Both Sides of the Servant Question
I
No matter how many girls spurn housework, homes will still exist. No matter how many women slink discouraged into hotels and boardinghouses, the best of families will always live in separate homes. No matter how many men remain unmarried, the majority will always have wives and children. Even the millennium itself will not be without the family. Hotels and boarding-houses, even, are merely megatherianized homes; and no matter how much sensible coöperation in washing and sewing, cooking and the care of children and sick folk, may be compassed, even those millenniares will still have beds to be made, floors to be swept, doors to be tended, clothes to be sorted, buttons to be sewn on, papers to be burned, dishes to be washed, errands to be run, and windows to be locked. Folks may live without concerts and trolley-cars and books, but they cannot live without sleeping, dressing, and eating, sickness, visitors, and children; nor can they live without that perpetual disorder which has to be perpetually cleared up, and that perpetual disintegration of the material universe which has to be perpetually swept up. Domestic work there will always be. The family itself may do it, or they may pay some one else to do it, or they may do part and pay some one else to do part; but done it must be.
For a family ranging from two to not more than six, living in a house which occupies not more than one thousand square feet of ground space, all the household work may be done after a fashion by one woman who is in reasonable health. It often is so done. From half-past five in the morning till half-past nine or ten or eleven at night, she is cooking something, or washing something or somebody; she is clearing or cleaning up, or sewing, and in the odd moments she is tending children or invalids, or the door or the table. She is never free to leave the house, even if she gets time to read a newspaper. A woman will do all this for her own, if she must, and many women do it well; here and there an exceptionally gifted woman, exceptionally placed, prefers to do it all herself and does it well; but few women will prefer to do it and certainly no one would be hired to do it. On the other hand, two together can do this same work for a family of even ten or twelve and yet have time for rest and recreation. The simple fact is that the work is not hard, but incessant. This secular character makes two workers necessary, if there is to be any rest but sleep. If only one worker is forthcoming from the household, then the other must be hired. If the family circumstances make no helper possible, then the size of the house must be the very least possible, and food and clothing must be reduced to the utmost simplicity.
If, beyond this, the mistress of the house wants time for rest and time for other exacting occupations, then she must secure another helper to take some or all of her share of the household work. Also, if she wishes to have either cooking or cleaning done extra well or elaborately, she must get still another helper, or two others. If she chooses to have more than four living rooms, if she wants a separate sleeping-room for each member of the family, and guest-rooms in addition, or if she chooses to have her rooms average more than fourteen feet square, then also she must secure more than two servants to keep these rooms in order. It is all a matter to be decided by arithmetic. From 24 hours subtract 8 for sleep, 2 for meals, and 14 for work; how much is left for pleasure? If it takes three quarters of an hour to sweep and dust one room 14x15, how long will it take to do four such rooms, and how long to do eight rooms which are twice as large? The resultant fact which emerges conspicuously from all such arithmetic is that almost every home is the better for having two to keep it, or else it keeps some one and must sometimes keep itself.
More than this. The unchangeable thing about housework is, that it lasts from the waking-hour of the family until all the family has gone to sleep, and even continues during the night if someone is sick or a thunderstorm comes up. The business of the housemistress is to care for the house and the family. This care can have no cessation. She may delegate its various activities, but her responsibility lasts from midnight to midnight, — the most intimate, the most necessary, of all services. In any other branch of continuous service, such as telephoning, two operators would be provided, but there is no possibility of providing two mothers. The best that can be done is to provide one aide or more.
In the purely natural household the mother’s aides are her boys and girls, who, as fast as they grow old enough, share this service for the common good. In very simple conditions she does not need more responsible assistance because she has no interests or duties outside her home. In a complex community, however, a mother, no matter how simple her interests, has many things to take her away from home, even if nothing more than shopping. Then she must have a responsible person to leave in charge.
Because of its incessant needs, then, almost every family of more than two members is the better for having one ‘ servant,’ — some responsible person, that is, — to help in the family service, to serve the mistress of the house, and share her activity. (Not because that service is disagreeable to her or difficult in any part, but because there is too much for one person.) This servant may be a half-grown daughter or a young grandmother, a maiden sister or a homeless friend, or a handy boy, or a husband, or even an accommodating neighbor. Or it may be a paid person without any previous interest in the family.
