CHAPTER IX
THE SERVANT IN HER HOUSE
According to the findings of the Massachusetts State Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose investigation into previous occupation of fallen women was described in a former chapter, domestic service is a dangerous trade. Of the 3,966 unfortunates who came under the examination of the Bureau's investigators, 1,115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been in domestic service. No other single industry furnished anything like this proportion.
From time to time reformatories and institutions dealing with delinquent women and girls examine the industrial status of their charges, always with results which agree with or even exceed the Massachusetts statistics. Bedford Reformatory, one of the two New York State institutions for delinquent women, in an examination of a group of one thousand women, found four hundred and thirty general houseworkers, twenty-four chamber-maids, thirteen nursemaids, eight cooks, and thirty-six waitresses. As some of the waitresses may have been restaurant workers, we will eliminate them. Even so, it will be seen that four hundred and seventy-five—nearly half of the Bedford women—had been servants.
In 1908 the Albion House of Refuge, New York, admitted one hundred and sixty-eight girls. Of these ninety-two were domestics, one was a lady's maid, and nine were nursemaids.
Of one hundred and twenty-seven girls in the Industrial School at Rochester, New York, in 1909, only fifty-one were wage earners. Of that number twenty-nine had worked in private homes as domestics. Bedford Reformatory receives mostly city girls; Albion and Rochester are supplied from small cities and country towns. It appears that domestic service is a dangerous trade in small communities as well as in large ones.
On the face of it, the facts are wonderfully puzzling. Domestic service is constantly urged upon women as the safest, healthiest, most normal profession in which they can possibly engage. Assuredly it seems to possess certain unique advantages. Domestic service is the only field of industry where the demand for workers permanently exceeds the supply. The nature of the work is essentially suited, by habit, tradition, and long experiment, to women. It offers economic independence within the shelter of the home.
Lastly, housework pays extremely well. A girl totally ignorant of the art of cooking, of any household art, one whose function is to clean, scrub, and assist her employer to prepare meals, can readily command ten dollars a month, with board. The same efficiency, or lack of efficiency, in a factory or department store would be worth about ten dollars a month, without board. The wages of a competent houseworker, in any part of the country, average over eighteen dollars a month. Add to this about thirty dollars a month represented by food, lodging, light, and fire, and you will see that the competent houseworker's yearly income amounts to five hundred and seventy-six dollars. This is a higher average than the school-teacher or the stenographer receives; it is almost double the average wage of the shop girl, or the factory girl. It is, in fact, about as high as the usual income of the American workingman.
It is true that the social position of the domestic worker is lower than that of the teacher, stenographer, or factory worker. This undoubtedly affects the attractiveness of domestic service as a profession. But the lower social position is in itself no explanation of the high rate of immorality. At least there are no figures to prove that the rate of morality rises or falls with the social status of the individual.