The Library of Work and Play: Housekeeping

by Elizabeth Hale Gilman

If your cook should suddenly turn on you with these questions—on you, who own to having fifteen cooks in two months, or even on you who grieve because servants are not respectful, would not either of you discharge her at once and say you were "never so insulted in your life?"

And yet if the patriarchal system of domestic service is to work, we must be able to answer earnestly, "yes," to these questions, and the servant on her side must make the family life and interests her chief concern. She must be like "Black Lize" who lies buried at the feet of her mistress in a northern cemetery, and who told some of her people that she did not leave "the family" after the war as they had done, she "stayed, and put up with things."

Or she must be like two Irish saints whom I know, devout women each consecrated to the service of a family. One hears their feet on the stairs at five in the morning going out to Church, and again going up to bed late at night after the last young mistress is undressed and comfortably at rest. They live here or there as others choose; they go out or stay in, sleep or stay awake, wait long or hurry madly as other people wish; they are the chosen companions of the ill, the sad and the difficult members of the family; they have given up their own family ties to share the fate of another family; they have no end in life except to serve.

This patriarchal system asks a good deal of mere human creatures, does it not? And one cannot say positively what the business system will ask because it has not been tried, but it seems probable that it would ask as much only in different ways.

It is time, though, to consider what the requirements of the business system might be, because many people think that domestic service will before long undergo some such change as has come over the professions of teaching and nursing in the last half-century. Any one who will read the novels of Miss Bronté and of Miss Austen, of Thackeray and of Dickens with special attention to the governesses and nurses they contain, is likely to feel surprise, however well he may know the histories of these professions.

Particularly consider "Shirley" for governesses and "Martin Chuzzlewit" for nurses and then picture the teachers and nurses of to-day, and it will not be hard to believe that in fifty years the profession of domestic service may also be so changed in status that no woman will feel it a social descent to employ herself therein.

What will the relation between worker and employer be then, and what will be required of each?

The relation would doubtless be that of a business contract such as one has with a teacher, a typewriter or a nurse. The employer could not ask for respect, but for business courtesy; she could not expect gratitude, but rather skilled service for value received. Her responsibility for her employee would consist in paying her wages, in providing her with "sanitary surroundings," in requiring only a definite number of hours of work from her, and in regarding her with the same sort of human consideration which is used toward other wage earners. In all probability these things would be required of the housekeeper by law, as they are in greater or less degree required now of employers of labour. Women would have to know more about housekeeping than many do now, to be able to direct professional workers. They would have to give up using the word servant and the manner and feeling which sometimes go with it, or their employee would probably seek another position.

The employee would not be a member of the household; she would usually sleep out of the house and come in for work hours, she would not take her meals with the family any more than she does now but it would be for the same reason that your husband's superintendent or secretary does not go out to lunch with him. She would expect the wages which were customary for her training and work hours. She would not be expected to have any especial attachment for her employers other than that arising from the fact that they fulfilled their business contracts and treated her courteously. She could not expect to have incompetency ignored, nor to learn her business from those who were paying her the wages of a skilled worker.

Would you like these requirements any better than those of the patriarchal system?