DOMESTIC SERVICE SINCE THE COLONIAL PERIOD
It has been said that domestic service in America has passed through
three distinct phases. The second phase began about the time of the
Revolution, when at the North the indented servants as a class were
gradually supplanted by free laborers, and at the South by negro
slaves who inherited with large interest the reproach attached to the
redemptioners. The social chasm that had existed at the North between
employer and employee, under the system of bonded servants, disappeared.
The free laborers, whether employed in domestic service or otherwise,
were socially the equal of their employers, especially in New England
and in the smaller towns. They belonged by birth to the same section of
the country, probably to the same community; they had the same religious
belief, attended the same church, sat at the same fireside, ate at the
same table, had the same associates; they were often married from the
homes[150] and buried in the family lots of their employers.[151] They
were in every sense of the word “help.”[152] A survival of this condition
is seen to-day in farming communities, especially at the West. In the
South, on the contrary, the social chasm became impassable as negro
slavery entirely displaced white labor.
This democratic condition at the North seemed especially noteworthy to
European travellers,[153] and it was one to which they apparently never
became accustomed. Harriet Martineau, in planning for her American
journey, was perplexed by the difficulty of securing a travelling
companion. “It would never do,” she says, “as I was aware, to take a
servant, to suffer from the proud Yankees on the one hand and the debased
slaves on the other.”[154] On arriving here, she found “the study of
domestic service a continual amusement,” and what she saw “would fill
a volume.”[155] “Boarding-house life,” she says, “has been rendered
compulsory by the scarcity of labour,—the difficulty of obtaining
domestic service.”[156] But she was quick to appreciate the difference
between the spirit of service she found in America and that with which
she was familiar in the old world. She writes:
“I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work
occasionally in chambers and kitchen, and from having little
hospitable designs frustrated, than witness the subservience
in which the menial class is held in Europe. In England,
servants have been so long accustomed to this subservience; it
is so completely the established custom for the mistress to
regulate their manners, their clothes, their intercourse with
friends, and many other things which they ought to manage for
themselves, that it has become difficult to treat them any
better. Mistresses who abstain from such regulation find that
they are spoiling their servants; and heads of families who
would make friends of their domestics find them little fitted
to reciprocate the duty. In America it is otherwise: and may
it ever be so!... One of the pleasures of travelling through a
democratic country is the seeing no liveries. No such badge of
menial service is to be met with throughout the States, except
in the houses of the foreign ambassadors at Washington.”
She then gives illustrations to show “of how much higher a character
American domestic service is than any which would endure to be
distinguished by a badge.”[157]
De Tocqueville, also, found, that “the condition of domestic service
does not degrade the character of those who enter upon it, because it is
freely chosen, and adopted for a time only; because it is not stigmatized
by public opinion and creates no permanent inequality between the servant
and the master.”[158]
Francis J. Grund was also able to appreciate the difference between
external servility and true self-respect, for he writes in 1837: “There
are but few native Americans who would submit to the degradation of
wearing a livery, or any other badge of servitude. This they would
call becoming a man’s man. But, on the other hand, there are also but
few American gentlemen who would feel any happier for their servants
wearing coats of more than one color. The inhabitants of New England are
quite as willing to call their servants ‘helps,’ or ‘domestics,’ as the
latter repudiate the title of ‘master’ in their employers.” And he adds,
“Neither is an American servant that same indolent, careless, besotted
being as an European.” He has another word of praise too for the American
servants, “who work harder, and _quicker_ than even in England.”[159]
The absence of livery was a subject of constant comment. William Cobbett,
in 1828, asserts that “the man (servant) will not wear a _livery_, any
more than he will wear a halter round his neck.... Neither men nor women
will allow you to call them _servants_, and they will take especial
care not to call themselves by that name.” He explains the avoidance of
the term “servant” by the fact that slaves were called servants by the
English, who having fled from tyranny at home were shy of calling others
slaves; free men therefore would not be called servants.[160]
But while the democratic spirit that prevailed during this period found
commendation in the eyes of those of similar tendencies, it often
evoked only mild surprise or a half sneer. Mrs. Trollope found that
“the greatest difficulty in organizing a family established in Ohio,
is getting servants, or, as it is there called, ‘getting help,’ for it
is more than petty treason to the Republic to call a free citizen a
_servant_.”[161] Chevalier asserted that “on Sunday an American would
not venture to receive his friends; his servants would not consent to
it, and he can hardly secure their services for himself, at their own
hour, on that day.”[162] Samuel Breck considers that “in these United
States nothing would be wanting to make life perfectly happy (humanly
speaking) had we good servants.”[163] Isabella Bird wrote of Canada in
1854, “The great annoyance of which people complain in this pleasant land
is the difficulty of obtaining domestic servants, and the extraordinary
specimens of humanity who go out in this capacity.” “The difficulty of
procuring servants is one of the great objections to this colony. The
few there are know nothing of any individual department of work,—for
instance, there are neither cooks nor housemaids, they are strictly
‘_helps_,’—the mistress being expected to take more than her fair share
of the work.”[164] The conditions she found there were the same as in the
United States.
