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Page 25
The household employee, in addition to her industrial isolation, is also
isolated socially. It is well to remember that the household employees
for the better quarters of the city and suburbs are largely drawn from
the poorer quarters, which are nothing if not gregarious. The girl is
born and reared in a tenement house full of children. She goes to school
with them, and there she learns to march, to read, and write in
companionship with forty others. When she is old enough to go to
parties, those she attends are usually held in a public hall and are
crowded with dancers. If she works in a factory, she walks home with
many other girls, in much the same spirit as she formerly walked to
school with them. She mingles with the young men she knows, in frank,
economic, and social equality. Until she marries she remains at home
with no special break or change in her family and social life. If she is
employed in a household, this is not true. Suddenly all the conditions
of her life are altered. This change may be wholesome for her, but it
is not easy, and thought of the savings-bank does not cheer one much,
when one is twenty. She is isolated from the people with whom she has
been reared, with whom she has gone to school, and among whom she
expects to live when she marries. She is naturally lonely and
constrained away from them, and the "new maid" often seems "queer" to
her employer's family. She does not care to mingle socially with the
people in whose house she is employed, as the girl from the country
often does, but she surfers horribly from loneliness.
This wholesome, instinctive dread of social isolation is so strong that,
as every city intelligence-office can testify, the filling of situations
is easier, or more difficult, in proportion as the place offers more or
less companionship. Thus, the easy situation to fill is always the city
house, with five or six employees, shading off into the more difficult
suburban home, with two, and the utterly impossible lonely country
house.
There are suburban employers of household labor who make heroic efforts
to supply domestic and social life to their employees; who take the
domestic employee to drive, arrange to have her invited out
occasionally; who supply her with books and papers and companionship.
Nothing could be more praiseworthy in motive, but it is seldom
successful in actual operation, resulting as it does in a simulacrum of
companionship. The employee may have a genuine friendship for her
employer, and a pleasure in her companionship, or she may not have, and
the unnaturalness of the situation comes from the insistence that she
has, merely because of the propinquity.
The unnaturalness of the situation is intensified by the fact that the
employee is practically debarred by distance and lack of leisure from
her natural associates, and that her employer sympathetically insists
upon filling the vacancy in interests and affections by her own tastes
and friendship. She may or may not succeed, but the employee should not
be thus dependent upon the good will of her employer. That in itself is
undemocratic.
The difficulty is increasing by a sense of social discrimination which
the household employee keenly feels is against her and in favor of the
factory girls, in the minds of the young men of her acquaintance. Women
seeking employment, understand perfectly well this feeling among
mechanics, doubtless quite unjustifiable, but it acts as a strong
inducement toward factory labor. The writer has long ceased to apologize
for the views and opinions of working people, being quite sure that on
the whole they are quite as wise and quite as foolish as the views and
opinions of other people, but that this particularly foolish opinion of
young mechanics is widely shared by the employing class can be easily
demonstrated. The contrast is further accentuated by the better social
position of the factory girl, and the advantages provided for her in
the way of lunch clubs, social clubs, and vacation homes, from which
girls performing household labor are practically excluded by their hours
of work, their geographical situation, and a curious feeling that they
are not as interesting as factory girls.
This separation from her natural social ties affects, of course, her
opportunity for family life. It is well to remember that women, as a
rule, are devoted to their families; that they want to live with their
parents, their brothers and sisters, and kinsfolk, and will sacrifice
much to accomplish this. This devotion is so universal that it is
impossible to ignore it when we consider women as employees. Young
unmarried women are not detached from family claims and requirements as
young men are, and are more ready and steady in their response to the
needs of aged parents and the helpless members of the family. But women
performing labor in households have peculiar difficulties in responding
to their family claims, and are practically dependent upon their
employers for opportunities of even seeing their relatives and friends.
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