What eight million women want

by Rheta Childe Dorr

Three girls sent to a house of this kind found themselves prisoners. One girl made such a disturbance by screaming and crying that the proprietor literally kicked her out of the house. The investigators for the Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research saw this girl in a hospital, insane and dying from the treatment she had received. Another of the three escaped from the place. She, too, was discovered in a state of dementia. The fate of the third girl is obscure.

Not all employment agencies cater to this trade. Not all would consent to be accessory to women's degradation. But the employment agency business, taken by and large, is disorganized, haphazard, out of date. It is operated on a system founded in lies and extortion. The offices want fees—fees from servants and fees from employers. They encourage servants to change their employment as often as possible. Often a firm will send a girl to a place, and a week or two later will send her word that they have a better job for her. Sometimes they arrange with her to leave her place after a certain period, promising her an easier position or a better wage. They favor the girl who changes often. "You're a nice kind of a customer!" jeered one proprietor to a girl who boasted that she had been in a family for five years. The girl was a customer to him, and she was nothing more.

To his profitable customer the agent is often very accommodating. If she lacks references he writes her flattering ones, or loans her a reference written by some woman of prominence. References, indeed, are often handed around like passports among Russian revolutionists.

Many of these unpleasant facts were brought to light in the course of the investigation made by the Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research. The result of their report was a model employment agency law, passed by the New York State Legislature, providing for a strict licensing system, rigid forms of contract, regulation of fees, and inspection by special officers of the Bureau of Licenses. The law applies only to cities of the first class, and unfortunately has never been very well enforced. Perhaps it has not been possible to enforce it.

In all the cities examined by the Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research the investigators found the majority of employment agencies in close connection with the homes of the agents. In New York, of three hundred and thirteen offices visited, one hundred and twenty were in tenements, one hundred and seven in apartment houses, thirty-nine in residences and only forty-nine in business buildings. In Philadelphia, only three per cent of employment agencies were found in business buildings. Chicago made a little better showing, with nineteen per cent in business houses. The difficulty of properly regulating a business which is carried on in the privacy of a home is apparent. When an agency is in a business building it usually has conspicuous signs, and often the rooms are well equipped with desks, comfortable chairs, and other office furnishings. But the majority of agencies are of another description. Those dealing with immigrant girls are sometimes filthy rooms in some rear tenement, reached through a saloon or a barber shop facing the street. Often the other tenants of the building are fortune tellers, palmists, "trance mediums," and like undesirables.

A large number of these agencies operate lodging houses for their patrons. There is hardly a good word to say for most of these, except that they are absolutely necessary. Dirty, unsanitary, miserable as they usually are, if they were closed by law, hundreds, perhaps thousands of domestics temporarily out of work, would be turned into the streets. Many are unfamiliar with the cities they live in. Many more are barred from hotels on account of small means. Often a girl finding it impossible to bring herself to lie down on the wretched beds provided by these lodging houses, leaves her luggage and goes out, not to return until morning. She spends the night in dance halls and other resorts.

According to Miss Kellor's report this description of employment agencies and lodging houses attached to them applies to about seventy-five per cent of all offices in the four cities examined. For greater accuracy the investigators made a brief survey of conditions in cities, such as St. Louis, New Haven, and Columbus, Ohio. The differences were slight, showing that the employment agency problem is much the same east and west.

Domestic servants have their industrial ups and downs like other workers. Sometimes they are able to pay the fees required in a high-class employment office, while at other times they are obliged to have recourse to the cheaper places, where standards of honesty, and perhaps also, of propriety, are low. Domestic workers are the nomads of industry. Their lives are like their work,—impermanent, detached from others', unobserved.