Thomas Grattan wrote of the condition:
“One of the subjects on which the minds of men and women in the
United States seem to be unanimously made up, is the admitted
deficiency of _help_.... Disguise it as we may, under all the
specious forms of reasoning, there is something in the mind of
every man which tells him he is humiliated in doing personal
service to another.... The servile nature of domestic duties
in Europe, and more particularly in England, is much more
likely to make servants liable to the discontent which mars
their merits, than the common understanding in America, which
makes the compact between ‘employer’ and ‘help’ a mere matter
of business, entailing no mean submission on the one hand,
and giving no right to any undue assumption of power on the
other.... Domestic service is not considered so disgraceful
in the United States, as it is felt to be in the United
Kingdom.”[165]
Grattan’s observations lead him to believe that the democratic spirit is
not always to be deplored.
“An American youth or ‘young lady’ will go to service
willingly, if they can be better paid for it than for
teaching in a village school, or working on a farm or in a
factory.... They satisfy themselves that they are _helps_, not
servants,—that they are going to work with (not for) Mr. so
and so, not going to service,—they call him and his wife their
_employers_, not their master and mistress.”[166]
But like all Europeans, he never ceases to be surprised by this spirit,
particularly by those manifestations of it that led to active work on the
part of the mistress of a home and to the use of the word “help.” “There
are no housekeepers,” he writes, “or ladies’ maids. The lady herself does
all the duties of the former.... Servants are thus really justified in
giving to themselves the favorite designation of ‘helps.’”[167] But he
closes a long and interesting chapter on the subject with the prophecy,
“They (employers) will, by degrees, give up the employment of native
servants who will be in future less likely than even now to submit to
their pretensions, and confine themselves to the fast increasing tribes
of Irish immigrants.”[168]
Curiously enough nearly forty years earlier Madame d’Arusmont had written
of friends who thought of coming to America and urged, “Let them by all
means be advised against bringing servants with them. Foreign servants
are here, without doubt, the worst; they neither understand the work
which the climate renders necessary, nor are willing to do the work
which they did elsewhere.”[169] She, like all travellers, found that
however subservient domestic servants might be when they left Europe,
the first contact with the democratic atmosphere of America wrought a
sudden change; subserviency disappeared, and the servant boasted of his
equality with all. She explains that those educated in America perceive
the difference placed between the gentleman and the laborer by education
and conditions, but the foreigner taking a superficial view of the matter
sees no difference.[170]
This second period in the history of domestic service continued from
about the time of the Revolution until 1850. It was the product of the
rapid growth of democratic ideas fostered by the Revolution and the
widespread influence of the French philosophical ideas of the latter
part of the eighteenth century. It was a period chiefly characterized by
social and industrial democracy, as the political system was also in its
spirit democratic. This democratic industrial spirit showed itself in the
universal use at the North of the term “help,” in the absence of liveries
and all distinguishing marks of service, in the intolerance on the part
of both employer and employee of servility and subserviency of manner, in
the bridging of the social chasm between master and servant as long as
the free employment of native born Americans continued, and in the hearty
spirit of willingness with which service was performed. The results of
this democratic régime were the difficulty of securing help, since new
avenues of independent work were opening out to women and the class of
indented servants had disappeared; the lack of all differentiation in
household work, since the servant conferred a favor in “going out to
work” and did what she knew how to do without troubling to learn new
kinds of work; and, most important, the subtle change that the democratic
atmosphere everywhere wrought in the servants who came from Europe.
This condition of free, democratic, native born white service at the
North and compulsory slave service at the South continued practically
unchanged until about the middle of the century. Between 1850 and 1870
four important political changes occurred which revolutionized the
personnel in domestic service and consequently its character. These
changes brought about the third period in the history of the subject.
The first of these changes was due to the Irish famine of 1846. Previous
to this time the immigration to this country from Ireland had been small,
averaging not more than twenty thousand annually between 1820 and 1846.
In the decade preceding the famine the average number of arrivals had
been less than thirty-five thousand annually. In 1846 the number was
51,752, and this was more than doubled the following year, the report
showing 105,536 arrivals in 1847. In 1851 the number of arrivals from
Ireland had risen to 221,253. Since that time the number has fluctuated,
but between fifty and seventy-five thousand annually come to this country
from Ireland.[171] A large proportion of these immigrants—forty-nine
per cent during the decade from 1870 to 1880—have been women who were
classed as “unskilled laborers.” Two occupations were open to them. One
was work in factories where as manufacturing processes became more simple
unskilled labor could be utilized. The Irish immigrants, therefore,
soon displaced in factories the New England women who had found, as
has been seen,[172] new opportunities for work of a higher grade. The
second occupation open to the Irish immigrants was household service.
