DIFFICULTIES IN DOMESTIC SERVICE FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE EMPLOYER
The understanding of domestic service has been seen to involve the
consideration of many historical changes both industrial and political,
and an examination of the general economic laws to which it is amenable.
It involves also a study of the economic conditions that surround the
average family, and the problems that confront it when undertaking to
deal with the question of domestic service.
The average family reached through the schedules was found to consist of
about five persons,[217] exclusive of servants. Its members have kept
house eighteen years,[218] they have boarded two years and a half,[219]
and at some time during their housekeeping experience they have been
without servants. They employ at the present time two servants and a
half, or rather, they command the full time of two persons and half the
time of the third, to whom they pay weekly for service rendered, on the
basis indicated in the schedule of average wages, $10,[220] exclusive of
board and lodging, or $500 annually, the expense of service exclusive
also of waste, breakage, and general wear and tear of household furniture
and appliances. In about one third of all the families with servants men
are employed in some capacity about the house; in one family in every
seven the number of servants is the same as the number of persons in the
family or exceeds it, while in the average family one servant renders
service to every two persons.
When the average family undertakes the task of dealing with domestic
servants the difficulties that confront it are many and serious.
It has first the task of assimilating into its domestic life those who
are of a different nationality and who consequently hold different
industrial, social, religious and political beliefs. More than one half
of all domestic employees are of foreign birth or belong to another
race,[221] who come not only from the prominent European countries but
also from the remote corners of the globe,[222] where all conditions are
totally unlike those of America. Moreover this number does not include
the very large percentage of those who are themselves native born, but
who are the children of foreign born parents and have inherited to a
certain extent un-American characteristics; 4.02 per cent of the domestic
employees in this country do not speak the English language.[223] Those
who come to this country, often with preconceived and erroneous ideas as
to the independence prevailing here, expecting high wages in return for
inexperienced and unskilled labor,[224] must be trained in all the ways
not only of American life, but of the family of the individual employer.
It has been found difficult to assimilate into our political system the
large foreign element coming here, though this system is simple and lends
itself readily to such assimilation, as our history has thus far proved.
It is far more difficult to assimilate this mass into the infinitely more
complex and delicate organism—the modern household. It is not strange
that congestion and inflammation so often result from the attempt. The
question is one also that becomes more difficult as the proportion of
foreign employees increases.
A second difficulty is that of the spirit of restlessness which
everywhere prevails among working classes, though not confined to them,
and the consequent brief tenure of service. The average length of service
of a domestic servant is found to be less than a year and a half and
this in many cases and in some localities is a high average. In the
East, in the vicinity of the great lakes, on the Pacific coast, and
in some sections of the South, proximity to popular summer or winter
resorts lessens the average duration of service. In the South, the
cotton-picking season draws many women from household work, as they are
able at that time to earn enough money to enable them to live for some
months in idleness. In other localities, the hop-picking season, the
berry-picking season, and the grape-picking season all offer temporary
inducements for girls to leave domestic service. In still other
places the canning factory, the pickle factory, and the fruit-drying
establishment successfully offer temporary competition. To the question
asked of employees, “Have you ever had any other occupation besides
domestic service?” twenty-eight per cent answered “Yes.” This at first
might seem to indicate a decided preference for domestic service, but
a closer examination shows that more often it means that housework is
taken up when the berry-picking and the fruit-canning season is over,
when the mill or the factory has closed in a dull time or when the hurry
of plantation work is ended at the South. A similar indication of this
restlessness is found in the replies given by employers to the question,
“How many servants have you employed since you have been housekeeping?”
Twenty-five per cent did not answer the question definitely and of these
one half state as their reason the fact that the number was too great to
remember. “Their name is legion,” answer fifteen housekeepers, a series
of exclamation points tells the story for others, “infinity-minus,”
writes one, and still another bids the compiler “read her answer in the
stars.”
This condition of affairs is not to be wondered at. That spirit of
restlessness, nervous discontent, and craving for excitement which
foreigners find characteristic of all who breathe American air is not
confined to business men and society women—it permeates the kitchen, the
nursery, the laundry, and every part of the household. Among employers
the mode of life tends more and more towards a winter in California, a
summer in Europe, an autumn in the mountains, and a spring in Florida. On
both sides of the Hudson there are magnificent country houses deserted
because their owners prefer the excitement of city life, the attractions
of Bar Harbor, or the society at Newport. The towns on the Hudson are
nearly stationary as regards population, though possessing every natural
advantage, while the large cities are powerful magnets drawing from
every direction. Domestic service cannot remain unaffected by these
characteristics of the age. A new situation is often like a voyage to
Europe so desired by others—it gives change, excitement, new experiences,
and it is often the only way in which these can be secured. A summer
engagement at the sea-shore, among the mountains, or at the springs is
often as eagerly sought as is the height of the season at Saratoga or
among the Berkshires by persons whose opportunities for change are far
less restricted. The occupations temporarily open at the time of the
hop-picking season, or the fruit-canning season, offer the attraction of
large numbers of fellow-workers in the company of whom “a good time” is
expected.
