subject is not worthy of consideration and that time and strength are
wasted in discussing it. This attitude of mind is well illustrated by
Lord Orrery’s “Remarks on the Life and Writings of Swift,” apropos
of Swift’s “General Instructions to Servants.”[11] Lord Orrery may
not indeed have been altogether free from malice and jealousy in
penning these words, and he certainly showed himself deficient in a
sense of humor, but whatever his motive, his comments on Swift’s work
illustrate fairly well a belief still prevalent. “How much time,”
Lord Orrery comments, “must have been employed in putting together
such a work! What an intenseness of thought must have been bestowed
upon the lowest and most slavish scenes of life!... A man of Swift’s
genius ought constantly to have soared into higher regions. He ought
to have looked upon persons of inferior abilities as children, whom
nature had appointed him to instruct, encourage, and improve.
Superior talents seem to have been intended by Providence as public
benefits; and the person who possesses such blessings is certainly
answerable to heaven for those endowments which he enjoys above the
rest of mankind. Let him jest with dignity, and let him be ironical
upon useful subjects; leaving poor slaves to heat their porridge,
or drink their small beer, in such vessels as they shall find
proper.”[12]
Another great difficulty is the persistent refusal to consider
domestic service as a question of general interest and a part of
the labor question of the day. “What is needed,” an English critic
remarks, “is an infallible recipe for securing a good £16 girl and
for keeping her when secured.” But alas, who shall give an infallible
recipe for accomplishing the impossible? Who shall lay down the
principle that will make coal-miners contented with low wages and
long hours, that will make the employers of masons satisfied with
bungling work that threatens life and limb, that will lull into
ease a conscience aroused by the iniquities of the sweating system?
Nothing can be more chimerical than to expect a perfect automatic
adjustment of the household machinery while other parts of the
industrial world are not in harmonious relation to each other.
A third obstacle is the persistent belief that nothing can be done
until this magic recipe has been discovered. If it is suggested that
one measure of alleviation is to take a part of the work out of the
household it is answered that it is useless to propose it because all
work cannot be taken out of the household, because the plan would
not work in the rural districts, because it would not meet the case
in England, because it is expensive. Certainly all these are valid
objections to considering the plan a sovereign remedy. But to refuse
to try a remedy that may prove of benefit in some households because
it will not work in all is quite the same as to refuse to administer
a medicine in case of fever because it will not also cure consumption.
The preceding is illustrative of another difficulty that is implied
in it--a fundamental ignorance on the part of many housekeepers of
the processes of reasoning. This is illustrated by the reasoning that
many go through with in discussing the question:
“Public laundries are in the hands of men whose standard of
perfection in laundry-work is a smooth shirt-front and a stiff collar
and cuff. This standard of perfection cannot be applied to the
laundering of linen and children’s clothing. Therefore, table-linen
and children’s clothing must be laundered in the house.”
“My mother’s cook received a part of her wages in lodging and board.
My cook receives a part of her wages in lodging and board. Therefore,
my daughter’s cook will receive a part of her wages in lodging and
board.”
“Negro employees lodge out of the house at the South. White employees
do not lodge out of the house in England. Therefore employees cannot
lodge out of the house at the North.”
“Employees should be treated with consideration. My employees are
treated with consideration. Therefore all employees are treated with
consideration.”
“Some employees are incompetent. Good results cannot be secured with
incompetent employees. Therefore good service is impossible.”
The only way of meeting this difficulty is found in the slow process
of careful, systematic education. What many housekeepers need is not
so much instruction in cooking or domestic sanitation as training in
calculus and quaternions, Herodotus and Livy, logic and geology.
Still another hindrance is the tone of certainty and finality that
characterizes all discussions concerning the household. It is a part
of the religious belief of many persons that every woman has been
foreordained by Providence to be a wife, mother, and housekeeper,
and that any deviation from this fundamental law is an infringement
on the designs of Providence. But some of us remember that scarcely
more than fifty years ago Daniel Webster said in the United States
Senate that slavery had been excluded from California and New Mexico
by the law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation
of the earth, and that he would not through the Wilmot Proviso take
pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of nature or to reënact
the will of God. Many apparently believe, through the same specious
reasoning, that to provide instruction in household affairs would be
in a similar way to reaffirm an ordinance of nature.
Not only does this tone of finality characterize the household
when it is assumed that because the majority of women will always
choose to be housekeepers, therefore all women must be housekeepers,
but the same tone of finality also characterizes methods in the
household. It is interesting to read to-day the objections raised
fifty years ago to the use of anesthetics in surgery; it was argued
that since pain was sent by heaven, it was sacrilegious to use any
means of alleviating it. It may be of equal interest fifty years
hence to read the protests of our contemporaries against the present
effort to combat instinct with science.