Here physical strength formed a partial compensation for lack of skill
and ignorance of American ways, and the Irish soon came to form a most
numerous and important class engaged in domestic employments.[173]
A second important European change, influencing the condition of domestic
service, was the German Revolution of 1848 with the events preceding
and resulting from it. Before this period the emigration from Germany
had been insignificant, fewer than fifteen thousand having come to this
country annually between 1830 and 1840. In 1840, owing to political
reasons, the number had risen to 29,704. It soon became evident that the
hopes raised by the accession of the new monarch were without foundation,
and emigration rapidly increased until the number of emigrants coming
to America reached 74,281 in 1847. During the year of the Revolution
the number decreased, but the failure of the cause of the revolutionary
party and the political apathy that followed again increased the movement
towards America. This reached its climax in 1854, when the sympathies
of the Court had been openly expressed during the Crimean War in favor
of Russian despotism. During this year the number of Germans arriving
in this country was 215,009—a number equalled but once since that time,
although the number has averaged nearly a hundred and fifty thousand
annually during the last decade.[174] A large number of these immigrants
have been women, the proportion of women emigrating from Germany being
greater than from any other foreign country except Ireland.[175] The
ranks of domestic service have been recruited from their number also,
the Germans being second only to the Irish as regards the number and
proportion engaged in this occupation.[176]
A third political influence affecting the question was the establishment
of treaty relations between the United States and China in 1844. This
fact and the discovery of gold in California in 1848, together with the
building of the Union Pacific railroad in 1867-1869, opened the doors to
the immigration of considerable numbers of Chinese. Many of these found
their way into domestic service, and on the Pacific coast they became
formidable competitors of household servants of other nationalities.[177]
The political and economic conditions in Europe and the breaking down of
long-established customs in Asia have thus since 1850 brought to this
country large numbers of men and women who have performed the household
service previously done by native born Americans. The presence of the
Irish in the East, of the Germans in the West, of the Scandinavians
in the Northwest, and of the Chinese on the Pacific coast has thus
introduced a new social, as well as a new economic, element at the
North. It has led to a change in the relation of employer and employee;
the class line which was only faintly drawn in the early part of the
century between employer and “help” has been changed into a caste line
which many employers believe it to their interest to preserve. The native
born American fears to lose social position by entering into competition
with foreign labor.
While this change, owing to political conditions in the Old World, was
taking place at the North in the character of the service, a similar
change was taking place at the South growing out of the abolition of
slavery in 1863. The negroes who had previously performed all domestic
service for their personal expenses have since then received for the
same service a small remuneration in money. This fact prevents now as
effectually as during the slavery period any competition in domestic
service on the part of native born white employees. It does not prevent
all competition on the part of foreign born white employees, since
prejudice against the negro does not exist in Europe owing to the fact
that negro slavery has not prevailed there. The effects of these great
movements upon the nature and personnel of domestic service will be
discussed later in considering its present condition. They have had a
direct and conspicuous influence on the condition of domestic service and
even in the use of the term applied to those who engage in it.
But other political influences more subtle and possibly more far-reaching
in their effect have been at work. Our loose naturalization laws, and
the determining of the qualifications for the right of suffrage by as
many standards as there are states, have made the enormous number of men
coming to this country annually an easy prey to scheming politicians and
demagogues. The labor vote, the Irish vote, the German vote, have been
flattered and sought by party managers until the wage-earning man feels
that “like Atlas of old he carries the world on his shoulders.” If the
laboring man feels the weight of the world, his wife and daughter believe
that some share of the burden rests on them. The democratic tendencies of
the country, the political practices of the day, have everywhere broken
down the high wall of separation between employer and employee. They are
subversive even in the household of that patriarchal relationship that
has been driven from every stronghold but this.
