Published October 1906
APOLOGIA
In 1897 the author of these sketches published a book entitled “Domestic Service.” It was an attempt to consider certain historical and economic aspects of a common occupation and its aim was to induce others to investigate by scientific processes a neglected field of inquiry. It distinctly disclaimed any and all attempts to square the circle by proposing a plan to do away with all difficulties in the present condition of household service.
The book was not one of “the six best sellers” of the season, it was never duplicated by a public library, and it never secured a lodgment at the Tabard Inn. A modest second edition, not yet exhausted, represents its present rating in the authors’ “Bradstreet’s.” The book was a disappointment to many housewives who had noted its appearance because they had hoped to find in it a sovereign remedy for all domestic ills. Instead of that they found only rather repellant footnotes, statistical tables, appendices, and bibliographies. “What connection,” they probably asked, “exists between the far-away fact that there is one domestic employee to every one hundred and fifty-six inhabitants in Oklahoma and the near-at-hand fact that there is a dearth of good cooks in Pantopia?” But Moses Coit Tyler, beatissima memoria, once instructed a class of college seniors about to begin the study of certain works in English literature that the initial step in all literary criticism was to find the author’s object and to judge him by his success in attaining that object; that an artist who intends to paint a landscape must be judged by his success in landscape painting, and not criticised because the landscape is not a figure piece. To the charge therefore that a book of three hundred odd pages contained no panacea with virtues attested by hundreds of housekeepers whose domestic ills had been cured by its application, the apologetic answer might be made that the writer professed to be only a seeker after facts, not a domestic physician,—she therefore craved judgment on the facts collected, not on the cure-all unsought and therefore unexploited.
But the author had secretly craved a hearing from the economists, although conscious that she was not one of the guild and therefore might be open to the charge of trespassing on the domain of others. She had also secretly hoped for a hearing from her fellow-workers in the field of history, although conscious that the proportion of history to economics in the book was in inverse ratio. Gaining admission to the salon, however, does not prevent the work of an amateur from being “skyed,” and “Domestic Service” was hung above the line. To the economists whose attention may have been called to the book, it doubtless seemed unreasonable that one who had apparently always been connected with work in history should meddle with economics; to the historians, it probably seemed apostasy to wander, even for a moment, from the path of history. Ergo mea apologia.
In September, 1887, I became associated with Vassar College with the understanding that I was to give instruction in history and economics. The work in history proved unexpectedly heavy and it was therefore necessary for me to defer taking up the work in economics until the following year. The same conditions existed for three successive years and I then definitely abandoned all thought of undertaking regular work in economics. But although unable to carry out all that had been expected, it seemed possible to make some compensation and therefore at the end of the first year an investigation of domestic service was planned. A series of schedules was drawn up and these were distributed to the members of two successive classes graduating from Vassar College. The publication of the results of the investigation was delayed in order to incorporate with them certain returns of the United States Census of 1890 and these were not available until late in the year, 1896.
A second explanation may be needed concerning the choice of the subject. A residence in several communities differing somewhat widely in geographical location and in industrial conditions had disclosed the fact that in every place the demand for capable household employees was greatly in excess of the supply, largely, it was commonly believed, because in each place the conditions were “peculiar.” These unusual and peculiar conditions were the competition of factories, the competition of shops, the loneliness of farm life, the loneliness of a great city, the inaccessibility of suburbs, the heat of the Western prairies, the dampness of the sea-shore, the life of a college town, and numerous variants of these general principles. All of the conditions that most attract to a place other residents and all the conditions most favorable to other occupations seemed to be always attended with fatality in the case of domestic employees. But as the union of the seven colors of the rainbow forms white light, was it possible that all these peculiar conditions could be reduced to a single fundamental cause that should explain the discrepancy between demand and supply?
Another consideration in favor of selecting domestic service as a reasonable subject for investigation lay in the accessibility of the material. Every household, whether with or without domestic employees, could add its contribution to the inquiry. Moreover, in an age that collects everything from baggage tags and cigar ribbons to old china and old masters, could not a zeal for collecting be turned in the direction of collecting the hitherto untabulated experiences of different households?