The Woman"s Munic.i.p.al League of New York, the Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, the Housekeepers" Alliance, and the Civic Club of Philadelphia were the moving elements in the investigation. Co-operating with them were the College Settlements a.s.sociation and the a.s.sociation of Collegiate Alumnae, which together established a scholar ship for the research. This research was most ably conducted by Miss Frances Kellor, a Va.s.sar graduate, and nine a.s.sistant workers, all of whom were college women. The report of the investigation was published a year later in the volume "Out of Work."[1]
This investigation by organizations of educated and expert women was the first survey ever made of domestic service _as an industry_, the first scientific study of domestic workers _as an industrial group_. It was the first intelligent attempt to review housework as if it were a trade.
The most important conclusion of the investigators was that housework, domestic service, although carried on as a trade, is really no trade at all. The domestic worker is no more a part of modern industry than the Italian woman who finishes "pants" in a tenement, or the child who stays from school to fasten hooks and eyes on paper cards.
Do not let us make a mistake concerning the underlying cause of the servant problem. Let us face the truth that we have two inst.i.tutions which are back numbers in twentieth century civilization: two left-overs from a past-and-gone domestic system of industry. One of these is the tenement sweat shop, where women combine, or try to combine, manufacturing and housekeeping. The other is the private kitchen--the home--where the last stand of conservatism and tradition, the last lingering remnant of hand labor, continues to exist.
No woman who is free enough, strong enough, intelligent enough to seek work in a factory or shop, is ever found in a sweat shop or seen carrying bundles of coats to finish at home.
Exactly for the same reason the average American working woman shuns housework as a means of livelihood. You will find in every community a few women of intelligence who are naturally so domestic in their tastes and inclinations that they shrink from any work outside the home. Such women do adhere to domestic service, but, broadly speaking, you behold in the servant group merely the siftings of the real industrial cla.s.s.
In a tentative, halting sort of fashion we are learning to humanize the factory and shop. Factory workers, mill hands, department store clerks, have been granted legislation in almost every State of the Union, regulating hours of work, sanitary conditions, ventilation, and in some cases they have been given protection from dangerous machinery. In department stores they have been granted even certain special comforts, such as seats on which to rest while not actually working.
Of course, we have done no more than make a beginning in this matter of humanizing the factory and the shop. But we have made a beginning, and the movement toward securing better and juster and healthier conditions for workers in all the industries is bound to continue. So long as manufacturing was carried on in the home, no such protective legislation as workers now enjoy was dreamed of. We had to wait until the workers came together in large groups before we could see their conditions and understand their needs.
Housework, because it is performed in isolation, because it is purely individual labor, has never been cla.s.sed among the industries. It has rather been looked upon as a normal feminine function, a form of healthy exercise. No one has ever suggested to legislators that sweeping and beating rugs might be included among the dusty trades; that bending over steaming washtubs, and almost immediately afterwards going out into frosty air to hang the clothes, might be harmful to throat and lungs; that remaining within doors days at a time, as houseworkers almost invariably do, reacts on nerves and the entire physical structure; that steady service, if not actual labor, from six in the morning until nine and ten at night makes excessive demands on mind and body.
Such conditions exist because the workers are too weak, too inefficient, too unintelligent to change them. Yet the demand for servants so far exceeds the supply that they are in a position, theoretically, to dictate the terms of their own employment. If they elected to demand pianos and private baths they could get them; that is, if instead of remaining isolated individuals they could form themselves into an industrial cla.s.s, like plumbers, or bricklayers, or carpenters. Even as isolated individuals they are able to command a better money wage than more efficient workers, which proves how great is the need for their services.
The housekeeper clings to her archaic kitchen, firmly believing that if she gave it up, tried to replace it by any form of co-operative living, the pillars of society would crumble and the home pa.s.s out of existence.
Yet so strong is her instinctive repugnance to the medieval system on which her household is conducted, that she shuns it, runs away from it whenever she can. Housekeeping as a business is a dark mystery to her.
The ma.s.s of women in the United States probably hold, almost as an article of religion, the theory that woman"s place is in the home. But the woman who can organize and manage a home as her husband manages his business, systematically, profitably, professionally--well, how many such women do you know?
It would seem as if in the newer generations, the average housekeeper is not in the professional cla.s.s at all. Usually she lacks professional training. If she was brought up in a well-to-do home where there were several servants, she knows literally nothing of cooking, or of any department of housekeeping. Even when she has had some instruction in household tasks, she almost never connects cooking with chemistry, food with dietetics, cleanliness with sanitation, buying with bookkeeping.
