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:
| Difficult | 545 | |
| Yes | 290 | |
| Very difficult | 148 | |
| At times | 72 | |
| Rather difficult | 20 | |
| Generally | 15 | |
| Not difficult | 418 | |
| No | 328 | |
| Not especially | 34 | |
| Not generally | 29 | |
| Not lately | 13 | |
| Very little difficulty | 8 | |
| Very seldom | 6 | |
| Not answered | 42 | |
| Total | 1005 |
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.