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Page 26
Curiously enough the same devotion to family life and quick response to
its claims, on the part of the employer, operates against the girl
employed in household labor, and still further contributes to her
isolation.
The employer of household labor, in her zeal to preserve her own family
life intact and free from intrusion, acts inconsistently and grants to
her cook, for instance, but once or twice a week, such opportunity for
untrammelled association with her relatives as the employer's family
claims constantly. This in itself is undemocratic, in that it makes a
distinction between the value of family life for one set of people as
over against another; or, rather, claims that one set of people are of
so much less importance than another, that a valuable side of life
pertaining to them should be sacrificed for the other.
This cannot be defended theoretically, and no doubt much of the talk
among the employers of household labor, that their employees are
carefully shielded and cared for, and that it is so much better for a
girl's health and morals to work in a household than to work in a
factory, comes from a certain uneasiness of conscience, and from a
desire to make up by individual scruple what would be done much more
freely and naturally by public opinion if it had an untrammelled chance
to assert itself. One person, or a number of isolated persons, however
conscientious, cannot perform this office of public opinion. Certain
hospitals in London have contributed statistics showing that
seventy-eight per cent of illegitimate children born there are the
children of girls working in households. These girls are certainly not
less virtuous than factory girls, for they come from the same families
and have had the same training, but the girls who remain at home and
work in factories meet their lovers naturally and easily, their fathers
and brothers know the men, and unconsciously exercise a certain
supervision and a certain direction in their choice of companionship.
The household employees living in another part of the city, away from
their natural family and social ties, depend upon chance for the lovers
whom they meet. The lover may be the young man who delivers for the
butcher or grocer, or the solitary friend, who follows the girl from her
own part of town and pursues unfairly the advantage which her social
loneliness and isolation afford him. There is no available public
opinion nor any standard of convention which the girl can apply to her
own situation.
It would be easy to point out many inconveniences arising from the fact
that the old economic forms are retained when moral conditions which
befitted them have entirely disappeared, but until employers of domestic
labor become conscious of their narrow code of ethics, and make a
distinct effort to break through the status of mistress and servant,
because it shocks their moral sense, there is no chance of even
beginning a reform.
A fuller social and domestic life among household employees would be
steps toward securing their entrance into the larger industrial
organizations by which the needs of a community are most successfully
administered. Many a girl who complains of loneliness, and who
relinquishes her situation with that as her sole excuse, feebly tries to
formulate her sense of restraint and social mal-adjustment. She
sometimes says that she "feels so unnatural all the time." The writer
has known the voice of a girl to change so much during three weeks of
"service" that she could not recognize it when the girl returned to her
home. It alternated between the high falsetto in which a shy child
"speaks a piece" and the husky gulp with which the _globus hystericus_
is swallowed. The alertness and _bonhomie_ of the voice of the
tenement-house child had totally disappeared. When such a girl leaves
her employer, her reasons are often incoherent and totally
incomprehensible to that good lady, who naturally concludes that she
wishes to get away from the work and back to her dances and giddy life,
content, if she has these, to stand many hours in an insanitary factory.
The charge of the employer is only half a truth. These dances may be the
only organized form of social life which the disheartened employee is
able to mention, but the girl herself, in her discontent and her moving
from place to place, is blindly striving to respond to a larger social
life. Her employer thinks that she should be able to consider only the
interests and conveniences of her employer's family, because the
employer herself is holding to a family outlook, and refuses to allow
her mind to take in the larger aspects of the situation.
Although this household industry survives in the midst of the factory
system, it must, of course, constantly compete with it. Women with
little children, or those with invalids depending upon them, cannot
enter either occupation, and they are practically confined to the sewing
trades; but to all other untrained women seeking employment a choice is
open between these two forms of labor.
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