She is an amateur. And she takes into her household to do work she herself is incapable of doing, another amateur, a woman who might, in many cases, do well under a capable commander, but who is hopelessly at sea when expected to evolve a system of housekeeping all by herself.
This irregular state of affairs in what should be a carefully studied, well-organized industry is reflected in the conditions commonly meted out to domestics. Take housing conditions, for example. Some housekeepers provide their servants with good beds; of course, not quite as good as other members of the household enjoy, but good enough. Some set aside pleasant, warm, well-furnished rooms for the servants. But Miss Kellor"s investigators reported that it was common to find the only unheated room in a house or apartment set aside for the servant. They found great numbers of servants" rooms in bas.e.m.e.nts, having no sunlight or heat.
At one home, where an investigator applied for a "place," the housekeeper complained that her last maid was untidy. Then she showed the applicant to the servant"s room. This was a little den part.i.tioned off from the coal bin!
In another place, the maid was required to sleep on an ironing board placed over the bathtub. In still another, the maid spent her night of rest on a mattress laid over the wash tubs in a bas.e.m.e.nt. A bed for two servants, consisting of a thin mattress on the dining-room table, was also found.
Unventilated closets, rooms opening off from the kitchen, small and windowless, are very commonly provided in city flats. Even in s.p.a.cious country homes the servants" rooms are considered matters of little importance.
"One woman," writes Miss Kellor, "planned her new three-story house with the attic windows so high that no one could see out of them. When the architect remonstrated she said: "Oh, those are for the maids; I don"t expect them to spend their time looking out.""
I remember a young girl who waited on table at a woman"s hotel where I made my home. One morning I sent this girl for more cream for my coffee.
She was gone some time and I spoke to her a little impatiently when she returned. She was silent for a moment, then she said: "Do you know that every time you send me to the pantry it means a walk of three and a half blocks? This dining-room and the kitchens and pantries are a block apart, and are separated by three flights of stairs. I have counted the distance there and back, and it is more than three blocks."
"But, Kittie," I said to her, "why do you work in a hotel, if it"s like that? Why don"t you take a place in a private family?"
"I"ve tried that," said the girl. "I had a place with the ----family,"
mentioning an historic name. "They had sickness in the family, and they stopped in town all summer. My room was up in the attic, with only a skylight for ventilation. During the day, except for the time I spent sitting on the area steps after nine o"clock, I was waiting on the cook in a hot kitchen. They let me out of the house once every two weeks.
Here I have some freedom, at least."
I have told this story to dozens of domestics, many of them from homes of wealth, and they agree that it is a common case. It is very rare, these girls say, to find a mistress who is willing to allow her maids to leave the house except on their days out. They concede certain hours of rest, it is true, but those hours must be spent within doors. "Why, if you went out I should be sure to need you," is the usual explanation.
Imagine a factory girl or a stenographer being required to remain after hours on the chance of being needed for extra work.
There is an aspect to this phase of the servant question which is generally overlooked by employers. This is an isolation from human intercourse to be found in no other industry. When the household employs only one servant the isolation is absolute. The girl is marooned, within full sight of others" happy life. Even when kindness is her portion she is an outsider from the family circle. Important as her function is in the life of the household, she is socially the lowest unit in it.
During the course of a great strike of mill operatives in Fall River, Ma.s.sachusetts, a few years ago, a considerable group of weaver and spinner girls were induced, by members of the Women"s Trade Union League, to take up domestic service until the close of the strike. As the girls were in acute financial distress they agreed to try the experiment. These were mostly American or English girls, some of them above the average of intelligence and good sense.
Housework with its great variety of tasks made severe draughts on the strength of girls accustomed to using one set of muscles. The long hours and the confinement of domestic service affected nerves adjusted to a legal fifty-eight-hour week.
But the girls" real objection to housework was its loneliness. Hardly a single house in Boston, or the surrounding suburbs, where the girls found places, was provided with a servants" sitting room. There was absolutely no provision made for callers. For a servant is supposed not to have friends except on her days out. On those occasions she is a.s.sumed to meet her friends on the street.
In England people recognize the fact that they have a servant cla.s.s.
Every house of any pretentions provides a servants" hall.
In the United States a sitting room for servants, even in millionaires"
homes, is a rarity.
