The understanding of domestic service has been seen to involve the consideration of many historical changes both industrial and political, and an examination of the general economic laws to which it is amenable. It involves also a study of the economic conditions that surround the average family, and the problems that confront it when undertaking to deal with the question of domestic service.

The average family reached through the schedules was found to consist of about five persons,[217] exclusive of servants. Its members have kept house eighteen years,[218] they have boarded two years and a half,[219] and at some time during their housekeeping experience they have been without servants. They employ at the present time two servants and a half, or rather, they command the full time of two persons and half the time of the third, to whom they pay weekly for service rendered, on the basis indicated in the schedule of average wages, $10,[220] exclusive of board and lodging, or $500 annually, the expense of service exclusive also of waste, breakage, and general wear and tear of household furniture and appliances. In about one third of all the families with servants men are employed in some capacity about the house; in one family in every seven the number of servants is the same as the number of persons in the family or exceeds it, while in the average family one servant renders service to every two persons.

When the average family undertakes the task of dealing with domestic servants the difficulties that confront it are many and serious.

It has first the task of assimilating into its domestic life those who are of a different nationality and who consequently hold different industrial, social, religious and political beliefs. More than one half of all domestic employees are of foreign birth or belong to another race,[221] who come not only from the prominent European countries but also from the remote corners of the globe,[222] where all conditions are totally unlike those of America. Moreover this number does not include the very large percentage of those who are themselves native born, but who are the children of foreign born parents and have inherited to a certain extent un-American characteristics; 4.02 per cent of the domestic employees in this country do not speak the English language.[223] Those who come to this country, often with preconceived and erroneous ideas as to the independence prevailing here, expecting high wages in return for inexperienced and unskilled labor,[224] must be trained in all the ways not only of American life, but of the family of the individual employer. It has been found difficult to assimilate into our political system the large foreign element coming here, though this system is simple and lends itself readily to such assimilation, as our history has thus far proved. It is far more difficult to assimilate this mass into the infinitely more complex and delicate organism—the modern household. It is not strange that congestion and inflammation so often result from the attempt. The question is one also that becomes more difficult as the proportion of foreign employees increases.

A second difficulty is that of the spirit of restlessness which everywhere prevails among working classes, though not confined to them, and the consequent brief tenure of service. The average length of service of a domestic servant is found to be less than a year and a half and this in many cases and in some localities is a high average. In the East, in the vicinity of the great lakes, on the Pacific coast, and in some sections of the South, proximity to popular summer or winter resorts lessens the average duration of service. In the South, the cotton-picking season draws many women from household work, as they are able at that time to earn enough money to enable them to live for some months in idleness. In other localities, the hop-picking season, the berry-picking season, and the grape-picking season all offer temporary inducements for girls to leave domestic service. In still other places the canning factory, the pickle factory, and the fruit-drying establishment successfully offer temporary competition. To the question asked of employees, “Have you ever had any other occupation besides domestic service?” twenty-eight per cent answered “Yes.” This at first might seem to indicate a decided preference for domestic service, but a closer examination shows that more often it means that housework is taken up when the berry-picking and the fruit-canning season is over, when the mill or the factory has closed in a dull time or when the hurry of plantation work is ended at the South. A similar indication of this restlessness is found in the replies given by employers to the question, “How many servants have you employed since you have been housekeeping?” Twenty-five per cent did not answer the question definitely and of these one half state as their reason the fact that the number was too great to remember. “Their name is legion,” answer fifteen housekeepers, a series of exclamation points tells the story for others, “infinity-minus,” writes one, and still another bids the compiler “read her answer in the stars.”