The tenure of service also apparently varies somewhat with the size
of the place, the average duration being longer in cities of from
ten thousand to eighty thousand inhabitants than in smaller towns or
larger cities. In small towns the desire for city life shortens the
terms of service. In the largest cities, as New York, Brooklyn, Boston,
Philadelphia, the average time is shortened by the fact that employers
are often obliged to engage as a temporary expedient persons who have
just arrived in this country; while it is also seen to be true that
there is greater difficulty than in small cities in obtaining reliable
testimonials.
It is not strange, therefore, that reasonable, intelligent, and competent
employers have difficulties to meet that lie entirely without the domain
of their own households, and that many persons who twenty-five years
ago experienced no difficulty whatever find to-day serious trouble in
retaining their employees.
A third difficulty is the fact that employers are so often obliged to
engage for skilled labor the assistance of unskilled laborers. Many who
seek employment as servants do not know even the names of the household
tools they are obliged to use—still less are they acquainted with their
uses. A part of this ignorance and lack of skill is due to the prevalence
of the old idea that anybody can do everything—a theory abandoned in most
occupations but still dominating the household. Household employments
and service are still generally considered occupations that any one can
“pick up,” but the picking-up process has resulted in the household,
as elsewhere, in unscientific, haphazard work and has seldom produced
expert workmen. The Superintendent of the Census wrote in 1880, “The
organization of domestic service in the United States is so crude that
no distinction whatever can be successfully maintained (between the
different parts of the service).”[225] In confirmation of this statement
is the testimony of a large number of employees to the effect that they
have become domestic servants because they had not education enough
to do anything else.[226] From this general conception of the nature
of household service several things result: first, few opportunities
exist for learning household duties in a systematic way; second, if the
opportunities were created, few would avail themselves of them so long as
this low estimate of the occupation prevails; third, many housekeepers
are obliged to conduct in their own households a training-school on a
limited scale; fourth, the expense is far greater than it should be,
since unskilled labor is always improvident of time and materials;[227]
fifth, the hygienic results of “instinctive cookery” and “picked up”
knowledge are often seen in ill health and a derangement of household
affairs erroneously attributed to other causes.
A fourth difficulty arises when the seemingly inevitable annual change of
employees comes. Four courses are open to the housekeeper: (1) she may
employ a new servant without asking for a recommendation, (2) she may
take the recommendation of previous employers, (3) she may consult an
employment bureau, (4) she may advertise.
Few persons are willing to adopt the first expedient and take a stranger
into their service, not to speak of their family life, without some
recommendation.[228]
But the second course open—taking the recommendation of others—is
scarcely more practicable. There must always be a difference in
standards, and “excellent” to one may mean “fair” or even “poor” to
another. It is also true that an employee may succeed in one place and be
ill adapted to meet the requirements of another. Again, it is a common
complaint that the recommendation does not always carry with it implicit
confidence in its contents. Daniel DeFoe wrote nearly two hundred years
ago:
“One of the great Evils, which lies heavily upon Families
now, in this particular Case of taking Servants, is the going
about from House to House, to take Characters and Reports of
Servants, or by Word of Mouth; and especially among the Ladies
this Usage prevails, in which the good Nature and Charity of
the Ladies to ungrateful Servants, goes so far beyond their
Justice to one another, that an ill Servant is very seldom
detected, and the Ladies yet excuse themselves by this,
_namely_, that they are loth to take away a poor Servant’s Good
Name, which is starving them; and that they may perhaps mend,
when they come to another Family, what was amiss before, which
indeed seldom happens.... The Ladies are cheating and abusing
one another, in Charity to their _Servants_. It is Time to put
an End to this unreasonable Good nature.”[229]
These words are as true a description of this phase of the subject
in America to-day as they were in England at the beginning of the
last century. It seems impossible to devise any system of personal
recommendations that will convey the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth.