More than this, in many city households, especially in apartment households, the servants are prohibited from receiving their friends even in the kitchen. "Are we allowed to receive men visitors in the house?" chorused a group of girls, questioned in a fashionable employment agency. "Mostly our friends are not allowed to step inside the areaway while we are putting on our hats to go out."
There is no escaping the conclusion that a large part of the social evil, or that branch of it recruited every year from domestic service, is traceable to American methods of dealing with servants. The domestic, belonging, as a rule, to a weak and inefficient cla.s.s, is literally driven into paths where only strength and efficiency could possibly protect her from evil.
Servants share, in common with all other human beings, the necessity for human intercourse. They must have a.s.sociates, friends, companions. If they cannot meet them in their homes they must seek them outside.
Walk through the large parks in any city, late in the evening, and observe the couples who occupy obscurely placed benches. You pity them for their immodest behavior in a public place. But most of them have no other place to meet. And it is not difficult to comprehend that clandestine appointments in dark corners as a rule do not conduce to proper behavior. Most of the women you see on park benches are domestic servants. Some of them, it is safe to a.s.sume, work in New York"s Fifth Avenue, or in mansions on Chicago"s Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive.
[Ill.u.s.tration: AN UNTHOUGHT-OF PHASE OF THE SERVANT QUESTION]
The social opportunity of the domestic worker is limited to the park bench, the cheap theater, the summer excursion boat, and the dance hall.
Hardly ever does a settlement club admit a domestic to membership; rarely does a working girls" society or a Young Women"s Christian a.s.sociation circle bid her welcome. The Girls" Friendly a.s.sociation of the Protestant Episcopal Church is a notable exception to this rule.
In a large New England city, not long ago, a member of the Woman"s Club proposed to establish a club especially for domestics, since no other cla.s.s of women seemed willing to a.s.sociate with them. The proposal was voted down. "For," said the women, "if they had a clubroom they would be sure to invite men, and immorality might result."
But there is no direct connection between a clubroom and immorality, whereas the park bench after dark and the dance hall and its almost invariable accompaniment of strong drink are positive dangers.
The housekeeper simply does not realize that her domestics are _girls_, exactly like other girls. They need social intercourse, they need laughter and dancing and healthy pleasure just as other girls need them, as much as the young ladies of the household need them.
Perhaps they need them even more. The girl upstairs has mental resources which the girl downstairs lacks. The girl upstairs has the protection of family, friends, social position. The last is of greatest importance, because the woman without a social position has ever been regarded by a large cla.s.s of men as fair game. The domestic worker sometimes finds this out within the shelter, the supposed shelter, of her employer"s home.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ANOTHER SERIOUS CONTRIBUTION TO THE SOCIAL QUESTION]
Tolstoy"s terrible story "Resurrection" has for its central anecdote in the opening chapter a court-room scene in which a judge is called upon to sentence to prison a woman for whose downfall he had, years before, been responsible. A somewhat similar story in real life, with a happier ending, was told me by the head of a woman"s reformatory. This official received a visit from a lawyer, who told her with much emotion that he had, several days before, been present when a young girl was sentenced to a term in a reformatory.
"She lived in my home," said the man. "I believe that she was a good girl up to that time. My wife died, my home was given up, and of course I forgot that poor girl. She never made any claim on me. When I saw her there in court, among the dregs of humanity, her face showing what her life had become, I wanted to shoot myself. Now she is here, with a chance to get back her health and a right state of mind. Will you help me to make amends?"
The head of the reformatory rather doubted the man"s sincerity at first.
She feared that his repentance was superficial. She refused to allow him to see or to communicate with the girl, but she wrote him regularly of her progress. Several times in the course of the year the man visited the reformatory, and at the end of that period he was allowed to see the girl. This inst.i.tution happens to be one of the few where a rational and a humane system of outdoor work is in vogue. The girl, who a year back had been almost a physical wreck from drugs and the life of the streets, was again strong, healthy, and sane. The two forgave each other and were married.
If the position of the domestic, while living in the shelter of a family, is sometimes precarious, her situation, when out of a job, is often actually perilous.
If a girl has a home she goes to that home, and regards her temporary period of unemployment as a pleasant vacation. But in most cases, in cities, at any rate, few girls have homes of which they can avail themselves.
"In no city," says Miss Kellor"s report, "are adequate provisions made for such homeless women, and their predicament is peculiarly acute, for their friends are often household workers who cannot extend the hospitality of their rooms."