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Page 24
A factory employer parts with his men at the factory gates at the end of
a day's work; they go to their homes as he goes to his, in the
assumption that they both do what they want and spend their money as
they please; but this solace of equality outside of working hours is
denied the bewildered employer of household labor.
She is obliged to live constantly in the same house with her employee,
and because of certain equalities in food and shelter she is brought
more sharply face to face with the mental and social inequalities.
The difficulty becomes more apparent as the character of the work
performed by the so-called servant is less absolutely useful and may be
merely time consuming. A kind-hearted woman who will complacently take
an afternoon drive, leaving her cook to prepare the five courses of a
"little dinner for only ten guests," will not be nearly so comfortable
the next evening when she speeds her daughter to a dance, conscious that
her waitress must spend the evening in dull solitude on the chance that
a caller or two may ring the door-bell.
A conscientious employer once remarked to the writer: "In England it
must be much easier; the maid does not look and dress so like your
daughter, and you can at least pretend that she doesn't like the same
things. But really, my new waitress is quite as pretty and stylish as my
daughter is, and her wistful look sometimes when Mary goes off to a
frolic quite breaks my heart."
Too many employers of domestic service have always been exempt from
manual labor, and therefore constantly impose exacting duties upon
employees, the nature of which they do not understand by experience;
there is thus no curb of rationality imposed upon the employer's
requirements and demands. She is totally unlike the foreman in a shop,
who has only risen to his position by way of having actually performed
with his own hands all the work of the men he directs. There is also
another class of employers of domestic labor, who grow capricious and
over-exacting through sheer lack of larger interests to occupy their
minds; it is equally bad for them and the employee that the duties of
the latter are not clearly defined. Tolstoy contends that an exaggerated
notion of cleanliness has developed among such employers, which could
never have been evolved among usefully employed people. He points to the
fact that a serving man, in order that his hands may be immaculately
clean, is kept from performing the heavier work of the household, and
then is supplied with a tray, upon which to place a card, in order that
even his clean hands may not touch it; later, even his clean hands are
covered with a pair of clean white gloves, which hold the tray upon
which the card is placed.
If it were not for the undemocratic ethics used by the employers of
domestics, much work now performed in the household would be done
outside, as is true of many products formerly manufactured in the feudal
household. The worker in all other trades has complete control of his
own time after the performance of definitely limited services, his wages
are paid altogether in money which he may spend in the maintenance of a
separate home life, and he has full opportunity to organize with the
other workers in his trade.
The domestic employee is retained in the household largely because her
"mistress" fatuously believes that she is thus maintaining the sanctity
of family life.
The household employee has no regular opportunity for meeting other
workers of her trade, and of attaining with them the dignity of a
corporate body. The industrial isolation of the household employee
results, as isolation in a trade must always result, in a lack of
progress in the methods and products of that trade, and a lack of
aspiration and education in the workman. Whether we recognize this
isolation as a cause or not, we are all ready to acknowledge that
household labor has been in some way belated; that the improvements
there have not kept up with the improvement in other occupations. It is
said that the last revolution in the processes of cooking was brought
about by Count Rumford, who died a hundred years ago. This is largely
due to the lack of _esprit de corps_ among the employees, which keeps
them collectively from fresh achievements, as the absence of education
in the individual keeps her from improving her implements.
Under this isolation, not only must one set of utensils serve divers
purposes, and, as a consequence, tend to a lessened volume and lower
quality of work, but, inasmuch as the appliances are not made to
perform the fullest work, there is an amount of capital invested
disproportionate to the product when measured by the achievement in
other branches of industry. More important than this is the result of
the isolation upon the worker herself. There is nothing more devastating
to the inventive faculty, nor fatal to a flow of mind and spirit, than
the constant feeling of loneliness and the absence of that fellowship
which makes our public opinion. If an angry foreman reprimands a girl
for breaking a machine, twenty other girls hear him, and the culprit
knows perfectly well their opinion as to the justice or injustice of her
situation. In either case she bears it better for knowing that, and not
thinking it over in solitude. If a household employee breaks a utensil
or a piece of porcelain and is reprimanded by her employer, too often
the invisible jury is the family of the latter, who naturally uphold her
censorious position and intensify the feeling of loneliness in the
employee.
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