These various explanations of the failure to consider domestic service in connection with other forms of labor are in reality but different phases of a fundamental reason—the isolation that has always attended household service and household employments. From the fact that other occupations are largely the result of association and combination they court investigation and the fullest and freest discussion of their underlying principles and their influence on each other. Household service, since it is based on the principle of isolation, is regarded as an affair of the individual with which the public at large has no concern. Other forms of industry are anxious to call to their assistance all the legislative, administrative, and judicial powers of the nation, all the forces that religion, philanthropy, society itself can exert in their behalf. The great majority of housekeepers, if the correspondent of a leading journal is to be trusted, “do not require outside assistance in the management of their affairs, and consequently resent any interference in the administration of their duties.”
The question must arise, however, in view of the interdependence of all other forms of industry, whether it is possible to maintain this perfect separation with regard to any one employment, whether household employments are justified in resenting any intrusion into their domain, whether the individual employer is right in considering household service exclusively a personal affair. An answer to the question may be of help in deciding whether the difficulties that are found in the present system of domestic service arise in every case necessarily from the personal relations which exist between employer and employee, or are largely due to economic conditions over which the individual employer has no control. Still further, the conclusions reached must determine somewhat the nature of the forces to be set in motion to lessen these difficulties.
CHAPTER II
HISTORICAL ASPECTS OF DOMESTIC EMPLOYMENTS
It is impossible to understand the condition of domestic service as it exists to-day without a cursory glance at the changes in household employments resulting from the inventions of the latter part of the eighteenth century. These changes, unlike many others, came apparently without warning. At the middle of the last century steam was a plaything, electricity a curiosity of the laboratory, and wind and water the only known motive powers. From time immemorial the human hand unaided, except by the simplest machinery, had clothed the world. Iron could be smelted only with wood, and the English parliament had seriously discussed the suppression of the iron trade as the only means of preserving the forests. But during the last third of the century the brilliant inventions of Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, and Cartwright had made possible the revolutionizing of all forms of cotton and woollen industries; Watt had given a new motive power to the world; the uses of coal had been multiplied, and soon after its mining rendered safe; while a thousand supplementary inventions had followed quickly in the train of these. A new era of inventive genius had dawned, which was to rival in importance that of the fifteenth century.
The immediate result of these inventions was seen in the rapid transference of all the processes of cotton and woollen manufactures from the home of the individual weaver and spinner to large industrial centres, the centralization of important interests in the hands of a few, and a division of labor that multiplied indefinitely the results previously accomplished.
But the factory system of manufactures that superseded the domestic system of previous generations has not been the product of inventions alone. It has been pointed out by Mr. Carroll D. Wright[7] that while these inventions have been the material forces through which the change was accomplished, other agencies co-operated with them. These co-operating influences have been physical, as illustrated in the discoveries of Watt; philosophical, as seen in the works of Adam Smith; commercial, or the industrial supremacy of England considered as a result of the loss of the American colonies; and philanthropical, or those connected with the work of the Wesleys, John Howard, Hannah More, and Wilberforce. All these acting in conjunction with the material force—invention—have operated on manufacturing industries to produce the factory system of to-day. It is, indeed, because the factory system is the resultant of so many forces working in the past that it touches in the present nearly every great economic, social, political, moral, and philanthropic question.
Although comparatively few of these inventions have been intended primarily to lessen household labor, this era of inventive activity has not been without its effects on household employments. A hundred years ago the household occupations carried on in the average family included, in addition to whatever is now ordinarily done, every form of spinning and weaving cotton, wool and flax, carpet weaving and making, upholstering, knitting, tailoring, the making of boots, shoes, hats, gloves, collars, cuffs, men’s underclothing, quilts, comfortables, mattresses, and pillows; also, the making of soap, starch, candles, yeast, perfumes, medicines, liniments, crackers, cheese, coffee-browning, the drying of fruits and vegetables, and salting and pickling meat. Every article in this list, which might be lengthened, can now be made or prepared for use out of the house of the consumer, not only better but more cheaply by the concentration of capital and labor in large industrial enterprises. Moreover, as a result of other forms of inventive genius, the so-called modern improvements have taken out of the ordinary household many forms of hard and disagreeable labor. The use of kerosene, gas, natural gas, and electricity[8] for all purposes of lighting, and to a certain extent for heating and cooking; the adoption of steam-cleaning for furniture and wearing apparel; the invention of the sewing-machine and other labor-saving contrivances; the improvement of city and village water-works, plumbing, heat-supplying companies, city and village sanitation measures, including the collection of ashes and garbage,—these are all the results of modern business enterprise.
These facts are familiar, but the effects more easily escape notice. The change from individual to collective enterprises, from the domestic to the factory system, has released a vast amount of labor formerly done within the house by women with three results: either this labour has been diverted to other places, or into other channels, or has become idle. The tendency at first was for labor thus released to be diverted to other places. The home spinners and weavers became the spinners and weavers in factories, and later the home workers in other lines became the operatives in other large establishments. As machinery became more simple, women were employed in larger numbers, until now, in several places and in several occupations, their numbers exceed those of men employees.[9] This fact has materially changed the condition of affairs within the household. Under the domestic system of manufactures nearly all women spent part of their time in their own homes in spinning, weaving, and the making of various articles of food and clothing in connection with their more active household duties. When women came to be employed in factories, the division of labor made necessary a readjustment of work so that housekeeping duties were performed by one person giving all her time to them instead of by several persons each giving a part of her time. The tendency of this was at first naturally to decrease the number of women partially employed in household duties, and to increase the demand for women giving all their time to domestic work.