This condition of affairs is not to be wondered at. That spirit of restlessness, nervous discontent, and craving for excitement which foreigners find characteristic of all who breathe American air is not confined to business men and society women—it permeates the kitchen, the nursery, the laundry, and every part of the household. Among employers the mode of life tends more and more towards a winter in California, a summer in Europe, an autumn in the mountains, and a spring in Florida. On both sides of the Hudson there are magnificent country houses deserted because their owners prefer the excitement of city life, the attractions of Bar Harbor, or the society at Newport. The towns on the Hudson are nearly stationary as regards population, though possessing every natural advantage, while the large cities are powerful magnets drawing from every direction. Domestic service cannot remain unaffected by these characteristics of the age. A new situation is often like a voyage to Europe so desired by others—it gives change, excitement, new experiences, and it is often the only way in which these can be secured. A summer engagement at the sea-shore, among the mountains, or at the springs is often as eagerly sought as is the height of the season at Saratoga or among the Berkshires by persons whose opportunities for change are far less restricted. The occupations temporarily open at the time of the hop-picking season, or the fruit-canning season, offer the attraction of large numbers of fellow-workers in the company of whom “a good time” is expected.

The tenure of service also apparently varies somewhat with the size of the place, the average duration being longer in cities of from ten thousand to eighty thousand inhabitants than in smaller towns or larger cities. In small towns the desire for city life shortens the terms of service. In the largest cities, as New York, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, the average time is shortened by the fact that employers are often obliged to engage as a temporary expedient persons who have just arrived in this country; while it is also seen to be true that there is greater difficulty than in small cities in obtaining reliable testimonials.

It is not strange, therefore, that reasonable, intelligent, and competent employers have difficulties to meet that lie entirely without the domain of their own households, and that many persons who twenty-five years ago experienced no difficulty whatever find to-day serious trouble in retaining their employees.

A third difficulty is the fact that employers are so often obliged to engage for skilled labor the assistance of unskilled laborers. Many who seek employment as servants do not know even the names of the household tools they are obliged to use—still less are they acquainted with their uses. A part of this ignorance and lack of skill is due to the prevalence of the old idea that anybody can do everything—a theory abandoned in most occupations but still dominating the household. Household employments and service are still generally considered occupations that any one can “pick up,” but the picking-up process has resulted in the household, as elsewhere, in unscientific, haphazard work and has seldom produced expert workmen. The Superintendent of the Census wrote in 1880, “The organization of domestic service in the United States is so crude that no distinction whatever can be successfully maintained (between the different parts of the service).”[225] In confirmation of this statement is the testimony of a large number of employees to the effect that they have become domestic servants because they had not education enough to do anything else.[226] From this general conception of the nature of household service several things result: first, few opportunities exist for learning household duties in a systematic way; second, if the opportunities were created, few would avail themselves of them so long as this low estimate of the occupation prevails; third, many housekeepers are obliged to conduct in their own households a training-school on a limited scale; fourth, the expense is far greater than it should be, since unskilled labor is always improvident of time and materials;[227] fifth, the hygienic results of “instinctive cookery” and “picked up” knowledge are often seen in ill health and a derangement of household affairs erroneously attributed to other causes.

A fourth difficulty arises when the seemingly inevitable annual change of employees comes. Four courses are open to the housekeeper: (1) she may employ a new servant without asking for a recommendation, (2) she may take the recommendation of previous employers, (3) she may consult an employment bureau, (4) she may advertise.

Few persons are willing to adopt the first expedient and take a stranger into their service, not to speak of their family life, without some recommendation.[228]

But the second course open—taking the recommendation of others—is scarcely more practicable. There must always be a difference in standards, and “excellent” to one may mean “fair” or even “poor” to another. It is also true that an employee may succeed in one place and be ill adapted to meet the requirements of another. Again, it is a common complaint that the recommendation does not always carry with it implicit confidence in its contents. Daniel DeFoe wrote nearly two hundred years ago:

These words are as true a description of this phase of the subject in America to-day as they were in England at the beginning of the last century. It seems impossible to devise any system of personal recommendations that will convey the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