Another difficulty is the inherent proneness of Americans to look for
results before establishing the conditions on which alone results are
to be based. The nervous haste that characterizes us physically as a
nation also characterizes us mentally. We seize eagerly suggestions
and scorn the slow processes through which alone suggestions can
be made realities; then comes the inevitable reaction and we drift
into the fatalistic tendency to put up with evils rather than fight
against them.
One other general difficulty is the assumption that any improvement
in domestic service must mean putting the domestic employee on a
plane of absolute equality with the employer. Yet nothing could be
farther from the truth than this. It is doubtful whether equality
ever meant either in America or in France what the rhetorical
phrases of the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of
the Rights of Man would on the surface seem to imply. Certainly
to-day we interpret equality to mean that all persons should have
the opportunity of making of themselves all that is possible;
to jump at the conclusion that reform in domestic service means
subscription to the literal interpretation of the preamble of the
Declaration of Independence is to make an unwarranted assumption.
If, however, we were to accept the doctrine of equality, it would
be with an appreciation of what it involves. The establishment of
social equality would sometimes mean the elevation of the employer to
the natural social and moral position of the employee. Our present
social status is well characterized by the late Lawrence Oliphant in
“The Tender Recollections of Irene Macgillicuddy,” where the heroine
describes her mother, suddenly elevated in the social scale, as being
very democratic toward all those who were socially above her and very
aristocratic toward all those who were socially below her. It is
specious, not genuine, democracy that to-day blocks the progress of
improvement in domestic service.
These are general conditions that confront any and all attempts to
put the household on a more reasonable basis. Not less serious are
the specific economic conditions existing in the household. One of
these is the truck system of wages.
In every other occupation the truck system has disappeared; formerly
the teacher boarded around, the minister received an annual donation
party, and the tailor and the carpenter shared the home of the
master workman. The more recent attempt to pay employees in part
in orders for household supplies on an establishment kept by the
head of a factory or a mill has met with the most bitter protest.
The truck system of payment in general industry is antiquated and
disadvantageous to both parties of the labor contract. But in the
household it is accepted as one of the foreordained provisions of the
household, and meets with neither protest nor objection.
That the difficulties in the way of substituting another method of
payment are very great must be accepted by all, but to say that it
is impossible to bring about a change before any attempt has been
made is idle. Wherever negroes are employed the custom is almost
universal for them to live in their own homes. In many families the
experiment among white employees has been made successfully. It has
been made on a somewhat extensive scale at the hotel at Saranac
Inn, New York, where the employees lodge in a large house fitted up
attractively with a dining-room that is used for dancing, while a
billiard-room and smoking-room are provided for the married men who
board in the house with their wives. So far these experiments are
only variations of the truck system; the negro employees sleep at
home, but have their meals in the families of their employers; in
Saranac Inn the boarding-house for employees is owned and managed by
the proprietor of the hotel. But they are illustrations of the fact
that in limited areas it has been found possible to take the employee
out of the house of the employer as far as lodging is concerned. To
accomplish this must be the first step toward any modification of
the truck system. Fifty years ago the teacher who “boarded ’round”
probably looked on the truck system as an inevitable accompaniment
of the occupation. Teaching is being raised from an occupation to a
profession and one of the elements in the change is the fact that
wages have been put on a different plane.
Another economic difficulty that some persons have found lies in the
fact that, as has been said, the substitution of contract for status
is at once the object and the method of modern civilization, and that
domestic service owes nearly all of its difficulties to the fact that
it is based on status. The reason why it has not been transferred
to contract is because it is part of family life and no one has as
yet shown how the family can be preserved as an institution if its
members rest their relations on contract and not on status.
This may be true if the domestic employee is to be considered a part
of the family. Yet just here is the anomaly and the fallacy of the
objection. The domestic employee is not, and cannot be, a part of the
family; she never in all her history has had more than a semblance
of such a relationship and even that semblance has long since
disappeared. The presence of the domestic employee in the family is
not essential to the existence of the family; the domestic employee
comes and goes, but the family remains. More than this, it must be
said that the presence of the domestic employee does something to
destroy the integrity of the family life. Family life presupposes
the existence of congenial tastes and sympathetic relationships. It
argues nothing against domestic service as an occupation that those
engaged in it are rarely those who would be chosen as life companions
or even as temporary companions by those with whom the accident of
occupation has thrown them.
Yet more than this must be said. The statement that family life
cannot be preserved if its members rest their relations on contract
ignores the fact that the tendency in family life is precisely in
this direction. The wife has her allowance, sons and daughters are
given their allowances, financial dealings between members of the
same family are becoming more definite and even legal in their
character, and the result is not the disintegration of the family
as it passes from status to contract, but a greater freedom of
the individual members and therefore a more complex and perfect
organization of the family relationships.