II
On taking a paid helper into the household, we step outside purely natural conditions. What was a labor of love and mutual service is now done for pay, and yet it remains within the domestic atmosphere. An employee has been engaged at a definite wage to work under direction, according to the needs of the employer, as she would do in a factory. She is to render mostly personal service, as she would do in a store or a telephone central. But this personal service is private service, like that of a clerk in an office. Yet unlike factory-hand, saleswoman, telephone girl, or stenographer, she is rendering a service which brings in no money gain to her employer. Hers is not a commercial service. She is helping her employer, not to get a living, but to live. She aids, not production, but consumption, for the home is that famous tiling, the ultimate consumer. This brings her work into the same class with that of the doctor, the clergyman, the teacher, and the nurse, and like them she can have no fixed hours of work agreed upon beforehand and held to rigidly. Like a trained nurse or a governess, she is not paid wholly in cash. Her wage is paid partly in board and lodging, so that in one aspect she is a boarder and presents thus a double problem. On the other hand, she is unlike the sick nurse in that the need of her is continuous, not fitful; and unlike a governess, in that she is doing what is a family necessity, not a family preference. Her service is an integral part of the daily family life. Domestic service is consequently unlike any other service.
Of course, all useful occupation is of two sorts, personal and commercial, — the sort which gives direct assistance to the life of others, like housing, feeding, tending, and teaching; and the sort which gives indirect assistance to that same personal life, — manufacturing, transportation, and sale. The one sort consumes money; the other makes it. Homes are not money-making establishments. They are moneyusers. Their work is personal: it is lifemaking, not money-making. If life is not worth living, money is not worth making: and as a man’s home is, so is his life. The nearer you get to a good home, the closer you are to the fountain of life. For this reason, good domestic service is more necessary to life and happiness than is good commercial service. Whether you are paid for keeping house or do it for love, does not matter. The service is equally valuable and indispensable.
Domestic service is not only indispensable, it is personally exacting. It requires a higher grade of personal character than any corresponding grade of work. All forms of personal service require this same quality of character, although such different kinds of skill and knowledge. Engineer, architect, lawyer, minister, teacher, nurse (sick or child’s), governess, coachman, cook, maid, housekeeper, housewife or homemaker, father and mother, all need the same qualities of fidelity, patience, kindness, devotion, honesty, and good manners. To be a good father is more creditable than to be a good business man, for it takes, not more talent but more intelligence and more kinds of virtue. To be a satisfactory domestic cook requires in the same way more all-round personal excellence and more varied good sense than to be a skilled milliner. A thoroughly valuable child’s nurse must have much more admirable personal qualities than a saleswoman needs.
Of course, these excellent moral qualities are not unwelcome in any occupation, but some can get along without them while to others they are essential. For instance, a marvelously perfect glass-cutter may be a liar, a drunkard, and a thief, but no one could be any of these three and be a valuable school-teacher, or doctor, or engineer, or coachman. So with all reputable domestic service. It does not demand remarkable talent in any one direction, but it must have a high grade of character and of general intelligence. To establish the full success of a home, every one who lives beneath its roof must share in general the same moral standards and the same notions of refinement.
These occupations of personal service requiring, first and foremost, good character, are also those which place the largest burden of t rust. People who enter them need a clear sense of honor, and such occupations enlist a special degree of personal devotion and loyalty. Who else gets and gives such devotion and loyally as the good family doctor and the beloved family nurse? So in the old feudal days, domestic service was held to be highly honorable, and so it is in these days wherever servant and served are equal to the opportunity. This is not a conspicuous or showy service. It is done in secret, almost, but it is one which wins rich rewards in appreciation and lifelong grateful mutual affection from those who have known and enjoyed its excellence.