The third expedient—the employment bureau—is apparently coming into general use, especially in the large cities where some means of communication is necessary between those desiring employees and employment. But it is in the large city, where the greatest need for it exists, that the employment bureau is most unsatisfactory. The bureau lives by the fees paid to it by those desiring help and those seeking employment. Every expedient, therefore, is used to extort fees from both classes, and it is difficult to tell which suffers more from this extortion. Even when numberless fees have been paid, the employer too often finds himself without the service to which his fee presumably entitles him. The first department abandoned by a large philanthropic institution in Boston, was the intelligence office, “because it was found impossible to supply well-trained servants while there was no demand for any other.”[230] But the greatest objection to the intelligence office is that it is often a breeding place for vice and crime. An investigation recently made of the intelligence offices in a large city showed that it supported one hundred and twenty, two thirds of them controlled by foreigners, many of them managed by minor ward politicians, and four of them under police supervision. The employees that can be found through such agencies are not those willingly received into a respectable family.[231] Employment bureaus in small cities are apparently more satisfactory than those in large ones, while those offices are to be commended which use printed forms for obtaining statements from previous employers as to the qualifications of applicants.[232] Those agencies patronized by an inferior class of employers and employees, especially those that are at no pains to secure recommendation of employees from respectable persons, are worse than useless.

Employers who adopt the fourth policy and advertise for help are forced to open an intelligence office on a small scale in their own homes.

All of these difficulties are so great, especially that of securing reliable testimony from responsible employers, that many persons tolerate incompetent service rather than incur the risk of a change for the worse.

A fifth difficulty encountered by the employers of domestic service, and probably the most serious of all, is the prevailing indifference among housekeepers to the action of economic law—a failure to realize that in domestic service, as in other occupations, the course followed by one employer has an appreciable effect on the condition of service as a whole. This can be best explained by a few concrete illustrations “drawn from life.”

Mr. A, an employer, leaves his city home during the summer, retaining in it two servants to care for the house and paying them their usual wages, $16 a month. No special service is required of them, but wages are paid in consideration of the tacit understanding that they are to remain in his employ. On the return of Mr. A, Mr. X, who has discharged his servants during the summer, offers the employees of Mr. A $18 a month. This price he can afford to pay since he has been at no expense for service during the summer. Mr. A, rather than lose his trusted employees, pays them the advance offered by Mr. X, although the services of neither employee are worth more than three months previous.

Mrs. B, an employer of limited means, with a natural gift for cooking considered as a fine art, takes an inexperienced girl from Castle Garden and teaches her after long training something of her own skill. She pays fair wages, which are considered entirely satisfactory by the employee in view of the instruction she has received. Mrs. Y, who ignores Mrs. B socially and is indifferent to the matter of wages, calls on Mrs. B’s cook and offers her $5 per week. This is much above the current rate of wages in the place and moreover Mrs. B cannot afford to pay it. She therefore loses her trained cook.

Mr. C, an employer in haste to reach his distant home and anxious to secure a servant, engages in the afternoon a Swedish girl who has that morning landed in America and of whom he knows nothing. She is to accompany his family, which includes five children, to their Western home, have all of her expenses of travel paid by her employers, and receive $4.00 a week for her services as a nurse-maid.

Mrs. D, a housekeeper with a large family, moderate income, and ambitious tastes, employs one general servant and requires, in addition to the ordinary duties of such a servant, dining-room and chamber service.

Mrs. E, her nearest neighbor, a housekeeper with a small family, simple tastes, and free from numerous social demands, makes all of the desserts herself, requires no table service of her employee, and expects her daughter to assume the care of the chambers.

Mrs. F pays full wages to her inexperienced “help,” fifteen years old, because the latter has an invalid mother dependent on her.

Mr. G, with a family of two, prides himself on paying the highest wages in the place to his cook, second girl, and coachman.

Mrs. H, who has inherited a large family homestead, which she occupies with her sister, provides her three employees each with a separate bedroom, a special dining-room, a sitting-room well furnished, and grants many personal privileges, as the use of the horse and carriage for early church. She does not understand how any housekeeper can have trouble in securing and retaining competent employees. She often quotes to her nearest neighbor, “A good mistress makes a good servant,” her neighbor being obliged to use her back parlor with a mantel bed as a guest-room and therefore to limit somewhat the accommodations granted her employees.

Mrs. I gives each of her employees a key to the side door and makes no inquiries as to the hours they keep.

Mrs. J gives her servants her discarded evening dresses because “it keeps them in good humor.”

Mrs. K, the wife of a millionaire, “burns all of her old finery,” and makes it a special point to teach all of her twelve employees how to dress well and economically within the wages they receive.

Mrs. L does not permit her employee to wear frizzes or bangs, disapproves of her having company, and will not tolerate a young man caller under any circumstances.

