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Page 23
As industrial conditions have changed, the household has simplified,
from the medi�val affair of journeymen, apprentices, and maidens who
spun and brewed to the family proper; to those who love each other and
live together in ties of affection and consanguinity. Were this process
complete, we should have no problem of household employment. But, even
in households comparatively humble, there is still one alien, one who is
neither loved nor loving.
The modern family has dropped the man who made its shoes, the woman who
spun its clothes, and, to a large extent, the woman who washes them, but
it stoutly refuses to drop the woman who cooks its food and ministers
directly to its individual comfort; it strangely insists that to do
that would be to destroy the family life itself. The cook is
uncomfortable, the family is uncomfortable; but it will not drop her as
all her fellow-workers have been dropped, although the cook herself
insists upon it. So far has this insistence gone that every possible
concession is made to retain her. The writer knows an employer in one of
the suburbs who built a bay at the back of her house so that her cook
might have a pleasant room in which to sleep, and another in which to
receive her friends. This employer naturally felt aggrieved when the
cook refused to stay in her bay. Viewed in an historic light, this
employer might quite as well have added a bay to her house for her
shoemaker, and then deemed him ungrateful because he declined to live in
it.
A listener, attentive to a conversation between two employers of
household labor,--and we certainly all have opportunity to hear such
conversations,--would often discover a tone implying that the employer
was abused and put upon; that she was struggling with the problem
solely because she was thus serving her family and performing her social
duties; that otherwise it would be a great relief to her to abandon the
entire situation, and "never have a servant in her house again." Did she
follow this impulse, she would simply yield to the trend of her times
and accept the present system of production. She would be in line with
the industrial organization of her age. Were she in line ethically, she
would have to believe that the sacredness and beauty of family life do
not consist in the processes of the separate preparation of food, but in
sharing the corporate life of the community, and in making the family
the unit of that life.
The selfishness of a modern mistress, who, in her narrow social ethics,
insists that those who minister to the comforts of her family shall
minister to it alone, that they shall not only be celibate, but shall be
cut off, more or less, from their natural social ties, excludes the best
working-people from her service.
A man of dignity and ability is quite willing to come into a house to
tune a piano. Another man of mechanical skill will come to put up window
shades. Another of less skill, but of perfect independence, will come to
clean and relay a carpet. These men would all resent the situation and
consider it quite impossible if it implied the giving up of their family
and social ties, and living under the roof of the household requiring
their services.
The isolation of the household employee is perhaps inevitable so long as
the employer holds her belated ethics; but the situation is made even
more difficult by the character and capacity of the girls who enter this
industry. In any great industrial change the workmen who are permanently
displaced are those who are too dull to seize upon changed conditions.
The workmen who have knowledge and insight, who are in touch with their
time, quickly reorganize.
The general statement may be made that the enterprising girls of the
community go into factories, and the less enterprising go into
households, although there are many exceptions. It is not a question of
skill, of energy, of conscientious work, which will make a girl rise
industrially while she is in the household; she is not in the rising
movement. She is belated in a class composed of the unprogressive
elements of the community, which is recruited constantly by those from
the ranks of the incompetent, by girls who are learning the language,
girls who are timid and slow, or girls who look at life solely from the
savings-bank point of view. The distracted housekeeper struggles with
these unprogressive girls, holding to them not even the well-defined and
independent relation of employer and employed, but the hazy and
constantly changing one of mistress to servant.
The latter relation is changing under pressure from various directions.
In our increasing democracy the notion of personal service is constantly
becoming more distasteful, conflicting, as it does, with the more
modern notion of personal dignity. Personal ministration to the needs
of childhood, illness, and old age seem to us reasonable, and the
democratic adjustment in regard to them is being made. The first two are
constantly raised nearer to the level of a profession, and there is
little doubt that the third will soon follow. But personal ministrations
to a normal, healthy adult, consuming the time and energy of another
adult, we find more difficult to reconcile to our theories of democracy.
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