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Domestic service

Chapter 3: PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
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About This Book

A systematic study of household employment based on questionnaires from employers and employees, presenting statistical tables and summaries of wages, tenure, hours, and working conditions. It examines geographic and demographic patterns and institutional supports such as exchanges and training in household skills. Employer and employee viewpoints are compared to reveal sources of dissatisfaction and turnover. The author evaluates pay relative to other occupations, surveys European practices, and offers practical recommendations and social reforms aimed at improving the organization, training, and standing of domestic labor.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

It has seemed advisable in sending out a second edition of this work to add a supplementary chapter on the condition of domestic service in Europe. This is based largely on the inquiries made in season and out of season at different times during the past ten years of heads of households and of housekeepers in England, France, Germany, and Italy. It has naturally been impossible to sum up in a single chapter the mass of information thus gleaned, but a few features common to all of these countries have been indicated, as well as some peculiar to each. The literature bearing directly on the subject is very meagre, but a few titles have been indicated.

For information bearing on this part of the work, I am under special obligation to M. Levasseur of Paris, to Miss Collet of the Labor Department of the Board of Trade, London, to Miss E. M. Hall of Rome, to Professor Victor Böhmert, recently of the Royal Statistical Bureau, Dresden, and to Mrs. J. H. W. Stuckenberg of Cambridge, recently of Berlin.

January, 1901.