of life here in America; the happiness of families, their thrift,
well-being, and comfort, are more affected by this than by any one thing
else. Our girls, as they have been brought up, cannot perform the labor
of their own families, as in those simpler, old-fashioned days you tell
of; and what is worse, they have no practical skill with which to
instruct servants, and servants come to us, as a class, raw and
untrained; so what is to be done? In the present state of prices, the
board of a domestic costs double her wages, and the waste she makes is a
more serious matter still. Suppose you give us an article upon this
subject in your ‘House and Home Papers.’ You could not have a better
one.”
So I sat down, and wrote thus on
SERVANTS AND SERVICE.
Many of the domestic evils in America originate in the fact, that, while
society here is professedly based on new principles which ought to make
social life in every respect different from the life of the Old World,
yet these principles have never been so thought out and applied as to
give consistency and harmony to our daily relations. America starts with
a political organization based on a declaration of the primitive freedom
and equality of all men. Every human being, according to this principle,
stands on the same natural level with every other, and has the same
chance to rise according to the degree of power or capacity given by the
Creator. All our civil institutions are designed to preserve this
equality, as far as possible, from generation to generation: there is no
entailed property, there are no hereditary titles, no monopolies, no
privileged classes,—all are to be as free to rise and fall as the waves
of the sea.
The condition of domestic service, however, still retains about it
something of the influences from feudal times, and from the near
presence of slavery in neighboring States. All English literature, all
the literature of the world, describes domestic service in the old
feudal spirit and with the old feudal language, which regarded the
master as belonging to a privileged class and the servant to an inferior
one. There is not a play, not a poem, not a novel, not a history, that
does not present this view. The master’s rights, like the rights of
kings, were supposed to rest in his being born in a superior rank. The
good servant was one who, from childhood, had learned “to order himself
lowly and reverently to all his betters.” When New England brought to
these shores the theory of democracy, she brought, in the persons of the
first pilgrims, the habits of thought and of action formed in
aristocratic communities. Winthrop’s Journal, and all the old records of
the earlier colonists, show households where masters and mistresses
stood on the “right divine” of the privileged classes, howsoever they
might have risen up against authorities themselves.
The first consequence of this state of things was a universal rejection
of domestic service in all classes of American-born society. For a
generation or two, there was, indeed, a sort of interchange of family
strength,—sons and daughters engaging in the service of neighboring
families, in default of a sufficient working-force of their own, but
always on conditions of strict equality. The assistant was to share the
table, the family sitting-room, and every honor and attention that might
be claimed by son or daughter. When families increased in refinement and
education so as to make these conditions of close intimacy with more
uncultured neighbors disagreeable, they had to choose between such
intimacies and the performance of their own domestic toil. No wages
could induce a son or daughter of New England to take the condition of a
servant on terms which they thought applicable to that of a slave. The
slightest hint of a separate table was resented as an insult; not to
enter the front-door, and not to sit in the front-parlor on
state-occasions, was bitterly commented on as a personal indignity.
The well-taught, self-respecting daughters of farmers, the class most
valuable in domestic service, gradually retired from it. They preferred
any other employment, however laborious. Beyond all doubt, the labors of
a well-regulated family are more healthy, more cheerful, more
interesting, because less monotonous, than the mechanical toils of a
factory; yet the girls of New England, with one consent, preferred the
factory, and left the whole business of domestic service to a foreign
population; and they did it mainly because they would not take positions
in families as an inferior laboring-class by the side of others of their
own age who assumed as their prerogative to live without labor.
“I can’t let you have one of my daughters,” said an energetic matron to
her neighbor from the city, who was seeking for a servant in her summer
vacation; “if you hadn’t daughters of your own, maybe I would; but my
girls ain’t going to work so that your girls may live in idleness.”
It was vain to offer money. “We don’t need your money, ma’am, we can
support ourselves in other ways; my girls can braid straw, and bind
shoes, but they ain’t going to be slaves to anybody.”