The workers cannot be watched, and the limit of authority cannot be defined; no definition of mutual service and obligation, can be made; no fixed contract can be drawn up. For the home is a place where things cannot be regulated by rule and schedule. It is a place of adjustment, like the joint in a suspension bridge. Weather, health, railroad schedules, business appointments, and social engagements, must be taken as fixed; the home must vary to meet them, and must be always ready to dry wet shoes, run for the doctor, have dinner late or no dinner at all, and to provide extra dishes or fresh beds, without a murmur. In short, the house is maintained for the advantage of the family.
III
How bewilderingly true this is may be appreciated by considering even briefly, from either the legal or the personal point of view, the mutual relations of mistress and maid as to work, hours, pay, health, or pleasure; and by then remembering that every mistress and every maid has to consider all those parts of the service from both points of view, all the time. No wonder bewilderment arises. If we do not follow the right method by instinct and custom, but depend upon thought, we are lost.
Besides obeying the general spirit of the common law in all the intimacy of household intercourse, mistress and maid have four special legal relations:
1. Employer and Employee. — This relation is a matter of contract. Both sides must live up to the agreement which they make in the beginning. The mistress must not ask that anything shall be done by the maid, of a wholly different sort from the work agreed upon. The maid must not refuse to do any work of the kind originally agreed upon. Of course, originally, the mistress has a perfect right to propose any kind of work so long as it is not criminal. It is for the girl to decide whether she cares to accept the proposal.
A reasonable cause for complaint on either side is something of which complaint has already been made and in which no improvement followed, or else something so objectionable that no one needs to be told that it is unendurable. But to allow a thing to go on for some time and then suddenly to complain and break the contract is not reasonable. Therefore all complaints, great or small, should be made promptly. This is a legal duty of both sides.
2. Principal and Agent.—An agent is one who acts in another’s place during the absence of that other. The position is therefore one of trust, and requires good judgment. An agent must behave as nearly as possible in the way in which the principal would behave under the circumstances, and must consider always the advantage of the principal. How much independent power of decision belongs to the agent, depends upon the directions which he receives.
Many times a day every domestic servant acts as an agent. It is a position which demands a strong sense of honor. She should be faithful to her mistress’s interests, saving money for her, caring for her property, and behaving courteously as her representative.
3. Bailor and Bailee.—A bailor is one who gives some article which he owns into the possession of another, in order that that other may do some work upon it.
The bailee is required to use all proper care in handling the goods intrusted to him and to return them promptly as soon as he has done the job agreed upon, while the bailor is expected not to blame the bailee for natural wear and tear or unavoidable accidents. All day long every servant is a bailee, doing some work upon articles owned by another.
4. Host and Boarder. — The host must see that the rooms provided are cleanly and sanitary. The food must be in sound condition and of as good quality as the board paid will warrant. The host has no claim to know anything of the boarder’s private affairs.
The boarder must behave in a courteous and quiet manner while in the house, doing nothing to make the house unattractive to the other occupants, and following the customs of the house in all essentials. The boarder has no claim upon the social or domestic life of the host.
There are two other important relations which, to be sure, mistress and maid do not hold legally toward one another, but, living under the same roof, and sharing so many of the same interests, they appear to hold these relations, and suggestions as to wise and acceptable behavior can be got by considering how things would be if these apparent relations were legal. These relations are :—
1. Guardian and Ward. — A guardian must see to it that the minors under her care do not do anything to imperil their future well-being and usefulness; she must see that they are properly occupied during the hours of pleasure; and that they have sufficient work to keep them busy and useful. She must treat them without due harshness, but must make them obedient. A good guardian also will win the ward’s confidence and take the place of a parent as much as possible.
A ward must be obedient and industrious, truthful and respectful to the guardian. A well-conditioned ward will also wish to enlist the guardian’s friendly interest, and to get the benefit of such judicious advice as a larger experience of life and greater opportunities can usually supply.
It is fortunate when mistress and maid are both such that a relation of guardian and ward is informally established between them. But a mistress must be very careful how she assumes a guardian’s rights, since legally they are not hers.
2. Confidential Adviser and Confidential Agent.— The confidential advisor (such as a doctor or a lawyer) must give honest, disinterested advice, and must not betray the confidence reposed in him by repeating what has been told him.
The confidential agent (such as a private secretary) must not repeat the secrets which are learned in the course of her work, and must not use the knowledge which she gains in any way to the disadvantage of her employer or of any one else.