The third expedient—the employment bureau—is apparently coming
into general use, especially in the large cities where some means
of communication is necessary between those desiring employees and
employment. But it is in the large city, where the greatest need for it
exists, that the employment bureau is most unsatisfactory. The bureau
lives by the fees paid to it by those desiring help and those seeking
employment. Every expedient, therefore, is used to extort fees from
both classes, and it is difficult to tell which suffers more from this
extortion. Even when numberless fees have been paid, the employer too
often finds himself without the service to which his fee presumably
entitles him. The first department abandoned by a large philanthropic
institution in Boston, was the intelligence office, “because it was found
impossible to supply well-trained servants while there was no demand for
any other.”[230] But the greatest objection to the intelligence office
is that it is often a breeding place for vice and crime. An investigation
recently made of the intelligence offices in a large city showed that
it supported one hundred and twenty, two thirds of them controlled by
foreigners, many of them managed by minor ward politicians, and four of
them under police supervision. The employees that can be found through
such agencies are not those willingly received into a respectable
family.[231] Employment bureaus in small cities are apparently more
satisfactory than those in large ones, while those offices are to be
commended which use printed forms for obtaining statements from previous
employers as to the qualifications of applicants.[232] Those agencies
patronized by an inferior class of employers and employees, especially
those that are at no pains to secure recommendation of employees from
respectable persons, are worse than useless.
Employers who adopt the fourth policy and advertise for help are forced
to open an intelligence office on a small scale in their own homes.
All of these difficulties are so great, especially that of securing
reliable testimony from responsible employers, that many persons tolerate
incompetent service rather than incur the risk of a change for the worse.
A fifth difficulty encountered by the employers of domestic service, and
probably the most serious of all, is the prevailing indifference among
housekeepers to the action of economic law—a failure to realize that
in domestic service, as in other occupations, the course followed by
one employer has an appreciable effect on the condition of service as a
whole. This can be best explained by a few concrete illustrations “drawn
from life.”
Mr. A, an employer, leaves his city home during the summer, retaining
in it two servants to care for the house and paying them their usual
wages, $16 a month. No special service is required of them, but wages
are paid in consideration of the tacit understanding that they are to
remain in his employ. On the return of Mr. A, Mr. X, who has discharged
his servants during the summer, offers the employees of Mr. A $18 a
month. This price he can afford to pay since he has been at no expense
for service during the summer. Mr. A, rather than lose his trusted
employees, pays them the advance offered by Mr. X, although the services
of neither employee are worth more than three months previous.
Mrs. B, an employer of limited means, with a natural gift for cooking
considered as a fine art, takes an inexperienced girl from Castle Garden
and teaches her after long training something of her own skill. She pays
fair wages, which are considered entirely satisfactory by the employee
in view of the instruction she has received. Mrs. Y, who ignores Mrs. B
socially and is indifferent to the matter of wages, calls on Mrs. B’s
cook and offers her $5 per week. This is much above the current rate
of wages in the place and moreover Mrs. B cannot afford to pay it. She
therefore loses her trained cook.
Mr. C, an employer in haste to reach his distant home and anxious to
secure a servant, engages in the afternoon a Swedish girl who has that
morning landed in America and of whom he knows nothing. She is to
accompany his family, which includes five children, to their Western
home, have all of her expenses of travel paid by her employers, and
receive $4.00 a week for her services as a nurse-maid.
Mrs. D, a housekeeper with a large family, moderate income, and ambitious
tastes, employs one general servant and requires, in addition to the
ordinary duties of such a servant, dining-room and chamber service.
Mrs. E, her nearest neighbor, a housekeeper with a small family, simple
tastes, and free from numerous social demands, makes all of the desserts
herself, requires no table service of her employee, and expects her
daughter to assume the care of the chambers.
Mrs. F pays full wages to her inexperienced “help,” fifteen years old,
because the latter has an invalid mother dependent on her.
Mr. G, with a family of two, prides himself on paying the highest wages
in the place to his cook, second girl, and coachman.
Mrs. H, who has inherited a large family homestead, which she occupies
with her sister, provides her three employees each with a separate
bedroom, a special dining-room, a sitting-room well furnished, and grants
many personal privileges, as the use of the horse and carriage for early
church. She does not understand how any housekeeper can have trouble
in securing and retaining competent employees. She often quotes to her
nearest neighbor, “A good mistress makes a good servant,” her neighbor
being obliged to use her back parlor with a mantel bed as a guest-room
and therefore to limit somewhat the accommodations granted her employees.
Mrs. I gives each of her employees a key to the side door and makes no
inquiries as to the hours they keep.
Mrs. J gives her servants her discarded evening dresses because “it keeps
them in good humor.”
Mrs. K, the wife of a millionaire, “burns all of her old finery,” and
makes it a special point to teach all of her twelve employees how to
dress well and economically within the wages they receive.
