.
If the position of the domestic, while living in the shelter of a
family, is sometimes precarious, her situation, when out of a job, is
often actually perilous.
If a girl has a home she goes to that home, and regards her temporary
period of unemployment as a pleasant vacation. But in most cases, in
cities, at any rate, few girls have homes of which they can avail
themselves.
"In no city," says Miss Kellor's report, "are adequate provisions made
for such homeless women, and their predicament is peculiarly acute, for
their friends are often household workers who cannot extend the
hospitality of their rooms."
I think I hear a chorus of protesting voices: "We don't have anything
to do with the servant class you are describing. Our girls are
respectable. They meet their friends at church. They come to us from
reputable employment offices, which would not deal with them if they
were not all right."
Are you sure you know this? What, after all, do you really know about
your servants? What do you know about the employment office that sent
her to you? What do you know of the world inhabited by servants and the
people who deal in servants? Can you not imagine that it might be
different from the one you live in so safely and comfortably?
Are you willing to know the facts about the world, the underworld, from
which the girl who cooks your food and takes care of your children is
drawn? Do you care to know how a domestic spends the time between
places, how she gets to your kitchen or nursery, the kind of homes she
may have been in before she came to you? Make a little descent into that
underworld with a girl whose experience is matched with those of many
others.
Nellie B---- was an Irish girl, strong, pretty of face, and joyful of
temperament. The quiet Indiana town where she earned her living as a
cook offered Nellie so little diversion that she determined to go to
Chicago to live. She gave up her place, and with a month's wages in her
pocket went to the city.
It was late in the afternoon when her train reached the station. Nellie
alighted, bewildered and lonely. She had the address of an employment
agency, furnished her by an acquaintance. Nellie slept that night, or
rather tossed sleepless in the agency lodging house, on a dirty bed
occupied by two women besides herself. In all her life she had never
been inside such a filthy room, or heard such frightful conversation.
Therefore next morning she gladly paid her exorbitant bill of one dollar
and seventy-five cents, besides a fee of two dollars and a half for
obtaining employment, and accepted the first place offered her.
The house she was taken to seemed to be conducted rather strangely.
Meals were at unusual hours, and the household consisted largely of
young women who received many men callers. For about a week Nellie did
her work unmolested. At the end of the week her mistress presented her
with a low-necked satin dress and asked her if she would not like to
assist in entertaining the men. Simple-minded Nellie had to have the
nature of the entertaining explained to her, and she had great
difficulty in leaving the house after she had declined the offer. She
had hardly any money left, and the woman refused to pay her for her
week's work.
Nellie knew of no other employment agency, so she was obliged to return
to the one she left. When she reproached the agent for sending her to a
disreputable house he shrugged his shoulders and replied: "Well, I send
girls where they're wanted. If they don't like the place they can
leave."
The fact is, they cannot always leave when they want to. Miss Kellor's
investigators found an office in Chicago which sent girls to a resort in
Wisconsin which was represented as a summer hotel. This notorious place
was surrounded by a high stockade which rendered escape impossible.
The investigators found offices in other cities which operate
disreputable houses in summer places. To these the proprietors send the
handsomest of their applicants for honest work.
Three girls sent to a house of this kind found themselves prisoners. One
girl made such a disturbance by screaming and crying that the proprietor
literally kicked her out of the house. The investigators for the
Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research saw this girl in a
hospital, insane and dying from the treatment she had received. Another
of the three escaped from the place. She, too, was discovered in a state
of dementia. The fate of the third girl is obscure.
[Illustration: THE SERVANT GIRL AND THE EMPLOYMENT AGENCY]
Not all employment agencies cater to this trade. Not all would consent
to be accessory to women's degradation. But the employment agency
business, taken by and large, is disorganized, haphazard, out of date.
It is operated on a system founded in lies and extortion. The offices
want fees--fees from servants and fees from employers. They encourage
servants to change their employment as often as possible. Often a firm
will send a girl to a place, and a week or two later will send her word
that they have a better job for her. Sometimes they arrange with her to
leave her place after a certain period, promising her an easier position
or a better wage. They favor the girl who changes often. "You're a nice
kind of a customer!" jeered one proprietor to a girl who boasted that
she had been in a family for five years. The girl was a _customer_ to
him, and she was nothing more.
To his profitable customer the agent is often very accommodating. If she
lacks references he writes her flattering ones, or loans her a reference
written by some woman of prominence. References, indeed, are often
handed around like passports among Russian revolutionists.
Many of these unpleasant facts were brought to light in the course of
the investigation made by the Intermunicipal Committee on Household
Research. The result of their report was a model employment agency law,
passed by the New York State Legislature, providing for a strict
licensing system, rigid forms of contract, regulation of fees, and
inspection by special officers of the Bureau of Licenses. The law
applies only to cities of the first class, and unfortunately has never
been very well enforced. Perhaps it has not been possible to enforce it.
In all the cities examined by the Intermunicipal Committee on Household
Research the investigators found the majority of employment agencies in
close connection with the homes of the agents. In New York, of three
hundred and thirteen offices visited, one hundred and twenty were in
tenements, one hundred and seven in apartment houses, thirty-nine in
residences and only forty-nine in business buildings. In
Philadelphia, only three per cent of employment agencies were found
in business buildings. Chicago made a little better showing, with
nineteen per cent in business houses. The difficulty of properly
regulating a business which is carried on in the privacy of a home is
apparent. When an agency is in a business building it usually has
conspicuous signs, and often the rooms are well equipped with desks,
comfortable chairs, and other office furnishings. But the majority of
agencies are of another description. Those dealing with immigrant girls
are sometimes filthy rooms in some rear tenement, reached through a
saloon or a barber shop facing the street. Often the other tenants of
the building are fortune tellers, palmists, "trance mediums," and like
undesirables.