Although the law does not recognize these confidential relations as involved in domestic service, as a matter of fact they always are, and a girl should scrupulously refrain from repeating outside what she hears in the home, if she knows that the repetition will work injustice.
So unavoidably complex are the legal and semi-legal relations between mistress and maid! In fulfilling them successfully special personal relations have to be established and maintained. These vary with every case according to the size and elaborateness of family and home, the skill and temperament of mistress and maid. They involve all questions of work, hours, pay, health, and pleasure on both sides. For instance : —
OBVERSE
It is right that
1. The character of the work should be definitely understood in the beginning on both sides.
2. The work should be carefully arranged according to hours and days; but the mistress should be willing to alter it on occasion to suit the preference or health or pleasure of the maid, provided that this alteration does not seriously interfere with the well-being of the family.
3. When the usual number of servants is lessened for a considerable time, those upon whom the additional work comes should receive extra pay according to the amount of extra work that they do.
4. Extra services not in the line of work agreed upon should not be expected, nor heavier work than was specified in the beginning.
5. A mistress who is not pinched for money should not on that account allow waste and carelessness among her servants. It is very bad for anyone, and very bad for the community, to acquire a disrespect for values.
6. A mistress should be careful about suddenly removing privileges to which girls have grown accustomed. She must always keep clear which are privileges, even very common ones.
REVERSE
It is right that
1. A girl should do willingly any work of the sort for which she was engaged which will be of benefit to the family, whether or not it was specifically mentioned in the beginning. The only reason for refusing to do such work should be either that it is too heavy for her strength, or that it constantly overruns her hours of recreation.
2. A girl should be interested to alter her usual routine to suit unusual circumstances in the family. Especially in regard to guests, she should remember that one of the blessings of a home is that friends may come there freely.
3. A girl should be ready to do work other than her own for a day or two without being annoyed or asking for more pay. She should never be willing to take pay from guests, as if she were a bootblack.
4. A girl should not shirk her work. She should work as hard and as well as she can without injury to her health. Otherwise she is docking the amount of work for which she is paid, and her employer would be justified in docking the amount of pay in proportion.
5. A girl should keep things in good condition, in order to preserve the property. She tacitly agrees when she takes the place to practice economy and care in her mistress’s interest. She uses things in trust for her.
6. Because she gets a certain privilege frequently she must not fall into the habit of thinking that it is a right.
7. There should be about, nine hours of work a day; that is, approximately sixty-three hours a week; or, better yet, one hundred and twenty-six hours in a fortnight.
8. The work each day should begin not more than fifteen hours from the time when it is to end; thus giving time for eight hours sleep and half an hour apiece for dressing and undressing.
9. The distribution of work-hours through the day should be as nearly as possible the same every day.
10. The pay offered for domestic work should correspond approximately to that which the girl could probably get in some commercial occupation, (minus the current price of board and lodging). She should not be paid more than the worth of the grade of work which she actually does.
11. The board and lodging which she gets at her place of service should be reckoned as part of her pay, at the rate which she herself would have to pay, if she were working by the day, and not living at home.
7. A girl should recognize the uncertain character of the work, and be cheerfully willing to work over-time some days, in an emergency, remembering that she often works under-time on other days.
8. A girl should begin her day as early as is best for the good of the family, and end at the time that is best for them. She must get her necessary respite during the afternoon or at some other time when the family does not need her.
9. A girl should use good sense, and not expect any family life to go on with the regularity of a factory.
10. A girl should not expect much higher pay than she knows she can get in some productive occupation.
11. A girl should not expect the food which she receives to be better than what she would be able to pay for if she were working by the day, nor should she take food between meals any more than she would if she were at a real boarding-house. Nor should she eat at meals more or differently than she would be allowed to at a boarding-house. If the food which she receives is of better quality than she would otherwise get, she should count that as just so much added to her wages in pleasure and health, and subtracted from her doctor’s bill, sick-leave, and so forth.
So one may go on through all the minutiæ of work, hours, pay, health, and pleasure, balancing items on both sides. But the showing is already
sufficient to illuminate the causes of the discontent and grumbling that are so frequently heard on both sides of the domestic service question.
