Domestic service

by Lucy Maynard Salmon

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:

“One of the great Evils, which lies heavily upon Families now, in this particular Case of taking Servants, is the going about from House to House, to take Characters and Reports of Servants, or by Word of Mouth; and especially among the Ladies this Usage prevails, in which the good Nature and Charity of the Ladies to ungrateful Servants, goes so far beyond their Justice to one another, that an ill Servant is very seldom detected, and the Ladies yet excuse themselves by this, namely, that they are loth to take away a poor Servant’s Good Name, which is starving them; and that they may perhaps mend, when they come to another Family, what was amiss before, which indeed seldom happens.... The Ladies are cheating and abusing one another, in Charity to their Servants. It is Time to put an End to this unreasonable Good nature.”[229]

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.