Domestic service

by Lucy Maynard Salmon

The plan most widely advocated and believed to contain the greatest possibilities for improvement in domestic service, is that of establishing training-schools for servants, such schools to have a regular course of study and to grant a diploma on the satisfactory completion of the work. Much can be said in favor of the theory of such schools. If universally established, they would greatly lessen the ignorance and inexperience of the employees—one of the greatest stumbling-blocks in the way of improvement in the service. The diploma would be in effect a license without the objectionable features of the latter, and it would be a testimonial of capability and moral character more reliable than the personal recommendation of previous unknown employers. It would render possible a better gradation of wages, a more perfect organization of domestic work, and more satisfactory business relations between employer and employee. In no occupation is there greater need for systematic training. The army of incompetents in domestic service is not greater than in other occupations, but incompetency here is far more productive than elsewhere of inconvenience and positive suffering. Without such public and regular training every housekeeper is compelled to make a training-school of her own house, and too often she herself lacks the necessary information she ought to impart. But two test questions must be applied to the theory. First, as far as it has been carried out, has it accomplished what was expected of it? Second, is the training-school for servants in harmony with the educational, industrial, and social tendencies of the day?

The demand for such training-schools has been almost universal, and reports of their immediate establishment on a large scale have been repeatedly circulated through the press. One of the most widely spread rumors concerned a movement to be set on foot in connection with the World’s Fair in 1893 for the organization of a national body with branches throughout every state and county in the country, each of these branches to establish a training-school for servants wherever practicable, and another concerned a scarcely less extended work to be begun in Washington. As far as can be learned, however, the number of such schools actually established has been extremely limited, and most of these have been discontinued for lack of success. As far as the results have been concerned, it must be said that, while not a failure, they have been far from commensurate with the efforts expended. In one training-school with accommodations for twenty, where neither labor nor expense had been spared to make it a success, there were when visited but five persons in attendance, and these five were the most unpromising material that could be brought together to train for such service, one being a partial cripple, another very deaf, a third too young to take the responsibility of a general servant, a fourth was deficient in mental capacity, and the fifth was a Swedish girl who attended to learn English. Another school also having accommodations for twenty reported that the number had never been full. The most successful of them all had had, a year or two since, total attendance of about four hundred during its ten years’ existence.

The practical difficulties in the way of all these schools have been many. The minimum age of admission has been fixed at sixteen, but there has been constant pressure to make exceptions to the rule and take girls under that age. The course has been usually one of three months, but this time is insufficient for the thorough training of immature girls in household duties; yet to extend the course is to decrease the attendance. Those who enter such schools do so, not because those who have attended them have been unusually successful in securing work and retaining good positions, but because sent there by friends, guardians, pastors, or city missionaries. In no instance, so far as known, has a person entered a training-school because she found herself incompetent to fill the position she had taken, or from a desire to perfect herself in any branch of her work. Much has been accomplished through these schools for the individuals attending them; personal habits have been improved, better motives in life given,—everything that has been most admirable in a philanthropic way. But it must be said that they have done little or nothing towards accomplishing the object for which they were established; the effect in elevating domestic service, in increasing the supply of trained servants, in lessening the prevailing ignorance of household affairs, has been infinitesimal. The training-school for servants is and must be a failure as long as the class for whom it was founded will not voluntarily attend it in any considerable numbers for the sake of the instruction it is primarily intended to give. They will not attend it because while there is a theoretical demand for such schools on the part of employers there is no practical demand for them. Young women will not spend three months in learning the details of such work when they can receive high wages for doing it without such instruction; not until domestic service loses its distinctive marks of drudgery, menial servitude, and social degradation will the training-school receive any large accession to its numbers. Moreover, public opinion has not yet demanded that every housekeeper should have both a general and a technical knowledge of domestic affairs before she assumes the care of a household. The stream cannot rise higher than its source, and the training-school for employees cannot succeed so long as employers are content with unscientific methods in their own share of the household duties. It is often said that by the establishment of training-schools for nurses what was formerly a trade, held in little repute, has become a profession second only in importance to that of the physician, and that in a similar way the training-school for domestic servants would elevate domestic service. But a vital difference exists in the two cases. Until scarcely more than a generation ago the medical profession could lay little or no claim to being an exact science. Most medical schools were poorly equipped and had a short course of study, while all their processes were largely experimental. But the Civil War and the scientific studies resulting from it have made of surgery an exact science, while rapid strides in biological investigation have gone far towards making other branches of medicine also exact sciences. It has been well said that “educational forces pull from the top, they do not push from the bottom.” It has been the educational forces pulling from the top as a result of increased scientific knowledge among the leaders of the medical profession that have made the training-school for nurses a necessity. Not until similar forces pull from the top in the household through the scientific and economic investigation of the processes carried on there, will a permanent, successful training-school for employees be even a remote possibility.

