If then the question in domestic service is this: How can the supply of domestic servants be increased, or how can the demand for them be lessened? the only answer must be, by bringing household employments and household service into the current of these and other industrial and social tendencies. To state the case in detail, the problem is not so much how to improve the personal relationship between the employer and the employee as it is to decrease this relationship; not how to increase the number of household drudges, but to decrease the amount of household drudgery; not how to do more for domestics, but how to enable them to do more for themselves; not how to merge the individual home into the co-operative home or boarding house, but how to keep it still more intact by taking out of it as far possible that extraneous element—the domestic employee; not how to restore the old household system, but how to bring about adaptation to present conditions; not so much how to persuade more persons to go into domestic service, as to use to better advantage the time and strength of those already engaged in it; not how to induce sewing women in the tenement houses of New York City to engage in work for which they have neither the physical nor the intellectual qualifications,[292] but how to utilize the idle labor in boarding houses and in the homes of the so-called middle and upper classes.
The statement cannot be made with too great emphasis that no plan can be suggested that will enable a housekeeper whose inefficient employee leaves to-day to secure a better one to-morrow; a complicated social malady of long standing demands time and patience to work a cure or even a relief. Two classes of measures, however, looking towards an improvement in the character of the service can be suggested, the first general, the second specific. It is believed that both classes will conform to the general industrial and social tendencies enumerated.
In the first place there must be a truer conception on the part of both men and women of the important place that household employments occupy in the economy of the world. The utter neglect of the subject by economic students and writers must give place to a scientific investigation of an employment which is at least wealth-consuming if not wealth-producing. A very large part of the wealth produced in the world is consumed in the household, yet neither those who produce nor those who consume know on what principles it is done. Time-saving and labor-saving devices are made at enormous cost for uses in production, while time and strength incalculable are wasted through consumption. In no other occupation is there so much waste of labor and capital; in no other would a fraction of this waste be overlooked. It is idle to complain of poor servants and of poor mistresses so long as domestic service is divorced from general labor questions, and employers everywhere are ignorant of the economic laws, principles, and conditions underlying the household. Men and women might better give to the study of domestic service as an occupation the time and energy that now are absorbed in considering the vices and virtues of individual employees.
This truer conception of the place of household economics considered from the theoretical standpoint will give rise to a more just estimate of their place in a practical way. Those employers who “despise housekeeping,” who “cannot endure cooking,” who “hate the kitchen,” who “will not do menial work,” will come to regard household work in a different light. Indeed, until the members of this class, far too large in numbers, change either their opinion or their occupation, it is hopeless to look for a reform in domestic service. That “dignity of labor” so often prescribed as a panacea for the troubles in the kitchen must first be maintained in the parlor if reform is to come. The simple prescription of the remedy will not effect a cure. “To know the workman,” wrote Leclaire in 1865, “one must have been a workman himself, and above all remember it.” In a similar way the housekeeper must have not only a knowledge of household affairs, but a respect for them, and being presumably better educated and equipped, she must be the one to prove that the interests of employer and employee are the same.
Again, more systematic study of the subject in a general way must remove much of the ignorance, as well as of the aversion, that undoubtedly exists in regard to this occupation. Public sentiment has not yet demanded that when a woman assumes the care of a household she shall possess at least a theoretical knowledge of household affairs; it is deemed sufficient if she acquire it afterward at an enormous cost of time, patience, energy, sometimes even of domestic happiness. But public sentiment will make such demand when the economic functions of housekeeping are understood. Until a larger number of housekeepers understand at least the rudiments of the profession they have adopted, it is to be expected that ignorant and inexperienced employees will waste the substance of their employers, and fail to become skilled laborers, and that able, intelligent, and ambitious girls will be unwilling to enter an occupation in which the employers are as untrained in a scientific way as are the employees. Water cannot rise higher than its source. As long as inefficient service is accepted inefficient service will be rendered; as long as mistresses are ignorant of the difference between rights and extraordinary privileges, employees, like children, will continue to be spoiled by careless indulgence; “as long as women hate kitchen and household cares, and servants know that they know more than their employers, just so long will employers everywhere have eye-servants.”
A different conception must also come in regard to the work of woman, especially where the factor of remuneration is involved. An explanation is still needed for the fact that idleness is practically regarded as a vice in men and a virtue in women;[293] that a young man is condemned by society for saying “the world owes me a living,” while a young woman is praised for her womanliness when she says it by her life; that a wealthy woman must not receive remuneration for services for which compensation would be accepted by a wealthy man or by a poor woman. This does not mean that all women should engage in business enterprises, but that it should be honorable for them to do so, dishonorable for them to be ignorant of all means of self-support, and that they should receive adequate remuneration for all public services performed when men would be paid under the same circumstances. Household employments are too often in effect, though less often than in theory, belittled by both men and women, and they will continue to be until there is the freest industrial play in all occupations for women as well as for men. As long as household employments performed without remuneration are the only occupations for women looked upon with favor by society at large, just so long will this free industrial play be lacking. One effect of this is seen in the case of very many mothers who have been overworked and overburdened by household cares. The pendulum swings to the opposite end of the arc, and they declare that their daughters shall never work at all. The children therefore grow up in idleness and ultimately, when driven to work by necessity, drift into shops and factories. When household employments are removed from the domain of charity and sentiment and put on a business basis, when the interests of women are broadened, when they are better able “to distinguish between infinity and infinitesimals,” there will be a more intelligent understanding of the financial side of woman’s work.
The general remedies therefore must include a wider prevalence of education in the true sense of the word, not its counterfeit, information; that mental education which results in habits of accuracy, precision, and observation, in the exercise of reason, judgment, and self-control, and that education of character which results in the ability constantly to put one’s self in the place of another. There must be scientific training and investigation in economic theory, history, and statistics, especially in their application to the household, and an increased popular knowledge of all scientific subjects concerning the home, those which secure the prevention of economic and material waste in the household as well as those which concern the questions of production for it. The educational forces must “pull from the top” and draw domestic service into the general current of industrial development.