Domestic service

by Lucy Maynard Salmon

This readjustment of work in the home and in the factory brought also certain other changes that have an important bearing. The first employees were the daughters of farmers, tradesmen, teachers, and professional men of limited means, women of sturdy, energetic New England character. They were women who, in their own homes, had been the spinners and the weavers for the family and who had sometimes eked out a slender income by doing the same work in their homes for others disqualified for it. As machinery was simplified, and new occupations more complex in character were opened to women, their places were taken in factories by Irish immigrants as these in turn have been displaced by the French Canadians. All these changes in the personnel of factory operatives have meant that while much labor has been taken out of the household, that which remained has been performed by fewer hands, and also that women of foreign nationalities have been pressed into household service.

Another and later result of the change from the domestic to the factory system was the diversion of much of the labor at first performed within the household into entirely different channels. The anti-slavery agitation beginning about 1830 enlisted the energies of many women, and the discussions growing out of it were undoubtedly the occasion for the opening of entirely new occupations to them. Oberlin College was founded in 1833 and Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1837, thus forming the entering wedge for the entrance of women into higher educational work. Medical schools for women were organized and professional life made possible, while business interests began to attract the attention of many.

Another part of the labor released by mechanical inventions and labor-saving contrivances became in time idle labor. By idle labor is meant not only absolute idleness, but labor which is unproductive and adds neither to the comfort nor to the intelligence of society. Work that had previously been performed within the home without money remuneration came to be considered unworthy of the same women when performed for persons outside their own household and for a fixed compensation. The era of so-called fancy-work, which includes all forms of work in hair, wax, leather, beads, rice, feathers, cardboard, and canvas, so offensive to the artistic sense of to-day, was one product of this labor released from necessary productive processes. It was a necessary result because some outlet was needed for the energies of women, society as yet demanded that this outlet should be within the household, and the mechanical instincts were strong while the artistic sense had not been developed. It is an era not to be looked upon with derision, but as an interesting phase in the history of the evolution of woman’s occupation.[10]

Still another channel for this idle labor was found in what has been called “intellectual fancy-work.” Literary clubs and classes sprang up and multiplied, affording occupation to their members, but producing nothing and giving at first only the semblance of education and culture. Many of them became in time a stimulus for more thorough systematic work, but in their origin they were often but a manifestation of aimless activity, of labor released from productive channels.

The era of inventions and resulting business activity has therefore changed materially the condition of affairs within the household. Before this time all women shared in preparing and cooking food; they spun, wove, and made the clothing, and were domestic manufacturers in the sense that they changed the raw material into forms suitable for consumption. But modern inventions and the resulting change in the system of manufactures, as has been seen, necessarily affected household employments. The change has been the same in kind, though not in degree, as has come in the occupations of men. In the last analysis every man is a tiller of the soil, but division of labor has left only a small proportion of men in this employment. So in the last analysis every woman is a housekeeper who “does her own work,” but division of labor has come into the household as well as into the field, though in a more imperfect form. It has left many women in the upper and middle classes unemployed, while many in the lower classes are too heavily burdened; in three of the four great industries which absorb the energies of the majority of women working for remuneration—manufacturing, work in shops, and teaching—the supply of workers is greater than the demand, while in the fourth—domestic service—the reverse is the case. But it cannot be assumed that all of those in the first three classes have necessarily been taken from the fourth class. It has been well said that “through the introduction of machinery, ignorant labor is utilized, not created.” Many who under the old order would have been able to live only under the most primitive conditions, and whose labor can be used under the new order only in the simplest forms of manufacturing, would be entirely unfit to have the care of an ordinary household in its present complex form.

One more effect must be noted of this transference of many forms of household labor to large centres through the operation of inventive genius. It has been seen that many women have thus been left comparatively free from the necessity of labor. The pernicious theory has therefore grown up that women who are rich or well-to-do ought not to work, at least for compensation, since by so doing they crowd out of remunerative employment others who need it. It is a theory that overlooks the historical fact that every person should be in the last analysis a producer, it is based wholly on the assumption that work is a curse and not a blessing, and it does not take into consideration the fact that every woman who works without remuneration, or for less than the market rates, thereby lowers the wages of every person who is a breadwinner. It is a theory which if applied to men engaged in business occupations would check all industrial progress. It is equally a hindrance when applied to women.

This revolutionizing of manufacturing processes through the substitution of the factory for the domestic system has thus rendered necessary a shifting of all forms of household labor. The division of labor here is but partially accomplished, and out of this fact arises a part of the friction that is found in household service.

Household employers and employees may be indifferent to the changes that the industrial revolutions of a century have brought, they may be ignorant of them all, but they have not been unaffected by them, nor can they remain unaffected by changes that may subsequently come in the industrial system. The interdependence of all forms of industry is so complete, that a change cannot revolutionize one without in time revolutionizing all. The old industrial régime cannot be restored, nor can household employments of to-day be put back to their condition of a hundred years ago.