Another curious anomaly is that domestic servants are becoming fewer in proportion to the population, 183 although the level of their wages is very high in comparison with the usual payments for women’s work. Between 1881 and 1901 female indoor servants increased from 1,230,406 to 1,330,783, an increase of 8.2 per cent., while the population increased 25.2 per cent. Actually, then, there was a smaller proportion of the population engaged in domestic service in 1901 then in 1881.[77] What is still more remarkable is that at the younger ages the number has actually decreased. Between the ages 15-20, there is a decrease of 7.3 per cent., while in the number of females living at those ages there is an increase of 28.1 per cent. This suggests that the difficulty of finding servants will intensify as time goes on, as is indeed borne out by observation. Other women’s industries are growing very rapidly. The number of female clerks more than trebled between 1891 and 1901. In the same period, female elementary school teachers increased by over 50 per cent., and the women engaged in hospital and institution service and in workhouses and workhouse infirmaries by 41 per cent. These facts indicate that domestic service is becoming less and less popular and is losing ground, while other women’s industries are gaining.
It is our duty then to consider the causes of this state of things, which cannot be regarded with equanimity. Our steadily increasing wealth ought to make it more and more possible and 184 desirable for more women to specialise in those basic industries of cooking and cleaning, which are of the utmost importance for the right ordering of life.
The question must be treated in reference to the general industrial and social changes of our time. Many ladies, knowing nothing of economics, discuss the matter as one of personal relations only, and when they find themselves annoyed with one incompetent servant after another, content themselves with blaming the servants as individuals without inquiring whether the difficulty has any deeper root. Or they take up a reactionary attitude, and declare that the lower classes are over-educated and too well off, and are in consequence refusing to perform their natural duties. But neither personal blame nor the semi-feudal belief that the one and only rightful destiny of daughters of bricklayers, coal miners, or small clerks is to become cooks or housemaids in the service of their betters will avail to throw any light on the difficulty of obtaining competent domestic workers. We must study carefully and without bias the conditions of that industry as compared with other industries, in order to solve the problem.
In the first place, we may note the advantages of domestic service. It is, as has been already observed, well paid. Some investigations carried out by a group of my students last year led to the conclusion that the ordinary cook, housemaid, or general servant in middle-class households costs her employer in wages, food, house-room, heating, 185 lighting, and insurance about £50 a year.[78] I have been informed by a lady accustomed to deal with servants in a wealthy household, that board wages are usually 14s. 6d. for men servants, and 12s. 6d. and 10s. 6d. for women servants. When we remember that in the ranks from which servants are drawn,[79] a workman is comparatively well off if he is earning 35s. a week for the support of himself and his family, and that a woman who makes £1 a week is a rarity,[80] we should expect to find domestic service one of the industries in which the supply outruns the demand. Again, there is no period of apprenticeship or training necessary. The servant earns from the first day she enters service, and is often carefully trained by a mistress in cooking or waiting at table, only to leave that mistress for a better situation the moment she thoroughly understands her duties. Again, in many households the maids share in the family holidays. They spend a month at the seaside or in the country, having all their travelling expenses paid as a matter of course. Their allowance of personal holidays may not be large, but at all events their wages run on without 186 interruption. These advantages are the more remarkable, when it is considered that they have been attained without the aid of any trade organisations at all. Trade unions for domestic workers have been formed from time to time, but their life has been ephemeral and their membership of the smallest. High wages, practically continuous employment, food and lodging usually of a standard much above that in the servant’s own home—all these are to be found in domestic work. Why, then, does it remain unpopular?