Mrs. L does not permit her employee to wear frizzes or bangs, disapproves
of her having company, and will not tolerate a young man caller under any
circumstances.
Mrs. M, a lifelong invalid whose physician has prescribed absolute rest
two hours every afternoon, reasons that her employee who rises two hours
earlier than herself must need the same rest and therefore sends her
every afternoon to take a nap. The latter thus never works afternoons and
is able to attend more evening entertainments than other employees in the
neighborhood.[233]
Mrs. N assists her husband in his business six hours each day and gives
her employee full control of the house during her absence.
Mrs. O requires all her employees to perform their work according to
minute directions laid down by herself and is constantly present to see
that these are not deviated from in the slightest degree.
Mrs. P discharges her nursery maid for untruthfulness and gives her
a recommendation testifying to her neatness, quickness, pleasant
disposition, and fondness for children.
Mr. Q discharges his butler for incapacity, but in view of the fact that
the latter has a widowed mother and an invalid sister dependent on him
gives him an excellent recommendation.
Mr. R discharges his housekeeper “for infirmity of temper,” as
he subsequently testifies in court, but gives her so excellent a
recommendation that she believes she has been discharged for physical
disability, and gives her testimony to this effect in the same lawsuit.
Mrs. S has a cook who drinks to excess one fourth of the time, but the
latter has no fear of dismissal because three fourths of the time she
cooks in a superior manner.
Mrs. T dislikes manual labor of every kind. Her servants therefore know
that she will tolerate inefficient and incompetent service rather than be
left for a single day without help.
Mr. U, the father of three young sons, has a coachman who swears like a
trooper, but he retains him because Mrs. U considers him the most stylish
coachman in the city.
Mrs. V applies to an employment bureau for a domestic and refuses six
applicants because they are not “pretty” and “refined.” After finding one
whose appearances are satisfactory, she parts with her because she is
unwilling to black the gentlemen’s boots.
Mrs. W engages a woman to go out of town for service, the latter to wait
a week before going and meantime to pay her own board. At the time agreed
upon she reaches the employer’s house, to learn that the former “help”
has decided to remain. She has thus lost a week’s board and wages and
more than two dollars in going and returning to the city, and all of “her
set” refuse to make engagements in the country.
The different economic, social, and moral questions connected with these
various conditions, the illustrations of which could be multiplied
indefinitely, may be, generally are, decided by each individual without
reference to society at large. Wages are too often regulated by the
employer’s bank account, hours of service by his caprice, and moral
questions by his personal convenience. The employer is too often the
autocrat in his own home. He considers that neither his neighbor nor the
general public has any more concern in the business relations existing
between himself and his domestic employees than it has in the price he
pays for a dinner service or in the color and cut of his coat.
Yet domestic service is the only employment in which economic laws are
so openly defied and all questions connected with it settled on the
personal basis. No manufacturer can from charitable motives double
the wages ordinarily paid to unskilled labor without being called to
account for it by competing manufacturers, nor can he reduce unduly the
wages of his employees without being held responsible for his course
by the employees of other establishments, nor can he prolong by one
fourth of an hour the daily period of labor without overstepping his
legal privileges. Within certain narrow limits he has freedom, but
competition, labor organizations, and the arm of the law combine to keep
him within these limits. Before domestic service is freed from all the
difficulties that attend it there must be a more widespread recognition
of the responsibility of the individual employer to those outside his own
household.[234]
Five general classes of perplexing conditions have been suggested. All
of them are independent of the personal characteristics and habits of
employer and employee and of the personal relationship that exists
between them. They do not take into account the fact that throughout
the South and wherever negroes are employed in the household the
housekeeper must be ever on the alert to guard against dishonesty and
immorality on the part of these employees, that intemperance has been
found a besetting sin of cooks and coachmen irrespective of race and
nationality, that many agree with Mr. Joseph Jefferson when he says, “I
am satisfied that domestic melancholy sets in with the butler. He is the
melodramatic villain of society.” They do not consider the tendencies
encountered here as elsewhere towards indifference, idleness, laziness,
low ideals and standards, insubordination, and a desire to obtain much
for nothing.[235] They do not include lack of harmony in the personal
relations between employees in the same household,[236] the constant
friction that necessarily arises from the presence of a stranger in
the family, the question of compatibility of disposition between the
mistress and the maid, the feeling between employees and the children
of the household. They are as prone to trouble a good mistress as a
poor one, they are independent of knowledge of household affairs, of
housekeeping experience, of good or ill treatment of employees, of any
personal element whatever in employer or employee. They are difficulties
apparently inherent in the present system of domestic service.