In the Irish and German servants who took the place of Americans in
families, there was, to begin with, the tradition of education in favor
of a higher class; but even the foreign population became more or less
infected with the spirit of democracy. They came to this country with
vague notions of freedom and equality, and in ignorant and uncultivated
people such ideas are often more unreasonable for being vague. They did
not, indeed, claim a seat at the table and in the parlor, but they
repudiated many of those habits of respect and courtesy which belonged
to their former condition, and asserted their own will and way in the
round, unvarnished phrase which they supposed to be their right as
republican citizens. Life became a sort of domestic wrangle and struggle
between the employers, who secretly confessed their weakness, but
endeavored openly to assume the air and bearing of authority, and the
employed, who knew their power and insisted on their privileges. From
this cause domestic service in America has had less of mutual kindliness
than in old countries. Its terms have been so ill understood and defined
that both parties have assumed the defensive; and a common topic of
conversation in American female society has often been the general
servile war which in one form or another was going on in their different
families,—a war as interminable as would be a struggle between
aristocracy and common people, undefined by any bill of rights or
constitution, and therefore opening fields for endless disputes. In
England, the class who go to service _are_ a class, and service is a
profession; the distance between them and their employers is so marked
and defined, and all the customs and requirements of the position are so
perfectly understood, that the master or mistress has no fear of being
compromised by condescension, and no need of the external voice or air
of authority. The higher up in the social scale one goes, the more
courteous seems to become the intercourse of master and servant; the
more perfect and real the power, the more is it veiled in outward
expression,—commands are phrased as requests, and gentleness of voice
and manner covers an authority which no one would think of offending
without trembling.
But in America all is undefined. In the first place, there is no class
who mean to make domestic service a profession to live and die in. It is
universally an expedient, a stepping-stone to something higher; your
best servants always have something else in view as soon as they have
laid by a little money; some form of independence which shall give them
a home of their own is constantly in mind. Families look forward to the
buying of landed homesteads, and the scattered brothers and sisters work
awhile in domestic service to gain the common fund for the purpose; your
seamstress intends to become a dress-maker, and take in work at her own
house; your cook is pondering a marriage with the baker, which shall
transfer her toils from your cooking-stove to her own. Young women are
eagerly rushing into every other employment, till female trades and
callings are all overstocked. We are continually harrowed with tales of
the sufferings of distressed needle-women, of the exactions and
extortions practised on the frail sex in the many branches of labor and
trade at which they try their hands; and yet women will encounter all
these chances of ruin and starvation rather than make up their minds to
permanent domestic service. Now what is the matter with domestic
service? One would think, on the face of it, that a calling which gives
a settled home, a comfortable room, rent-free, with fire and lights,
good board and lodging, and steady, well-paid wages, would certainly
offer more attractions than the making of shirts for tenpence, with all
the risks of providing one’s own sustenance and shelter.
I think it is mainly from the want of a definite idea of the true
position of a servant under our democratic institutions that domestic
service is so shunned and avoided in America, that it is the very last
thing which an intelligent young woman will look to for a living. It is
more the want of personal respect toward those in that position than the
labors incident to it which repels our people from it. Many would be
willing to perform these labors, but they are not willing to place
themselves in a situation where their self-respect is hourly wounded by
_the implication of a degree of inferiority which does not follow any
kind of labor or service in this country but that of the family_.
There exists in the minds of employers an unsuspected spirit of
superiority, which is stimulated into an active form by the resistance
which democracy inspires in the working-class. Many families think of
servants only as a necessary evil, their wages as exactions, and all
that is allowed them as so much taken from the family; and they seek in
every way to get from them as much and to give them as little as
possible. Their rooms are the neglected, ill-furnished, incommodious
ones,—and the kitchen is the most cheerless and comfortless place in the
house. Other families, more good-natured and liberal, provide their
domestics with more suitable accommodations, and are more indulgent; but
there is still a latent spirit of something like contempt for the
position. That they treat their servants with so much consideration
seems to them a merit entitling them to the most prostrate gratitude;
and they are constantly disappointed and shocked at that want of sense
of inferiority on the part of these people which leads them to
appropriate pleasant rooms, good furniture, and good living as mere
matters of common justice.
It seems to be a constant surprise to some employers that servants
should insist on having the same human wants as themselves. Ladies who
yawn in their elegantly furnished parlors, among books and pictures, if
they have not company, parties, or opera to diversify the evening, seem
astonished and half indignant that cook and chambermaid are more
disposed to go out for an evening gossip than to sit on hard chairs in
the kitchen where they have been toiling all day. The pretty
chambermaid’s anxieties about her dress, the time she spends at her
small and not very clear mirror, are sneeringly noticed by those whose
toilet-cares take up serious hours; and the question has never
apparently occurred to them why a serving-maid should not want to look
pretty as well as her mistress. She is a woman as well as they, with all
a woman’s wants and weaknesses; and her dress is as much to her as
theirs to them.
A vast deal of trouble among servants arises from impertinent
interferences and petty tyrannical exactions on the part of employers.