In the first place, the hours are long and irregular. A domestic servant, especially in a place where only one or two are kept, is “on duty” for at least fifteen hours a day—from 7 A.M. to 10 P.M. Even meal-hours are not free from interruption. The thoughtful mistress, it is true, will not summon her maids at dinner-time or supper-time if she can help it, but all mistresses are not thoughtful, and in any case there is the doorbell to be answered. Much of the work is not hard; in a well-managed household there should always be an hour or two of comparative leisure in the afternoon and again in the evening. But the average maid is never sufficiently free through the whole day to go out without asking leave, or to lie down for an hour should her morning work have been unusually heavy. Of some households a much blacker picture could be painted. Not merely do the maids have no leisure, but they are actually hard at work washing, cooking, ironing, serving meals, washing up, carrying 187 coals and hot water, &c., for even a larger period than the fifteen hours which, as noted before, is the minimum of time “on duty.” These hours compare very unfavourably with the six or seven hours’ day of the elementary school-teacher, the eight hours’ day of the Civil servant, and the nine or ten hours worked in factories and in offices.
Next, there is the lack of personal freedom. This may seem a mere sentimental objection not to be weighed in the balance for a moment by sensible persons as against the solid advantages of domestic work. But sentimental objections count more decisively with women than with men. Miss B. L. Hutchins points out in a recent article that respectable girls of the working class often accept quite low wages, provided only their employment is light, clean, comfortable, and affords abundant hours of leisure. And women enter on domestic service exactly at the age at which freedom and some amount of leisure seem more valuable than high wages. Doubtless in later years many sweated drudges have wished that they had become servants instead of entering the jam-factory or the steam-laundry. But at sixteen and seventeen, when the choice was made, the situation appeared very different. I have very little doubt that one of the greatest objections to domestic service is that it removes the young woman from her own class just at the marriageable age, and therefore decreases her chances of marriage, while in some ill-governed households and in hotel and restaurant service she may be subjected to severe 188 temptation. The widening of the gulf between rich and poor and their segregation into distinct districts increases this disadvantage.
Again, there is the fact that domestic service is strangely enough regarded as a peculiarly menial occupation, in itself a mark of a lower social grade. This is indicated by the use of the Christian name, the insistence on a uniform, and the commonness of contemptuous terms such as “slavey.” Refined people are careful to avoid the use even of the word “servant,” replacing it by “maid,” so strong is this connotation of inferiority. Here again we are on sentimental grounds. But it certainly seems undesirable, in view of the spread of doctrines of social equality, that this suggestion of a low social status should cling around the person who undertakes such important duties as cooking and washing.
Another disadvantage is the loneliness of domestic servants. In other occupations women have colleagues and companions. The general servant, coming as she does from a lively even if poor working-class home, with neighbours at hand for gossip in moments of relaxation, may find it very hard to bear up against the restraint and unnatural quietude of her first place,[81] and often ends by returning in haste to the factory industry she had been persuaded to abandon, when she will find the gaiety and lively society of girls and young men of her own age. Even when two maids are 189 kept, they may not be congenial to one another, and one cannot deny that to share work, meals, and often bed with a woman whom one has reason to dislike, is a fate we would all wish to avoid.
Girls of higher status and more intelligence are often turned from domestic service by the fact that it affords little or no opportunity for self-improvement or recreation, or for promotion inside its own ranks. Servants cannot go to lectures or evening classes. The servant’s piano or bicycle is a common theme for jesting in the comic papers. In a large household or in a hotel promotion may be obtained, but the maid who becomes a general servant or a single-handed cook reaches the limit of her increase in income at an early age.
Many of the disadvantages noted do not apply to large households. There companionship is to be found, and promotion may be looked for. The hours are more regular, meals less interrupted, and free time easier to obtain. Hence I was not surprised when I questioned proprietors of clubs, residential hotels, and the mistresses of wealthy households to learn that most of them considered the servant difficulty to be greatly exaggerated. The housekeeper of one suite of residential flats told me she had no trouble at all in getting servants, and that she sent them off at a week’s notice if they proved unsatisfactory. “Even if I cannot get a maid to live in at once,” she added, “I can always supplement the work of the others by an extra charwoman. There are any number of outworkers to be had.” In another residential 190 hotel all the women servants had two evenings a week free from 5 to 10.30. Here, too, there was never much difficulty in obtaining workers.