It is of interest to note the opinion of housekeepers on this point. The
question, “Have you found it difficult to secure good domestic servants?”
was answered with the following result:
Difficult 545
Yes 290
Very difficult 148
At times 72
Rather difficult 20
Generally 15
Not difficult 418
No 328
Not especially 34
Not generally 29
Not lately 13
Very little difficulty 8
Very seldom 6
Not answered 42
----
Total 1005
Fifty-seven per cent therefore of the housekeepers represented by the
schedules have found more or less difficulty in securing good servants.
This is, probably, an underestimate of the true condition. Many
housekeepers who see only the personal element involved in the employment
of service consider an acknowledgment of difficulty a confession of
weakness and inability on their own part to cope with the question and
are therefore silent. Others have had the experience of one who writes,
“I have had no difficulty, my cook having been with me eighteen years,
and my second girl, her daughter, ten years. But if they should leave I
should not know where to turn.” Again, the replies do not represent the
experiences of a class not represented on the schedules—the many in the
large cities who are able to employ servants only occasionally and find
them through the lowest grade of intelligence offices.
These difficulties are certainly not decreasing,[237] and the demand
for competent servants is in most places evidently greater than the
supply.[238] These difficulties are, at times, somewhat modified by
the conditions in which the employer is placed. They are apparently
less in large cities that are ports of entry or the termini of leading
railroad lines, and have comparatively few manufacturing industries in
which women are employed; they are less in small families employing a
large number of servants and paying high wages. But even all of these
favorable conditions only modify—they do not change—the nature of the
question.[239] A careful study of the returned schedules with reference
to the location, population, and prevailing industry of the towns, the
number of servants employed, size of family, and wages paid leads to this
conclusion. Of the five hundred and forty-five employers who reported
that they had difficulty in securing competent servants, only twenty-six
gave in explanation a reason that would not have been applicable in any
city, town, or village in the country, and those twenty-six had reference
to the negroes at the South and the Chinese at the West. One half of the
employees reporting state that they would go into another occupation
provided it would pay them as well,[240] although the number is very
small of those who are dissatisfied except with the disadvantages of the
position. If these difficulties are found in every place irrespective
of its size, its geographical location, its prevailing industry, the
character of its inhabitants, and the personal relations of mistress and
maid, something more is involved for the employer than “kind treatment”
and personal consideration.
The belief has apparently been general that these perplexities are
confined to our own country and that the adoption of English or German
or French methods of dealing with the subject would remove them all.
The question is undoubtedly a less difficult one in England than it is
in this country, since it is not complicated by differences of race,
religion, interests, and traditions, by foreign immigration, and possibly
not by the same ease with which labor is transferred from one employment
to another, while tradition and social custom have favored country rather
than city life and have thus eliminated one of our difficulties. But
with all these obstacles removed, DeFoe’s _Behaviour of Servants_ shows
that even in England the question is an old one, and current literature
indicates that it is far from settled.[241]
If the question is asked in Germany, “Is it easy to secure good domestic
servants here?” the almost invariable answer is, “It is very difficult,
almost impossible.” The reasons for the difficulty are precisely the same
as in America—the attractions of city life, the competition of shops and
factories, the growth of democratic ideas, the difficulty of securing,
in spite of the system of service books, unimpeachable recommendations,
and the spirit of restlessness that everywhere prevails among the working
classes. In some of the higher classes, where something of the old
patriarchal relationship between mistress and maid still exists, there
is apparently no difficulty; but each year these classes become more and
more undermined by the social democratic spirit, and must in time be
affected by the same conditions that bring perplexity to other classes.
Yet it is true in Germany as in America that servants seeking places are
always to be found, that intelligence offices are crowded with applicants
for work, and that an army of incompetents is always at hand.
In France the problem is the same. It varies in details; the proportion
of men employed in housework is far greater than in America, England, or
Germany, servility of manner is not expected as in England, and waste of
material is less common than in America. But fundamentally the conditions
are the same as elsewhere.
The difficulties that meet the employer of domestic labor both in
America and in Europe are the difficulties that arise from the attempt
to harmonize an ancient, patriarchal industrial system with the
conditions of modern life. Everywhere the employer closes his eyes to
the incongruities of the attempt and lays the blame of failure, not to
a defective system, but to the natural weaknesses in the character of
the unfortunate persons obliged to carry it out. The difficulties in the
path of both employer and employee will not only never be removed but
will increase until the subject of domestic service is regarded as a
part of the great labor question of the day and given the same serious
consideration.