Domestic service

by Lucy Maynard Salmon

From the standpoint of the employer one advantage domestic service in Europe has, is that it apparently costs less than it does in America. The money wages paid domestic employees are nominally much lower than in America, apparently ranging from about three dollars a month for an ordinary housemaid to eight dollars a month for an excellent cook,[349] in addition to board and lodging.[350] But these wages are supplemented in a score of ways. A present in money of from five to eight dollars is often given at Christmas or New Year’s, another is given at Easter, and a third on birthdays,[351] while at all times the temper of the cook must be propitiated with gifts of clothing and the housemaid remembered in a similar way.[352] Not only are members of the family expected to make these additions to the nominal wages given, but guests and transient visitors pay similar tribute.[353] Moreover, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestickmaker all increase the monthly stipend of servants by frequent fees given in return for trade secured through them,[354] while no inconsiderable part of the wages received—or taken—comes in the form of profits,[355] perquisites and “gratifications.”[356] Still another factor must be added, the daily allowance for wine or beer, or its money equivalent.[357] In France, according to Weber, men-servants are paid while performing military service,—“it is an act of patriotism and of social solidarity.”[358] In Germany girls in the country sometimes receive part of their wages in the use granted of a small piece of land where they can raise flax. This they spin, weave, and sell, adding thus something to their wages. Compulsory insurance in Germany and in Belgium materially increases the cash wages paid by the employer.[359] It is thus extremely difficult to state with even approximate exactness the amount of wages received by domestics in Europe, since the total amount is affected to such an extent by the variable factors of fees and outside perquisites.[360] It is still more difficult to compute the variations that wages have undergone from a past to the present time.[361]

That the cost of domestic service is in many places in excess of what it should be is indicated by the growing custom among certain classes of employers of demanding as their right a percentage of the fees received,[362] and the protests, as yet unavailing, on the part of the public against the exactions of these fees by either employer or employee.[363] It seems not unreasonable to conclude, in view of all the various ways by which wages are augmented, that they are in reality much greater than their face value indicates, and in many parts of the service greatly in advance of wages in other corresponding occupations.

The question naturally arises whether the value of the service rendered is commensurate with its cost, but it is a question that must remain unanswered in default of any common standard by which service can be gauged.[364] Figaro has answered the question theoretically in the other question put to Count Almaviva, “Measured by the virtues demanded of a servant, does your excellency know many masters worthy of being valets?”[365]

But the wage received sums up as little in Europe as it does in America the subject of domestic service. Even good wages do not altogether compensate for long hours of service,[366] hardness of work[367] and of life,[368] and entire lack of social intercourse.

It is undeniable that the social conditions that surround domestic servants in Europe are harder than in America. They are the survivals of the condition of serfdom, as this was in turn the survival of a preëxisting state of slavery.[369] Literature everywhere testifies to the social chasm that has at all times existed between master and slave, master and servant, mistress and maid, and employer and employee, as it also does to the manifold imperfections of both parties to the domestic contract,[370] while on the stage as well as in the daily press it has been the domestic servant who has always been made the butt of jest and ridicule.[371] “Now, as before and during the Revolution,” says M. Salomon, tersely, “it (the occupation) remains under the ban of society; customs are not changed with laws.”[372] It is true that the domestic servant is often apparently unconscious of the existence of this social ban, and that even when he is conscious of it, he acquiesces in it and accepts it as a part of the social order that he cannot and perhaps would not change, yet this unconsciousness of it does not alter the fact of its existence.

The social disadvantages of domestic service show themselves under the same guise as in America, though often in a much more exaggerated form. In England the existence of a tax on men-servants puts at once a social chasm between the master who pays a tax on luxuries and the servant who is an outward manifestation of that luxury, while the servility of manner that an American finds so exasperating in an English servant is encouraged and even demanded as the birthright inheritance of a well-born Englishman.[373] The servants in their turn enforce among themselves similar social distinctions and the recognition by their fellows of the various grades of social superiority or inferiority[374]—a condition that has its origin partly in a desire to imitate the customs and manners of those above them in the social scale,[375] and partly in the extreme specialization of every form of household work and the resulting inflexibility of all parts of it.[376] It follows that in England “domestic service provides no general bond—perhaps, indeed, rather accentuates class indifferences,” and that, as an occupation, for this and other reasons, “domestic service, though lucrative and in many ways luxurious, is not popular.”[377]

In France, while the relations between employer and employee are much more democratic than in England, the social stigma is put on the household servant, in part because of the traditional character given servants in French literature, in part because the construction of the French apartment house places the rooms of all the servants in the mansard story and thus draws a line of social demarkation between those served and those serving, in part because of the bureaucratic character of society.

In Italy, domestic servants have apparently no social life whatever. This is partially explained by the long hours of work that leave them no opportunity for it; it is in part because women servants never go out in the evening, receive no callers, and are, as it is often explained, “really servants,” in the sense of having no social ambitions; and it is also because manual work in every form is considered degrading, and those who engage in it are under the social ban—a condition that is apparently accepted without outward protest.