A fourth badge is the fact that domestic servants are made not only to feel but to acknowledge their social inferiority. Not only deference but even servility of manner is demanded as of no other class, and this in an age when social and family relationships are everywhere becoming more democratic, when reverence and respect for authority are sometimes considered old-fashioned virtues, when even undue freedom of speech and manner are permitted to other classes. The domestic employee receives and gives no word or look of recognition on the street except in meeting those of her own class; she is seldom introduced to the guests of the house, whom she may faithfully serve during a prolonged visit; the common daily courtesies exchanged between the members of the household are not always shown her; she takes no part in the general conversation around her; she speaks only when addressed, obeys without murmur orders which her judgment tells her are absurd, “is not expected to smile under any circumstances,” and ministers without protest to the whims and obeys implicitly the commands of children from whom deference to parents is never expected.
A fifth mark of social inferiority is the fact that domestic employees, especially those connected with boarding houses, restaurants, and hotels, are generally given a fee for every service rendered.
A self-respecting man or woman in any other occupation is insulted by the offer of a fee. The person who through mistake offers a fee to a person belonging to his own station brings upon himself only ridicule and embarrassment. The shop-girl who works for $7 a week spends half an hour in a vain attempt to match for a customer a bit of ribbon; but she would be justly indignant, as would be her employer, if she were offered a fee. In hotels and restaurants, the larger the establishment and the more the price of every article should warrant exemption from such outside dues, the greater is felt to be the pressure for their payment. Nowhere else is the democratic principle “first come first served” so flagrantly violated, and nowhere else would its violation be tolerated. Feeing is a system of begging that cannot be reached by charity organization societies, a species of blackmail levied on all who wish good service, for which there is no legal redress, a European and American form of backsheesh that carries with it the taint of the soil from which it has sprung. It has its origin in snobbishness and it results in toadyism and flunkeyism. It is objectionable because it makes the giver feel as humiliated in giving as the recipient ought to feel in receiving. It puts a price on that kindness and consideration which ought to be the “royal bounty” in connection with every paid service, it destroys genuine sympathy and unselfishness, it creates an eye service and introduces into every branch of domestic service an element of demoralization and degradation that is incalculable. It takes from the person receiving it the option of placing a value on the service rendered by him, and it is the only occupation where fees are given that does not carry with it this privilege. A lawyer or a physician must be the best judge of the value of his services, but the domestic servant takes “what you please.”
One of the results of the system is indicated by a jesting paragraph that recently went the rounds of the daily press to the effect that the porter of the Grand Pacific Hotel, in Chicago, had retired with a fortune of $100,000 accumulated from tips given him by guests of the house,[275] while the men who contributed it were still struggling to keep the wolf from the door. In tipping, as in bribery, the social odium falls on the one who takes the tip or the bribe, not on the one who offers it. The fortune of $100,000, more or less, would not give social position to one who had acquired it through fees. But the fee is at bottom a bribe offered for service for which payment is presumably made by the employer; it is a bribe because it is an additional sum offered for quick service or good service which a waiter will not give without this extra compensation from the person served. As long as this form of bribery prevails, every person who accepts the bribe is socially tainted and no amount of financial success resulting from it can eradicate the taint.
Not only is the fee objectionable in itself, but the manner of giving it is equally so. It is bestowed surreptitiously, as if the giver appreciated the fact that he was doing an insulting thing and was ashamed of it; or it is offered openly with the patronizing manner of one who says, “I have no use for such a trifle; take it, if you wish it.” It is folded in a napkin, tucked under a plate, slipped into the hand of a waiter with a vain attempt to appear unconscious, left ostentatiously on a tray, or contemptuously flung at an attendant. It can be neither given nor received with the self-respect that accompanies any reputable business transaction.
Two excuses for feeing are given. One, “because every one else does it and one feels contemptible if he doesn’t do it,” an easy, good-natured way of disposing of a serious problem. Comparatively few persons are controlled by general principles; each acts according to what seems most convenient at the time being. The second excuse is that employees in hotels and restaurants and porters in drawing-room and sleeping cars are underpaid. This is undoubtedly true, and it will remain true as long as the general public frees the class of hotel, restaurant, and boarding-house proprietors, and palace and sleeping car companies, from the responsibility of paying their own assistants. But the general public also knows that the saleswomen in many large stores work for almost nothing, that street-car conductors and motor men are overworked and underpaid, that school teachers receive but a pittance. The public, however, pursues here a different policy; it puts on “the white list” employers who pay their saleswomen well, it allows street-railway employees to fight out the matter of low wages by strikes or in such other ways as they deem fit, it permits the school teacher to struggle on with a salary of $400 or $500 a year and patronizes a fair held for the benefit of a pension fund. It is difficult to see why this reason for feeing a domestic employee should not hold good in all underpaid employments; that it does not is one reason why those in other occupations do not fall in the social scale. That the public continues to pay directly the employees in this occupation as it does in no other is one explanation of the ill repute it bears among self-respecting wage-earning men and women. Every person has a contempt for another who accepts a fee, and the reproach extends from the individual to every branch of the occupation he represents. No other thing has done more to lower domestic service in the eyes of the public than this most pernicious custom, and every person who fees a domestic employee has by that act done something to degrade what should be an honorable occupation into a menial service.[276]
Another phase of the social question is presented by an employer who writes, “There is something wrong when a young girl servant is sent out in the evening to accompany the daughter or perhaps the mistress and return alone.” If protection is the thought, the maid needs it as much as the mistress; if it is in deference to a social custom, the maid must bitterly resent any custom which demands this distinction between herself and those whom she serves. Another aspect of the same question is suggested when it is realized what veritable dens of iniquity are some of the intelligence offices in large cities, and how difficult it often is for a domestic employee to come in contact with them without becoming contaminated by the touch. These are the things that lead many to believe that “the kitchen has become very like a social Botany Bay.”[277]
It is this social position with its accompanying marks of social inferiority that, more than any other one thing, turns the scale against domestic service as an occupation in the thoughts of many intelligent and ambitious women whose tastes naturally incline them to domestic employments. Professor Arthur T. Hadley has well said in a discussion of comparative wages, “One thing which counts for more and costs more than anything else is social standing.”[278] The social standing maintained by a cash girl on $3 a week which she fears to lose by going into domestic service ought not to be vastly superior to what is within the reach of intelligent cooks earning $10 a week; yet undoubtedly it is; and while this is true the number of intelligent women in domestic service will not increase.[279]