Another economic difficulty lies in the fact that so much of the
service is largely personal in character, and that, therefore,
payments are regulated by personal feelings and not by a recognized
standard of payment. The result of this is the obnoxious system of
fees--a system difficult to be done away with as long as employees
expect to receive them. Fees could be abolished by the action of
the employers, but as long as they prefer to have their employees
paid by other persons--a practice that would be tolerated by no
other class of employers--the initiative will not come from them.
Fees could be abolished by the action of the individuals disposed
to give them, but so long as men selfishly believe that money ought
to purchase privileges that are not rights, the initiative will not
come from them. Fees could be abolished by the concerted action of
employees, but so long as they are ignorant of economic principles
and indifferent to the social results of the system, the initiative
will not come from them. But one of the hopeful signs of the times is
the recent statement that in Paris waiters are coming to appreciate
the fact that fees ultimately must mean smaller wages, since
employers not only refuse to pay their employees but demand a certain
percentage of the fees received. The movement among the waiters to
refuse fees and to insist on wages paid by employers is full of
promise.
What, then, are the conditions under which improvement in domestic
service is possible?
First of all must come that attitude of mind that is willing
to recognize not only the impossibility of separating domestic
service from other parts of the household life, but still more the
impossibility of separating the economic conditions within the
household from the economic conditions without, a willingness to
give up _a priori_ reasoning in regard to domestic employments and
to study the historical and economic development of the household.
All superficial treatment of the question must fail of securing the
desired results, and all treatment must be superficial that does not
rest on the solid basis of economic history and theory.
Granted, then, the existence of economic conditions in the household,
the method of procedure is the same as in all other fields of action.
In medicine the first step is to diagnose the case; in law, to take
evidence; in mathematics, to state the problem; in science, to
marshal the facts. No set of _a priori_ principles can be assumed in
the household with the expectation that the household will conform
to them. Investigation to-day stands at the door of every entrance
into a new field and bars the way to any attempt to force a passage
without its aid. The household has been slow to accept the inexorable
fact that it must demolish its Chinese wall of exclusion and throw
open its facts to investigation, but this is the inevitable end.
Next to the household, the most conservative element in society
is the school. Yet the school is already yielding to the spirit
of the times. It has been pointed out in a recent number of the
“Atlantic Monthly”[13] that the profession of teaching, starting
with a definite and final code of principles of education, has
clung tenaciously to it, and it is but to-day that the occupation
is realizing that it can make progress only as progress is made in
other fields, and that is through scientific investigation; only
to-day is it coming to appreciate that all conclusions to be valid
must be based on facts. Every occupation has passed through the same
experience and the law of progress that governs all development
will work itself out in the household. Minds open to conviction and
trained to scientific investigation are the prerequisites for an
improved condition in domestic service.
Is it said that this discussion of the subject has dealt only with
its economic phases and has ignored the ethical side? Alas, life is
everywhere one long protest against a varying standard of ethics.
Shall we separate the ethics of household service from the ethics of
the shop, the ethics of the factory, the ethics of the professions?
Shall we be governed by one code in the family, by another code in
the church, by a third code in the school, and a fourth code in
the state? Is the subject of ethics to be divided and pigeon-holed
in compartments labeled “ethics for domestic service,” “ethics for
skilled labor,” “ethics for unskilled labor,” “ethics for employers,”
and “ethics for employees?” Who shall separate any question in
economics, nay more, any question in life from its ethical phases?
Who shall declare that the ethical code for one is not the ethical
code for all?
It is said that every book is but the elaboration of a single idea.
In a similar way all discussion of domestic service must have its
beginning and its end with the idea that no improvement is possible
that is not inaugurated by that class in society that sees most
clearly the economic as well as the ethical elements involved in it,
and that work by the slow methods of careful, patient investigation
is the only way by which its difficulties, all too evident, may be
lessened, not for ourselves but for those who shall come after us.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] _Works of Swift_, XI, 365-441.
[12] Cited from _Remarks on the Life and Writings of Swift_, p. 179,
in _Works of Swift_, XI, 365.
[13] Frederic Burk, _The Training of Teachers_, October, 1897.
“PUT YOURSELF IN HIS PLACE”
To seek wisdom through a _questionnaire_ is a time-honored expedient,
while to give wisdom through questions has classic authority. It is
therefore immaterial whether it is Experience or Inexperience that
may be either seeking wisdom or that may have wisdom to bestow in
this interlocution concerning a domestic problem that has already
been involved to the _n^{th}_ power.