IV
The fact is that, both mistress and maid occupy a sphere where honor and trust and disinterested hard work must be present, or discontent will abound. But honor and trust do not rule in most people, and overcoming difficulties is not now in fashion. This is the season of our discontent. Our shield of discussion is not golden on one side and silver on the other, but dull lead here and rusty iron there; on both sides dissatisfaction.
Mistresses say :
Housekeeping is wearisome and disheartening. There are many maids ready to draw good pay, and few ready to do good work. Many do not know how to work well, and most do not want to work well. They all want to get much and give little.
Maids say:
Housework is tiresome and discouraging. There are lots of mistresses ready to ask for good work, and very few ready to give good conditions. Lots of them do not know how to manage well, and most of them do not want to deal fairly. They all want to get much and give little.
We are used to pitying the mistresses — if we are mistresses ourselves; but if we are maids, we consider sadly the plight of the maids. Getting a new mistress is a very uncertain venture.
First, there is the mistress who has been bred from childhood in a home where there was plenty of service, but who is entirely without, any experience of the work itself and employs her servants to rid herself of what she considers mere undesirable activities. Such a mistress is frequently unreasonable and unsympathetic.
Second, there are the houses where the mistress is unaccustomed to the control and direction of others: she was not brought up in a household where servants were employed, and she, too, employs them in order that she herself may be rid of the household work which she dislikes. These housewives who are just waking to the possibility of assistance also frequently make very poor mistresses, for their attitude is likewise apt to be selfish. They are unaccustomed to being in authority, and are too often either timid or exacting.
The increasing probability of coming under the control of such mistresses is helping to keep many of the most desirable girls out of domestic service. On the other hand, the increased number of good incomes, and the decreased willingness to work long hours, has added enormously to the number of families employing servants, and to the number of servants employed in each family. Thus, circumstance is working at both ends, increasing the demand and decreasing the supply, at one blow.
In a third sort of house, however, the mistress, whether or not she has been accustomed from childhood to see servants about, understands the work herself, and is capable of doing any part of it as well as need be. She employs servants in order that she may have free time for other occupations which she cannot delegate, but which she considers of great importance to the best development and usefulness of her husband and her children. It is these women who can help gradually to make domestic service more desired; but perhaps they are relatively few, and certainly the tug of the times is against them. Modern women have not a mind to it, because modern girls are not bred to a knowledge of it.
In fact, as we are all weary of remarking, the growing prosperity, independence, and democracy of the last thirty years, have, along with their many blessings, brought disquiet. They have cast a definite slur in our minds upon obedience, hard work, drudgery, stability, domestic life, and personal service. Easy independence has become a stock idea with us. The gospel of sorrow and suffering, labor and difficulty, has fallen into disfavor. It is replaced by the gospel of pleasantness. Working, even to grow rich, is unpopular. ‘The Almighty Dollar!’ said an observant German, full twenty years ago. ‘No! the Americans no longer worship the Almighty Dollar. They worship the God of Good Times.’ If any one doubts the hold which this exaggerated stock idea has upon even the least lazy of us, let him count the number of times during the coming week that he himself accepts an inferior grade of work from himself or from another, because he does not like to make things disagreeable; or decides not to ask a simple favor of a friend for fear of giving trouble. We are the first generation which has said of a woman in our employ, ‘Yes, she is idle, slovenly, and dishonorable, she does not give me a fair return for my money. But I don’t blame her : the work is disagreeable. I should not like to do it myself.’
Besides this easy temper of the times, another stock idea disturbs the peace of our households. This is the notion of doing something a little beyond one’s capacity. We call it ambition. Ninety-nine men you meet are ambitious, to one who is thorough. The born clerk wants to be a lawyer, and the born lawyer wants to be a railroad president. But one of these days innumerable persons of good mental training will have to go into occupations which they now think not worth considering. Then they will discover that, in a democracy, all occupations are equally honorable. In a true democracy everybody works, each one at whatever he can do best, and he takes pride in it. Not every one can do the unusual things, or they would not be unusual. Every five persons need a sixth to help in the household, but only every five hundred need a doctor. And a doctor cannot support himself on less than five hundred patients: no one of them needs him often enough. It is the same with trained nurses. So some day more of the right sort of girls who are welcome in domestic service will take it up. The right kind of girls are those who want to work steadily and well, at work suited to their strength and ability, for eight or nine hours a day. And since to do housework satisfactorily demands refinement and good sense, they are also girls who have nice feelings and a fair education.
