Domestic service

by Lucy Maynard Salmon

Thomas Grattan wrote of the condition:

“One of the subjects on which the minds of men and women in the United States seem to be unanimously made up, is the admitted deficiency of help.... Disguise it as we may, under all the specious forms of reasoning, there is something in the mind of every man which tells him he is humiliated in doing personal service to another.... The servile nature of domestic duties in Europe, and more particularly in England, is much more likely to make servants liable to the discontent which mars their merits, than the common understanding in America, which makes the compact between ‘employer’ and ‘help’ a mere matter of business, entailing no mean submission on the one hand, and giving no right to any undue assumption of power on the other.... Domestic service is not considered so disgraceful in the United States, as it is felt to be in the United Kingdom.”[165]

Grattan’s observations lead him to believe that the democratic spirit is not always to be deplored.

“An American youth or ‘young lady’ will go to service willingly, if they can be better paid for it than for teaching in a village school, or working on a farm or in a factory.... They satisfy themselves that they are helps, not servants,—that they are going to work with (not for) Mr. so and so, not going to service,—they call him and his wife their employers, not their master and mistress.”[166]

But like all Europeans, he never ceases to be surprised by this spirit, particularly by those manifestations of it that led to active work on the part of the mistress of a home and to the use of the word “help.” “There are no housekeepers,” he writes, “or ladies’ maids. The lady herself does all the duties of the former.... Servants are thus really justified in giving to themselves the favorite designation of ‘helps.’”[167] But he closes a long and interesting chapter on the subject with the prophecy, “They (employers) will, by degrees, give up the employment of native servants who will be in future less likely than even now to submit to their pretensions, and confine themselves to the fast increasing tribes of Irish immigrants.”[168]

Curiously enough nearly forty years earlier Madame d’Arusmont had written of friends who thought of coming to America and urged, “Let them by all means be advised against bringing servants with them. Foreign servants are here, without doubt, the worst; they neither understand the work which the climate renders necessary, nor are willing to do the work which they did elsewhere.”[169] She, like all travellers, found that however subservient domestic servants might be when they left Europe, the first contact with the democratic atmosphere of America wrought a sudden change; subserviency disappeared, and the servant boasted of his equality with all. She explains that those educated in America perceive the difference placed between the gentleman and the laborer by education and conditions, but the foreigner taking a superficial view of the matter sees no difference.[170]

This second period in the history of domestic service continued from about the time of the Revolution until 1850. It was the product of the rapid growth of democratic ideas fostered by the Revolution and the widespread influence of the French philosophical ideas of the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was a period chiefly characterized by social and industrial democracy, as the political system was also in its spirit democratic. This democratic industrial spirit showed itself in the universal use at the North of the term “help,” in the absence of liveries and all distinguishing marks of service, in the intolerance on the part of both employer and employee of servility and subserviency of manner, in the bridging of the social chasm between master and servant as long as the free employment of native born Americans continued, and in the hearty spirit of willingness with which service was performed. The results of this democratic régime were the difficulty of securing help, since new avenues of independent work were opening out to women and the class of indented servants had disappeared; the lack of all differentiation in household work, since the servant conferred a favor in “going out to work” and did what she knew how to do without troubling to learn new kinds of work; and, most important, the subtle change that the democratic atmosphere everywhere wrought in the servants who came from Europe.

This condition of free, democratic, native born white service at the North and compulsory slave service at the South continued practically unchanged until about the middle of the century. Between 1850 and 1870 four important political changes occurred which revolutionized the personnel in domestic service and consequently its character. These changes brought about the third period in the history of the subject.

The first of these changes was due to the Irish famine of 1846. Previous to this time the immigration to this country from Ireland had been small, averaging not more than twenty thousand annually between 1820 and 1846. In the decade preceding the famine the average number of arrivals had been less than thirty-five thousand annually. In 1846 the number was 51,752, and this was more than doubled the following year, the report showing 105,536 arrivals in 1847. In 1851 the number of arrivals from Ireland had risen to 221,253. Since that time the number has fluctuated, but between fifty and seventy-five thousand annually come to this country from Ireland.[171] A large proportion of these immigrants—forty-nine per cent during the decade from 1870 to 1880—have been women who were classed as “unskilled laborers.” Two occupations were open to them. One was work in factories where as manufacturing processes became more simple unskilled labor could be utilized. The Irish immigrants, therefore, soon displaced in factories the New England women who had found, as has been seen,[172] new opportunities for work of a higher grade. The second occupation open to the Irish immigrants was household service. Here physical strength formed a partial compensation for lack of skill and ignorance of American ways, and the Irish soon came to form a most numerous and important class engaged in domestic employments.[173]