_What are the causes of our household troubles?_
The causes are in part economic--a household system governed by the
same economic laws that govern other industries, but resisting the
action of these laws; in part social--the attempt to form a chemical
compound of public and political democracy with private and social
aristocracy; in part educational--the tradition that marriage acts as
a solvent to change every ignorant, inexperienced young woman into
an accomplished housekeeper, and that, therefore, mental training is
for her a work of supererogation; in part religious--the persistent
maintenance of the belief that from the primeval chaos every woman
has been foreordained to be a housekeeper, united with the rejection
of the parallel belief that every man has been foreordained to be a
tiller of the soil.
_But the situation in regard to household help has never been so
critical as it is at the present time._
This statement has been found in one form or another in all
literature, sacred and profane, from the times of Abraham and
Achilles to the story of the last college graduate who has entered
domestic service in disguise.
_Other countries do not have the same difficulty._
On the contrary, the difficulty is universal. It may vary somewhat in
degree, but fundamentally the problem is the same the world over.
Moreover, in no country is there so intelligent an understanding of
all its factors as in America, for in no other country is found so
great a mass of material for a comprehensive study of the subject.
Statistical investigations have been carried on through national,
state, and private initiative, and the information asked for has,
for the most part, been cheerfully given because of the widespread
desire among household employers to coöperate in every way with
those undertaking these investigations. Material of every kind,
ranging from the scientific accumulations of bureaus of labor to the
hysterical deductions of sentimental observers, is all at hand. In
Berlin a young man who recently carried on a statistical inquiry in
regard to domestic service was nearly mobbed for his presumption--so
considered--in attempting to gather information that German
housekeepers had guarded as sacredly as Tibet holds the Grand Lama.
_When will our present household difficulty end?_
The difficulty will end when every man is reasonable, when every
woman is omniscient, when every child is obedient, when we discover
the philosopher’s stone, when we drink of the Pierian spring, when we
dig the treasure at the end of the rainbow, when we enter upon our
inheritance in Spain, when the east meets the west.
_Meantime?_
Dismiss the cook from your attention for a moment and study the
kitchen. Is the baking-table on the opposite side of the room from
the baking-utensils, while the baking-materials are kept in the
pantry? Does an inventory of the cooking-implements show one article
for toasting and broiling, two battered saucepans for preparing a
five-course dinner, and a soup-kettle with a cover that does not fit?
Is the pump on the left-hand side of the sink? Is the sink three
inches too low and in a dark corner where a blank wall is all that
meets the eye of the one who works before it? Does the waste-pipe
from the ice-chest lead into a pan that must be emptied daily? Must
the ashes from the range be carried out of doors every day? Is
the range-coal too large and is the kindling-wood green? Does the
oven-door refuse to shut tight and has the tea-kettle sprung a leak?
Do the unprotected water-pipes freeze with zero weather? Does the
chimney fail to draw? The results of these investigations may be the
discovery that the household engineer has been expected to run his
engine with insufficient fuel. _What if the skillful engineer has
made the same discovery?_
Occupy for a week in winter the room of the cook. Does the
temperature hover near the freezing-point, while the rest of the
house is warm? Is the mattress of husks and are the pillows of hen’s
feathers? Does a row of hooks take the place of a closet? Try the
room for a week in midsummer. Is the temperature stifling hot? Do
flies and mosquitoes find joy in the screenless windows? Are the
facilities for bathing a small bowl and a pitcher without a handle
on the top of a triangular wash-stand? The two weeks’ vacation in an
unknown part of your own home may lead to the traditional _mauvais
quart d’heure_. _What if the employee has spent a year under the
protecting shelter of your roof?_
Watch for a week the table conversation of your family and its
guests. Count the number of times you hear the word “servant,” and
remarks in regard to “household drudgery,” “menial service,” “knowing
one’s place,” and “superiority to housework.” _What if the household
employee has also kept count?_
Imagine that you can accept ten cents from a friend for doing an
errand, half a dollar from a guest as he leaves the house and a
dollar from another, and can flatter an unwelcome cousin in the hope
of getting two dollars at his departure. Criticise mercilessly all of
your friends after you have invited them to afternoon tea. Repeat
at table all the gossip retailed by officious busy-bodies. Your own
self-respect will be lowered. _What if moral deterioration takes
place in the kitchen under the same conditions?_
_But what can I do?_
Try putting all the laundry-work out of the house; take up the
carpets, paint the floors, put down rugs and send these out of the
house to be cleaned, or clean house with a vacuum cleaning-machine;
reduce useless work and incidentally add to the attractiveness of
your house by taking down portières and paying storage on half of the
bric-à-brac; buy ice-cream and cake and all “extras” at the woman’s
exchange. These additional expenses will materially reduce your
subscriptions to half-orphan asylums and to vacation funds for the
indigent. _What if this course saves you from hotel existence and
enables others to keep their homes intact and to pay for their own
vacations?_