A large number of these agencies operate lodging houses for their
patrons. There is hardly a good word to say for most of these, except
that they are absolutely necessary. Dirty, unsanitary, miserable as they
usually are, if they were closed by law, hundreds, perhaps thousands of
domestics temporarily out of work, would be turned into the streets.
Many are unfamiliar with the cities they live in. Many more are barred
from hotels on account of small means. Often a girl finding it
impossible to bring herself to lie down on the wretched beds provided by
these lodging houses, leaves her luggage and goes out, not to return
until morning. She spends the night in dance halls and other resorts.
According to Miss Kellor's report this description of employment
agencies and lodging houses attached to them applies to about
seventy-five per cent of all offices in the four cities examined. For
greater accuracy the investigators made a brief survey of conditions in
cities, such as St. Louis, New Haven, and Columbus, Ohio. The
differences were slight, showing that the employment agency problem is
much the same east and west.
Domestic servants have their industrial ups and downs like other
workers. Sometimes they are able to pay the fees required in a
high-class employment office, while at other times they are obliged to
have recourse to the cheaper places, where standards of honesty, and
perhaps also, of propriety, are low. Domestic workers are the nomads of
industry. Their lives are like their work,--impermanent, detached from
others', unobserved.
It is for the housekeepers of America to consider the plain facts
concerning domestic service. Some of the conditions they can change.
Others they cannot. No one can alter the economic status of the kitchen.
Like the sweat shop, it must ultimately disappear.
What system of housekeeping will take the place of the present system
cannot precisely be foretold. We know that the whole trend of things
everywhere is toward co-operation. Within the past ten years think how
much cooking has gone into the factory, how much washing into the steam
laundry, how much sewing into the shop. As the cost of living increases,
more and more co-operation will be necessary, especially for those of
moderate income. At the present time millions of city dwellers have
given up living in their own houses, or even in rented houses. They
cannot afford to maintain individual homes, but must live in apartment
houses, where the expenses of heat, and other expenses, notably water,
hall, and janitor service, are reduced to a minimum because shared by
all the tenants. There may come a time when the private kitchen will be
a luxury of the very rich.
For a time, however, the private kitchen and the servant in the kitchen
will remain. That is one servant problem. But the housekeeper still has
another "servant problem," and I have tried to make it clear that this
problem pretty closely involves the morals of the community.
Now this matter of community morals has begun to interest women
profoundly. In many of their organizations women are studying and
endeavoring to understand the causes of evil. They are securing the
appointment of educated women as probation officers in the courts which
deal with delinquent women and girls. Sincerely they are working toward
a better understanding of the problem of the prodigal daughter.
Since about one-third of all these prodigals are recruited from the
ranks of domestic workers it is possible for the housekeepers of the
country to play an important part in this work. Every woman in the
United States who employs one servant has a contribution to make to the
movement. The power to humanize domestic service in her own household is
in every woman's hand.
Loneliness, social isolation, the ban of social inferiority,--these
cruel and unreasonable restrictions placed upon an entire class of
working women are out of tune with democracy. The right of the domestic
worker to regular hours of labor, to freedom after her work is done, to
a place to receive her friends, must be recognized. The self-respect of
the servant must in all ways be encouraged.
Above all, the right of the domestic worker to social opportunity must
be admitted. It must be provided for.
Yonkers, New York, a large town on the Hudson River, points out one way
toward this end. In Yonkers there has been established a Women's
Institute for the exclusive use of domestics. It has an employment
agency and supports classes in domestic science for those girls who wish
to become more expert workers. There are club rooms and recreation
parlors where the girls receive and meet their friends--including their
men friends. A group of liberal-minded women established this unique
institution, which is well patronized by the superior class of domestic
workers in Yonkers. The dues are small, and members are allowed to share
club privileges with friends. It is not unusual for employers to present
their domestics with membership cards. It cannot be said that the
Women's Institute has solved the servant problem for Yonkers, but many
women testify to its happy effects on their own individual problems.
The Committee on Amusements and Vacation Resources of Working Girls in
New York is collecting a long list of farmhouses and village homes in
the mountains and near the sea where working girls, and this includes
domestics, may spend their vacations for very little money.
Every summer, as families leave the city for country and seaside,
domestics are thrown out of employment. A department in the Women's Club
can examine vacation possibilities for domestics. The clubs can also
deal with the employment agency. Some women's organizations have already
taken hold of this department. The Women's Educational and Industrial
Union of Boston conducts a very large and flourishing employment agency.
Women's clubs can study the laws of their own community in regard to
public employment agencies. They can investigate homes for immigrant
girls and boarding-houses for working women.
Preventive work is better than reform measures, but both are necessary
in dealing with this problem. Women have still much work to do in
securing reformatories for women. New York is the first State to
establish such reformatories for adult women. Private philanthropy has
offered refuges and semipenal institutions. The State stands aloof.
Even in New York public officials are strangely skeptical of the
possibilities of reform. Last year the courts of New York City sent
three thousand delinquent women to the workhouse on Blackwell's
Island,--a place notorious for the low state of its _morale_. They sent
only seventeen women to Bedford Reformatory, where a healthy routine of
outdoor work, and a most effective system administered by a scientific
penologist does wonders with its inmates. Nothing but the will and the
organized effort of women will ever solve the most terrible of all
problems, or remove from society the reproach of ruined womanhood which
blackens it now.
NOTES:
Note 1: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1904.