Now the authority of the master and mistress of a house in regard to
their domestics extends simply to the things they have contracted to do
and the hours during which they have contracted to serve; otherwise than
this, they have no more right to interfere with them in the disposal of
their time than with any mechanic whom they employ. They have, indeed, a
right to regulate the hours of their own household, and servants can
choose between conformity to these hours and the loss of their
situation; but, within reasonable limits, their right to come and go at
their own discretion, in their own time, should be unquestioned.
If employers are troubled by the fondness of their servants for dancing,
evening company, and late hours, the proper mode of proceeding is to
make these matters a subject of distinct contract in hiring. The more
strictly and perfectly the business matters of the first engagement of
domestics are conducted, the more likelihood there is of mutual quiet
and satisfaction in the relation. It is quite competent to every
housekeeper to say what practices are or are not consistent with the
rules of her family, and what will be inconsistent with the service for
which she agrees to pay. It is much better to regulate such affairs by
cool contract in the outset than by warm altercations and protracted
domestic battles.
As to the terms of social intercourse it seems somehow to be settled in
the minds of many employers that their servants owe them and their
family more respect than they and the family owe to the servants. But do
they? What is the relation of servant to employer in a democratic
country? Precisely that of a person who for money performs any kind of
service for you. The carpenter comes into your house to put up a set of
shelves,—the cook comes into your kitchen to cook your dinner. You never
think that the carpenter owes you any more respect than you owe to him
because he is in your house doing your behests; he is your
fellow-citizen, you treat him with respect, you expect to be treated
with respect by him. You have a claim on him that he shall do your work
according to your directions,—no more. Now I apprehend that there is a
very common notion as to the position and rights of servants which is
quite different from this. Is it not a common feeling that a servant is
one who may be treated with a degree of freedom by every member of the
family which he or she may not return? Do not people feel at liberty to
question servants about their private affairs, to comment on their dress
and appearance, in a manner which they would feel to be an impertinence,
if reciprocated? Do they not feel at liberty to express dissatisfaction
with their performances in rude and unceremonious terms, to reprove them
in the presence of company, while yet they require that the
dissatisfaction of servants shall be expressed only in terms of respect?
A woman would not feel herself at liberty to talk to her milliner or her
dressmaker in language as devoid of consideration as she will employ
towards her cook or chambermaid. Yet both are rendering her a service
which she pays for in money, and one is no more made her inferior
thereby than the other. Both have an equal right to be treated with
courtesy. The master and mistress of a house have a right to require
respectful treatment from all whom their roof shelters, but they have no
more right to exact it of servants than of every guest and every child,
and they themselves owe it as much to servants as to guests.
In order that servants may be treated with respect and courtesy, it is
not necessary, as in simpler patriarchal days, that they sit at the
family-table. Your carpenter or plumber does not feel hurt that you do
not ask him to dine with you, nor your milliner and mantua-maker that
you do not exchange ceremonious calls and invite them to your parties.
It is well-understood that your relations with them are of a mere
business character. They never take it as an assumption of superiority
on your part that you do not admit them to relations of private
intimacy. There may be the most perfect respect and esteem and even
friendship between them and you, notwithstanding. So it may be in the
case of servants. It is easy to make any person understand that there
are quite other reasons than the assumption of personal superiority for
not wishing to admit servants to the family privacy. It was not, in
fact, to sit in the parlor or at the table, in themselves considered,
that was the thing aimed at by New England girls,—these were valued only
as signs that they were deemed worthy of respect and consideration, and,
where freely conceded, were often in point of fact declined.
Let servants feel, in their treatment by their employers, and in the
atmosphere of the family, that their position is held to be a
respectable one, let them feel in the mistress of the family the charm
of unvarying consideration and good manners, let their work-rooms be
made convenient and comfortable, and their private apartments bear some
reasonable comparison in point of agreeableness to those of other
members of the family, and domestic service will be more frequently
sought by a superior and self-respecting class. There are families in
which such a state of things prevails; and such families, amid the many
causes which unite to make the tenure of service uncertain, have
generally been able to keep good permanent servants.
There is an extreme into which kindly disposed people often run with
regard to servants, which may be mentioned here. They make pets of them.
They give extravagant wages and indiscreet indulgences, and, through
indolence and easiness of temper, tolerate neglect of duty. Many of the
complaints of the ingratitude of servants come from those who have
spoiled them in this way; while many of the longest and most harmonious
domestic unions have sprung from a simple, quiet course of Christian
justice and benevolence, a recognition of servants as fellow-beings and
fellow-Christians, and a doing to them as we would in like circumstances
that they should do to us.
