I once knew a woman who, deliberately, and of purpose, changed servants every month. She said no new broom lasted more than four weeks, and when one became grubby and stumpy she got rid of it. Her house was the cleanest in town and her temper did not seem worse for friction.
Another woman who, strange to tell, lived to be ninety years old, “liked moving” and never lived two years in one and the same house. She maintained that she kept clear of rubbish by frequent flittings, and enjoyed rubbing out and beginning again. Personally, I should have preferred a clean, lively conflagration every three years or so, but she throve upon nomadism.
In minor details of housewifery, as in more important, make up your mind how you will manage the home and turn a deaf ear to gratuitous suggestions from people whose own households would be better conducted if their energies were concentrated.
Let one example suffice: A so-called reformer felt herself called in (or out of) the Gospel of Humanity, the other day, to inveigh in a parlor lecture upon the unkindness and general unchristianliness of the maid’s cap and apron which all would-be stylish mistresses insist upon. “Have I, a Christian woman in a republic,” cried the oratress, “the right to put the badge of servitude upon my sister woman, because, having less money than I have, she is obliged to earn her living? Do I not tend to degrade, instead of elevating her?
“Of a piece with the cap and apron is the black dress, now ‘the thing’ for girls in domestic service. Why should not Bridget and Dinah exercise their own right in dress as well as I?”
These questions have been put to me many times by women who think and act for themselves without regard to arbitrary conventionalities.
I am so well assured that most conventionalities have a substratum of common sense that I am slow to condemn any one of them.
I dispute, at the outset, the insinuation that black dress, white cap and apron are a badge of servitude. I know no more independent class of women than trained nurses, no more arbitrary men than railway officials. I should certainly never consider the distinctive garb of the Sisters of Charity—Protestant or Roman Catholic—as degrading. The idea of humiliation attached to the uniform of housemaid and child’s nurse in the mind of employees or employer is founded upon the conviction that domestic service demeans her who performs it. This is precisely the prejudice which sensible, philanthropic women are trying to beat down—a prejudice that has more to do with the complications of the servant question than all other influences combined. If I hesitate to ask a maid entering my service to wear the uniform of her calling, I intimate too broadly to be misunderstood that there is something in that service which would demean her were it generally known that she is in it.
I had one maid, years ago, who would not run around the corner to grocery or haberdasher’s without taking time to put on her Sunday coat and hat, and to lay off her apron. When I spoke to her of the absurdity and inconvenience of this, she confessed, blushingly, that the porter at the grocery was “keeping company with her,” and “it was nat’ral a gurrel should want to look her best when she was like to see him.”
“Ah,” I said, “doesn’t he know what your position is in my house? Has he never seen you in cap and apron?”