Already, to-day, many steady, refined, sensible girls appreciate the advantage of working in other people’s homes, but they make four definite objections to the occupation as it is now arranged. These are: (1) The difficulty of securing a pleasant, quiet place in which to enjoy leisure and to receive their callers; that is, its discomforts. (2) The difficulty of finding out beforehand how the mistress of any particular house is going to treat you; that is, its uncertainty. (3) The difficulty of being sure of pleasant fellow-workers; that is, its intimacy. (4) A dislike of helping without sharing in a private home life; that is, its aloofness. Of course, also, the social ‘stigma ’ is urged as the chief reason why it is hard to secure good help in the household. This is the reason which many girls believe they have for not entering domestic service. But a general sentiment of this kind follows the conditions which create it. A feeling is always a consequence before it is a cause. If the conditions were altered, the sentiment would disappear. In the eighteenth century there was a social stigma on artists; the social stigma on doctors has scarcely yet disappeared in England; and that on retail trade has been heard of in this country. Some say there is still a social stigma on dentists, while others look upon dentists as high in the social scale. These are matters of sentiment. We cannot work to efface sentiment, but only to efface what causes the sentiment.
This sentiment, among those who feel it, is clearly caused by the combined pressure of the four conditions that I have enumerated. But we may each of us work to efface from our own household gradually, so far as possible, its discomfort and its uncertainty. Its intimacy with the other workers must always continue, but just so far as girls learn how to be agreeable without being familiar, its unpleasantness will abate.
Its aloofness from the family must always continue, too, in most households, but this can be turned to advantage by the girl. In talking of the advantages of domestic service for young girls, it is very usually said to secure them a good home. This is palpably not so. In the first place, many of the households in which they can find service are not in themselves good homes; and, in the second place, however good the home may be, the girl never wholly shares it. The actual situation is that by going into domestic service a girl gets a more or less good and homelike boarding-place, possibly more comfortable than what she could probably provide for herself if she were working at any other occupation, and probably more elaborate than the home from which she comes. No matter how homelike it may be, it is not her own home, it is some one else’s home. If the family lives well into the country in a simple way, with almost no interests outside the domestic happenings, then the girl feels, and is, very much like one of the family. But the more outside interests the family has, and the more they use their home for entertaining their acquaintances, the less can she be a part of their life. It is too complicated to admit of receiving any outsider on a family footing; the housekeeper, the governess, or the trained nurse, feels this quite as keenly as the maid. If those employed in the home were part of the family it would defeat the very purpose for which they are employed. They are employed in order to free the family for outside interests. The aloofness may be small disadvantage if a girl knows how to use her unoccupied time, and has a just amount of it.
In fact, on both sides, we may make domestic service acceptable if we have a mind to. The long and the short of it is that minds must be changed as well as methods. Since domestic service is merely the delegating of her own duties to a trustworthy aide, the house-mother must look upon it with interest and respect; and the houseworker, since it is merely the prophecy of her own duties to come, must look upon it with respect and interest. And since it is the centre of human life and the source of all human happiness, both must look upon it as indispensable, inevitable, honorable, and desirable. Wherever both mistress and maid realize this, harmony exists; and the spread of this understanding will separate the desirable from the undesirable on both sides, drawing the desirable together in mutual satisfaction (of our mitigated human sort), and leaving the undesirable to wrestle with each other and come to their proper end, like the Kilkenny cats. A consummation much to be desired on both sides!
Much remains to be said as to method, but she, on either side, — mistress or maid, — who believes and lives up to what is here set down, is not, even now, dwelling in the Cave of Adullam — which is so big and crowded. She has a little private cave of her own, where the prospect is pleasant and the air is not ‘polluted by corruption and groans.’