It must be said also that the training-school for domestic servants must be a failure as long as it is out of harmony with the tendencies in all other fields of education and industry. Technical schools are everywhere springing up, and the demand for them is constantly increasing. But the technical school teaches general and fundamental principles, the wood carver learns drawing, the plumber chemistry, the architect mathematics, and the engineer mechanics. In each trade or profession the first step is the principle underlying it, and the second the practical application of the principle. In the training-school for servants with a three months’ course, the educational idea is and must be totally different. Those attending it are taken without examination, often they have had no previous education whatever, they may be of varying grades of intelligence and capability, and any attempt at classification according to these grades is impossible. Its members must learn how to cook without a knowledge of chemistry and physiology, to care for a room without knowing the principles of ventilation and sanitation, and to arrange a table in ignorance of form and color. The work must be learned by simple mechanical repetition—a method fast disappearing from every department of education.

Again, such a plan is in opposition to present political and social tendencies. A training-school for servants is an anomaly in a democratic country. No father or mother born under the Declaration of Independence will ever send a child to be trained as a servant. A striking illustration of this is found in recent accounts of a new building about to be erected in a large city for the use of a woman’s organization. Those in charge of the organization established a few years since a kitchen garden for the children of the poor. Families recommended by the Charity Organization Society were visited and the attendance of the young daughters of the family solicited. “At first not a few mothers objected on the ground that they did not wish to have their daughters trained to be servants, even if they were poor, but when it was explained that the object of the kitchen garden was to make the children more tidy and useful in their own homes the objection usually disappeared.” Yet in the face of this experience—a common one wherever kitchen gardens have been started—the managers of the organization have provided for the establishment of a training-school for servants.

The opposition to such schools on social grounds is not strange. No recognized industrial aristocracy is possible in America. There are no training-schools for masons, carpenters, day-laborers, or clerks. In the technical school the boy learns masonry, carpentry, and brick-laying, but in these schools there is no division of those attending into “classes for gentlemen” and “classes for laborers.” American men will never recognize one kind of training for a superior social class, and another for an inferior. The training-school for servants means the introduction of a caste system utterly at variance with democratic ideas. It has not been possible at any time since the abolition of slavery to educate any class in society to be servants; it will never again be possible in America. Democracy among men and aristocracy among women cannot exist side by side; friction is as inevitable as it was between free labor and slave labor in the ante-bellum days. Opportunity for scientific training in all household employments must ultimately be given in such a form that any and all persons can obtain it, but it can never be given in a school distinctively intended for the training of servants and called by that name.

Another plan, perhaps less widely but even more earnestly advocated by its supporters, is that of co-operative housekeeping. There has been much looseness of phraseology in referring to this plan, and many experiments have been called co-operative housekeeping which are such in no sense of the word. Co-operative housekeeping, pure and simple, as described by the pioneer in the movement, Mrs. Melusina Fay Peirce,[289] means the association in a stock company of not fewer than twelve or fifteen families. The first step is the opening of a co-operative grocery on the plan adopted by the Rochdale Pioneers, and this to be followed by the opening of a bakery, and later by a kitchen for cooking soups, meats, and vegetables. The next department to be organized is that of sewing, beginning with the establishment of a small dry-goods store, and developing from this the making of underclothes, dresses, cloaks, and bonnets. The last step is to organize a co-operative laundry. The main industries pursued in every house—cooking, sewing, and laundering—are thus to be taken out of the house and carried on at a central point, while the profits on all the retail purchases are ultimately to accrue to the purchasers.

The advantages in the scheme are in the saving of expense in buying, economy in the preparation of all the materials consumed, a division of labor on the part of the co-operators which enables each to follow her own tastes in work, and a removal of all difficulties with the subject of service by making the servants responsible to a corporation, not to individuals. The essential point in the whole plan, and that which justifies the name, is that each housekeeper is to take an active part not only in the management, but also in the actual work of the association, since co-operation ceases to be such if one individual or “manager” is paid for assuming the responsibility of the business.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts, Co-operative Housekeeping Association was organized in 1870 with forty shareholders and continued about one year. It approached more nearly than any other experiment that has been made to the ideal of its chief promoter, Mrs. Peirce, but failed in the opinion of its founder for three reasons: because all the shareholders did not patronize the co-operative store; because three departments of work—a bakery, kitchen, and laundry—were begun at the same time instead of being allowed to develop as experience should dictate; and because the whole was given over to the charge of a board of seven directors, one of whom was to be a paid officer and the manager of the entire business. The theory in its realization, therefore, lacked some of the essentials of a true co-operative enterprise, but even in this form it is believed to have been the only experiment that can in any real sense of the word be called co-operative housekeeping.