Mrs. M, a lifelong invalid whose physician has prescribed absolute rest two hours every afternoon, reasons that her employee who rises two hours earlier than herself must need the same rest and therefore sends her every afternoon to take a nap. The latter thus never works afternoons and is able to attend more evening entertainments than other employees in the neighborhood.[233]

Mrs. N assists her husband in his business six hours each day and gives her employee full control of the house during her absence.

Mrs. O requires all her employees to perform their work according to minute directions laid down by herself and is constantly present to see that these are not deviated from in the slightest degree.

Mrs. P discharges her nursery maid for untruthfulness and gives her a recommendation testifying to her neatness, quickness, pleasant disposition, and fondness for children.

Mr. Q discharges his butler for incapacity, but in view of the fact that the latter has a widowed mother and an invalid sister dependent on him gives him an excellent recommendation.

Mr. R discharges his housekeeper “for infirmity of temper,” as he subsequently testifies in court, but gives her so excellent a recommendation that she believes she has been discharged for physical disability, and gives her testimony to this effect in the same lawsuit.

Mrs. S has a cook who drinks to excess one fourth of the time, but the latter has no fear of dismissal because three fourths of the time she cooks in a superior manner.

Mrs. T dislikes manual labor of every kind. Her servants therefore know that she will tolerate inefficient and incompetent service rather than be left for a single day without help.

Mr. U, the father of three young sons, has a coachman who swears like a trooper, but he retains him because Mrs. U considers him the most stylish coachman in the city.

Mrs. V applies to an employment bureau for a domestic and refuses six applicants because they are not “pretty” and “refined.” After finding one whose appearances are satisfactory, she parts with her because she is unwilling to black the gentlemen’s boots.

Mrs. W engages a woman to go out of town for service, the latter to wait a week before going and meantime to pay her own board. At the time agreed upon she reaches the employer’s house, to learn that the former “help” has decided to remain. She has thus lost a week’s board and wages and more than two dollars in going and returning to the city, and all of “her set” refuse to make engagements in the country.

The different economic, social, and moral questions connected with these various conditions, the illustrations of which could be multiplied indefinitely, may be, generally are, decided by each individual without reference to society at large. Wages are too often regulated by the employer’s bank account, hours of service by his caprice, and moral questions by his personal convenience. The employer is too often the autocrat in his own home. He considers that neither his neighbor nor the general public has any more concern in the business relations existing between himself and his domestic employees than it has in the price he pays for a dinner service or in the color and cut of his coat.

Yet domestic service is the only employment in which economic laws are so openly defied and all questions connected with it settled on the personal basis. No manufacturer can from charitable motives double the wages ordinarily paid to unskilled labor without being called to account for it by competing manufacturers, nor can he reduce unduly the wages of his employees without being held responsible for his course by the employees of other establishments, nor can he prolong by one fourth of an hour the daily period of labor without overstepping his legal privileges. Within certain narrow limits he has freedom, but competition, labor organizations, and the arm of the law combine to keep him within these limits. Before domestic service is freed from all the difficulties that attend it there must be a more widespread recognition of the responsibility of the individual employer to those outside his own household.[234]

Five general classes of perplexing conditions have been suggested. All of them are independent of the personal characteristics and habits of employer and employee and of the personal relationship that exists between them. They do not take into account the fact that throughout the South and wherever negroes are employed in the household the housekeeper must be ever on the alert to guard against dishonesty and immorality on the part of these employees, that intemperance has been found a besetting sin of cooks and coachmen irrespective of race and nationality, that many agree with Mr. Joseph Jefferson when he says, “I am satisfied that domestic melancholy sets in with the butler. He is the melodramatic villain of society.” They do not consider the tendencies encountered here as elsewhere towards indifference, idleness, laziness, low ideals and standards, insubordination, and a desire to obtain much for nothing.[235] They do not include lack of harmony in the personal relations between employees in the same household,[236] the constant friction that necessarily arises from the presence of a stranger in the family, the question of compatibility of disposition between the mistress and the maid, the feeling between employees and the children of the household. They are as prone to trouble a good mistress as a poor one, they are independent of knowledge of household affairs, of housekeeping experience, of good or ill treatment of employees, of any personal element whatever in employer or employee. They are difficulties apparently inherent in the present system of domestic service.

