Progress in the household

by Lucy Maynard Salmon

Not only does this tone of finality characterize the household when it is assumed that because the majority of women will always choose to be housekeepers, therefore all women must be housekeepers, but the same tone of finality also characterizes methods in the household. It is interesting to read to-day the objections raised fifty years ago to the use of anesthetics in surgery; it was argued that since pain was sent by heaven, it was sacrilegious to use any means of alleviating it. It may be of equal interest fifty years hence to read the protests of our contemporaries against the present effort to combat instinct with science.

Another difficulty is the inherent proneness of Americans to look for results before establishing the conditions on which alone results are to be based. The nervous haste that characterizes us physically as a nation also characterizes us mentally. We seize eagerly suggestions and scorn the slow processes through which alone suggestions can be made realities; then comes the inevitable reaction and we drift into the fatalistic tendency to put up with evils rather than fight against them.

One other general difficulty is the assumption that any improvement in domestic service must mean putting the domestic employee on a plane of absolute equality with the employer. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth than this. It is doubtful whether equality ever meant either in America or in France what the rhetorical phrases of the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man would on the surface seem to imply. Certainly to-day we interpret equality to mean that all persons should have the opportunity of making of themselves all that is possible; to jump at the conclusion that reform in domestic service means subscription to the literal interpretation of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence is to make an unwarranted assumption. If, however, we were to accept the doctrine of equality, it would be with an appreciation of what it involves. The establishment of social equality would sometimes mean the elevation of the employer to the natural social and moral position of the employee. Our present social status is well characterized by the late Lawrence Oliphant in “The Tender Recollections of Irene Macgillicuddy,” where the heroine describes her mother, suddenly elevated in the social scale, as being very democratic toward all those who were socially above her and very aristocratic toward all those who were socially below her. It is specious, not genuine, democracy that to-day blocks the progress of improvement in domestic service.

These are general conditions that confront any and all attempts to put the household on a more reasonable basis. Not less serious are the specific economic conditions existing in the household. One of these is the truck system of wages.

In every other occupation the truck system has disappeared; formerly the teacher boarded around, the minister received an annual donation party, and the tailor and the carpenter shared the home of the master workman. The more recent attempt to pay employees in part in orders for household supplies on an establishment kept by the head of a factory or a mill has met with the most bitter protest. The truck system of payment in general industry is antiquated and disadvantageous to both parties of the labor contract. But in the household it is accepted as one of the foreordained provisions of the household, and meets with neither protest nor objection.

That the difficulties in the way of substituting another method of payment are very great must be accepted by all, but to say that it is impossible to bring about a change before any attempt has been made is idle. Wherever negroes are employed the custom is almost universal for them to live in their own homes. In many families the experiment among white employees has been made successfully. It has been made on a somewhat extensive scale at the hotel at Saranac Inn, New York, where the employees lodge in a large house fitted up attractively with a dining-room that is used for dancing, while a billiard-room and smoking-room are provided for the married men who board in the house with their wives. So far these experiments are only variations of the truck system; the negro employees sleep at home, but have their meals in the families of their employers; in Saranac Inn the boarding-house for employees is owned and managed by the proprietor of the hotel. But they are illustrations of the fact that in limited areas it has been found possible to take the employee out of the house of the employer as far as lodging is concerned. To accomplish this must be the first step toward any modification of the truck system. Fifty years ago the teacher who “boarded ’round” probably looked on the truck system as an inevitable accompaniment of the occupation. Teaching is being raised from an occupation to a profession and one of the elements in the change is the fact that wages have been put on a different plane.

Another economic difficulty that some persons have found lies in the fact that, as has been said, the substitution of contract for status is at once the object and the method of modern civilization, and that domestic service owes nearly all of its difficulties to the fact that it is based on status. The reason why it has not been transferred to contract is because it is part of family life and no one has as yet shown how the family can be preserved as an institution if its members rest their relations on contract and not on status.

This may be true if the domestic employee is to be considered a part of the family. Yet just here is the anomaly and the fallacy of the objection. The domestic employee is not, and cannot be, a part of the family; she never in all her history has had more than a semblance of such a relationship and even that semblance has long since disappeared. The presence of the domestic employee in the family is not essential to the existence of the family; the domestic employee comes and goes, but the family remains. More than this, it must be said that the presence of the domestic employee does something to destroy the integrity of the family life. Family life presupposes the existence of congenial tastes and sympathetic relationships. It argues nothing against domestic service as an occupation that those engaged in it are rarely those who would be chosen as life companions or even as temporary companions by those with whom the accident of occupation has thrown them.

Yet more than this must be said. The statement that family life cannot be preserved if its members rest their relations on contract ignores the fact that the tendency in family life is precisely in this direction. The wife has her allowance, sons and daughters are given their allowances, financial dealings between members of the same family are becoming more definite and even legal in their character, and the result is not the disintegration of the family as it passes from status to contract, but a greater freedom of the individual members and therefore a more complex and perfect organization of the family relationships.

Another economic difficulty lies in the fact that so much of the service is largely personal in character, and that, therefore, payments are regulated by personal feelings and not by a recognized standard of payment. The result of this is the obnoxious system of fees—a system difficult to be done away with as long as employees expect to receive them. Fees could be abolished by the action of the employers, but as long as they prefer to have their employees paid by other persons—a practice that would be tolerated by no other class of employers—the initiative will not come from them. Fees could be abolished by the action of the individuals disposed to give them, but so long as men selfishly believe that money ought to purchase privileges that are not rights, the initiative will not come from them. Fees could be abolished by the concerted action of employees, but so long as they are ignorant of economic principles and indifferent to the social results of the system, the initiative will not come from them. But one of the hopeful signs of the times is the recent statement that in Paris waiters are coming to appreciate the fact that fees ultimately must mean smaller wages, since employers not only refuse to pay their employees but demand a certain percentage of the fees received. The movement among the waiters to refuse fees and to insist on wages paid by employers is full of promise.