While the political movements of the century have thus changed the
personnel of domestic service in America, the development of the material
resources of the country has affected its status. Before the present
century employees of every kind were in a sense stationary. This was due
partly to the influence of the English poor laws; partly to the system
of indenture which bound a servant for seven, five, or four years, and
to the system of slavery which bound the servant for life; partly to the
system of apprenticeship which made the servant a member of the family of
his master; partly to the custom prevailing in the country districts and
small towns for unmarried workmen in all industries to board with their
employers; and partly to the lack of facilities for cheap and easy means
of communication between different sections of the country. There was no
mobility of labor as regards either employment or place of employment—a
fact true alike of domestic service and of other occupations. But this
condition of affairs gradually changed. As has been seen, indented
servants disappeared and every employee was free to break as well as to
make an engagement for service. The establishment of the factory system
of manufactures and the consequent substitution of mechanical for skilled
processes of labor broke down the system of apprenticeship, and workmen
of every occupation, except domestic service, ceased to be members of
the families of their employers. A mobility of labor was made possible
such as could not have been secured under the old system. At a later
time the great era of railroad development and similar enterprises gave
opportunity for a certain mobility as regards place of employment. The
tide of western emigration due to the discovery of gold and the cheapness
of western land caused much shifting of labor among the non-capitalist
class, and this was increased as means of communication were rendered
more easy. The establishment of companies to encourage foreign
immigration with the object of developing the material resources of the
country was another weight in the scale in favor of greater mobility of
labor as regards both place and employment. The abolition of slavery
removed the last important legal barrier against perfect mobility.
All of these industrial movements have been important factors in changing
the condition and character of domestic service. It is true, in a general
sense, that every great change in economic conditions affects all
occupations. But domestic service has through these causes been affected
in certain specific ways. The employee who disliked housework, but to
whom no other occupation had been open, could go into a factory or a
mill, since no time was consumed in learning the simple processes of
mechanical work. Every invention formed the basis for a new occupation.
Domestic service had a hundred competitors in a field where before the
era of inventions it had stood alone. Moreover, these new occupations
required little skill, no preparation, and possessed the charm of
novelty. Again, the rapid development of railroad interests, with the
increase of competition and consequent lowering of passenger rates,
often influenced families emigrating to the West to take with them their
trusted employees. The same fact made it possible for women seeking new
employments to go from place to place in ways unthought of in the early
part of the century.
In view of these changed and changing economic conditions it may be
said that the immobility of labor, which has seemed to some economists
so great an obstacle to the industrial advancement of women,[178] has
practically ceased to exist in the case of domestic service. In fact,
industrial development has so far changed conditions that the problem has
now come to be how to make this form of labor not more mobile, but more
stable. One illustration of this is found in the fact that when seven
hundred domestic employees represented on the schedules were asked how
many of them had ever been engaged in any other occupation, twenty-seven
per cent replied that they had. The mobility as to the place of labor
was found to be even greater. Twenty-seven per cent of the native born
employees did not reside in the same state in which they were born, and
adding to these the number of foreign born, it was found that sixty-eight
per cent did not reside in their native country or state. Moreover, this
statement is below the truth as it does not take into account the number
of changes made within a single year and refers to only one change from
place of birth to present residence.[179]
An indication of these various changes in the condition of domestic
service during these different periods is seen in the history of the word
“servant.” As used in England and in law at the time of the settlement
of the American colonies it signified any employee, and no odium was in
any way attached to the word.[180] But five things led to its temporary
disuse: first, the reproach connected with the word through the character
and social rank of the redemptioners; second, the fact that when the
redemptioners gave place at the South to negro slaves the word “servant”
was transferred to this class,[181] and this alone was sufficient to
prevent its application to whites;[182] third, the levelling tendencies
that always prevail in a new country; fourth, the literal interpretation
of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence; and fifth, the new
social and political theories resulting from the introduction of French
philosophical ideas. At the North the word “help” as applied especially
to women superseded the word “servant,” while at the South the term
“servant” was applied only to the negro. From the time of the Revolution,
therefore, until about 1850 the word “servant” does not seem to have
been generally applied in either section to white persons of American
birth.[183]
Since the introduction of foreign labor at the middle of the century,
the word “servant” has again come into general use as applied to white
employees, not, however, as a survival of the old colonial word, but
as a reintroduction from Europe of a term signifying one who performs
so-called menial labor, and it is restricted in its use, except in a
legal sense, to persons who perform domestic service. The present use
of the word has come not only from the almost exclusive employment
of foreigners in domestic service, but also because of the increase
of wealth and consequent luxury in this country, the growing class
divisions, and the adoption of many European habits of living and
thinking and speaking.[184]
These simple historical facts are one explanation of the unwillingness of
American women to engage in work stigmatized by an offensive term applied
to no other class of laborers.
In studying the question of domestic service, therefore, the fact
cannot be overlooked that certain historical influences have affected
its conditions; that political revolutions have changed its personnel,
and industrial development its mobility. It is as impossible to dream
of restoring the former condition of household service as it is of
restoring former household employments, and neither is to be desired.
In each case the question is one of preparing for the next step in the
process of evolution, not of retrograding toward a condition impossible
to restore. Any attempt to secure a change for the better in the present
condition of domestic service must be ineffective if it does not take
into consideration these historic aspects of the subject.