It is of interest to note the opinion of housekeepers on this point. The question, “Have you found it difficult to secure good domestic servants?” was answered with the following result:

Fifty-seven per cent therefore of the housekeepers represented by the schedules have found more or less difficulty in securing good servants. This is, probably, an underestimate of the true condition. Many housekeepers who see only the personal element involved in the employment of service consider an acknowledgment of difficulty a confession of weakness and inability on their own part to cope with the question and are therefore silent. Others have had the experience of one who writes, “I have had no difficulty, my cook having been with me eighteen years, and my second girl, her daughter, ten years. But if they should leave I should not know where to turn.” Again, the replies do not represent the experiences of a class not represented on the schedules—the many in the large cities who are able to employ servants only occasionally and find them through the lowest grade of intelligence offices.

These difficulties are certainly not decreasing,[237] and the demand for competent servants is in most places evidently greater than the supply.[238] These difficulties are, at times, somewhat modified by the conditions in which the employer is placed. They are apparently less in large cities that are ports of entry or the termini of leading railroad lines, and have comparatively few manufacturing industries in which women are employed; they are less in small families employing a large number of servants and paying high wages. But even all of these favorable conditions only modify—they do not change—the nature of the question.[239] A careful study of the returned schedules with reference to the location, population, and prevailing industry of the towns, the number of servants employed, size of family, and wages paid leads to this conclusion. Of the five hundred and forty-five employers who reported that they had difficulty in securing competent servants, only twenty-six gave in explanation a reason that would not have been applicable in any city, town, or village in the country, and those twenty-six had reference to the negroes at the South and the Chinese at the West. One half of the employees reporting state that they would go into another occupation provided it would pay them as well,[240] although the number is very small of those who are dissatisfied except with the disadvantages of the position. If these difficulties are found in every place irrespective of its size, its geographical location, its prevailing industry, the character of its inhabitants, and the personal relations of mistress and maid, something more is involved for the employer than “kind treatment” and personal consideration.

The belief has apparently been general that these perplexities are confined to our own country and that the adoption of English or German or French methods of dealing with the subject would remove them all. The question is undoubtedly a less difficult one in England than it is in this country, since it is not complicated by differences of race, religion, interests, and traditions, by foreign immigration, and possibly not by the same ease with which labor is transferred from one employment to another, while tradition and social custom have favored country rather than city life and have thus eliminated one of our difficulties. But with all these obstacles removed, DeFoe’s Behaviour of Servants shows that even in England the question is an old one, and current literature indicates that it is far from settled.[241]

If the question is asked in Germany, “Is it easy to secure good domestic servants here?” the almost invariable answer is, “It is very difficult, almost impossible.” The reasons for the difficulty are precisely the same as in America—the attractions of city life, the competition of shops and factories, the growth of democratic ideas, the difficulty of securing, in spite of the system of service books, unimpeachable recommendations, and the spirit of restlessness that everywhere prevails among the working classes. In some of the higher classes, where something of the old patriarchal relationship between mistress and maid still exists, there is apparently no difficulty; but each year these classes become more and more undermined by the social democratic spirit, and must in time be affected by the same conditions that bring perplexity to other classes. Yet it is true in Germany as in America that servants seeking places are always to be found, that intelligence offices are crowded with applicants for work, and that an army of incompetents is always at hand.

In France the problem is the same. It varies in details; the proportion of men employed in housework is far greater than in America, England, or Germany, servility of manner is not expected as in England, and waste of material is less common than in America. But fundamentally the conditions are the same as elsewhere.

The difficulties that meet the employer of domestic labor both in America and in Europe are the difficulties that arise from the attempt to harmonize an ancient, patriarchal industrial system with the conditions of modern life. Everywhere the employer closes his eyes to the incongruities of the attempt and lays the blame of failure, not to a defective system, but to the natural weaknesses in the character of the unfortunate persons obliged to carry it out. The difficulties in the path of both employer and employee will not only never be removed but will increase until the subject of domestic service is regarded as a part of the great labor question of the day and given the same serious consideration.