The mistresses of American families, whether they like it or not, have
the duties of missionaries imposed upon them by that class from which
our supply of domestic servants is drawn. They may as well accept the
position cheerfully, and, as one raw, untrained hand after another
passes through their family, and is instructed by them in the mysteries
of good housekeeping, comfort themselves with the reflection that they
are doing something to form good wives and mothers for the Republic.
The complaints made of Irish girls are numerous and loud; the failings
of green Erin, alas! are but too open and manifest; yet, in arrest of
judgment, let us move this consideration: let us imagine our own
daughters between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, untaught and
inexperienced in domestic affairs as they commonly are, shipped to a
foreign shore to seek service in families. It may be questioned whether
as a whole they would do much better. The girls that fill our families
and do our house-work are often of the age of our own daughters,
standing for themselves, without mothers to guide them, in a foreign
country, not only bravely supporting themselves, but sending home in
every ship remittances to impoverished friends left behind. If our
daughters did as much for us, should we not be proud of their energy and
heroism?
When we go into the houses of our country, we find a majority of
well-kept, well-ordered, and even elegant establishments where the only
hands employed are those of the daughters of Erin. True, American women
have been their instructors, and many a weary hour of care have they had
in the discharge of this office; but the result on the whole is
beautiful and good, and the end of it, doubtless, will be peace.
In speaking of the office of the American mistress as being a missionary
one, we are far from recommending any controversial interference with
the religious faith of our servants. It is far better to incite them to
be good Christians in their own way than to run the risk of shaking
their faith in all religion by pointing out to them the errors of that
in which they have been educated. The general purity of life and
propriety of demeanor of so many thousands of undefended young girls
cast yearly upon our shores, with no home but their church, and no
shield but their religion, are a sufficient proof that this religion
exerts an influence over them not to be lightly trifled with. But there
is a real unity even in opposite Christian forms; and the Roman Catholic
servant and the Protestant mistress, if alike possessed by the spirit of
Christ, and striving to conform to the Golden Rule, cannot help being
one in heart, though one go to mass and the other to meeting.
Finally, the bitter baptism through which we are passing, the life-blood
dearer than our own which is drenching distant fields, should remind us
of the preciousness of distinctive American ideas. They who would seek
in their foolish pride to establish the pomp of liveried servants in
America are doing that which is simply absurd. A servant can never in
our country be the mere appendage to another man, to be marked like a
sheep with the color of his owner; he must be a fellow-citizen, with an
established position of his own, free to make contracts, free to come
and go, and having in his sphere titles to consideration and respect
just as definite as those of any trade or profession whatever.
Moreover, we cannot in this country maintain to any great extent large
retinues of servants. Even with ample fortunes they are forbidden by the
general character of society here, which makes them cumbrous and
difficult to manage. Every mistress of a family knows that her cares
increase with every additional servant. Two keep the peace with each
other and their employer; three begin a possible discord, which
possibility increases with four, and becomes certain with five or six.
Trained housekeepers, such as regulate the complicated establishments of
the Old World, form a class that are not, and from the nature of the
case never will be, found in any great numbers in this country. All such
women, as a general thing, are keeping, and prefer to keep, houses of
their own.
A moderate style of housekeeping, small, compact, and simple domestic
establishments, must necessarily be the general order of life in
America. So many openings of profit are to be found in this country,
that domestic service necessarily wants the permanence which forms so
agreeable a feature of it in the Old World.
This being the case, it should be an object in America to exclude from
the labors of the family all that can, with greater advantage, be
executed out of it by combined labor.
Formerly, in New England, soap and candles were to be made in each
separate family; now, comparatively few take this toil upon them. We buy
soap of the soap-maker, and candles of the candle-factor. This principle
might be extended much further. In France no family makes its own bread,
and better bread cannot be eaten than what can be bought at the
appropriate shops. No family does its own washing, the family’s linen is
all sent to women who, making this their sole profession, get it up with
a care and nicety which can seldom be equalled in any family.
How would it simplify the burdens of the American housekeeper to have
washing and ironing day expunged from her calendar! How much more neatly
and compactly could the whole domestic system be arranged! If all the
money that each separate family spends on the outfit and accommodations
for washing and ironing, on fuel, soap, starch, and the other et
ceteras, were united in a fund to create a laundry for every dozen
families, one or two good women could do in first rate style what now is
very indifferently done by the disturbance and disarrangement of all
other domestic processes in these families. Whoever sets neighborhood
laundries on foot will do much to solve the American housekeeper’s
hardest problem.