“I suppose the lodging-house keepers can’t cook themselves, and can’t get servants who can,” said Lucy. “And oh, Mr. Black, many of the old style lodging-house servants were terribly overworked and underpaid and ill-treated. I once went to get lessons from a lady who had apartments in one of these houses. She told me that there was only one servant—an undersized creature who had opened the door to me. There were four sets of apartments in that house, apart from her mistress’s family of four people, and the girl got no help, except a little in the cooking, from the mistress’s aged mother. The washing was done at home there, and the servant did it all! My teacher told me that the girl was on her feet and hard at work from six o’clock in the morning till after ten o’clock at night, and ‘the worst of it was,’ she added, ‘the girl was learning nothing, and getting so used to scamped and slovenly work, that she could never rise to anything better than the same drudgery.’ She had very low wages. A week’s illness would mean the hospital. Her life’s sole resting-place would be the workhouse. We can’t be sorry for any changes which end such a state of things, can we, Mr. Black?”
“Well, no, certainly not,” he said, “but are they ending? By the look of the servants I saw in the big boarding-houses, I shouldn’t think their lives are much easier or better. They may have higher wages. Mrs. Mott’s girls certainly had a better time. They were comfortable and happy when they chose to be so. She paid them a very fair wage, considering that she taught them housework thoroughly. She says that some of the girls she had long ago went from her place to the very best situations. One of them afterwards married a young farmer, and when she visits London she always comes to see Mrs. Mott.”
“As for getting meals at restaurants,” pursued poor Tom, “I can’t do it. I can’t afford it. I know they are very cheap; but somehow there doesn’t seem much ‘bite’ in their platefuls. And there’s such a noise, and such a hurry, and such a horrid smell of food. If fellows really have to come to that, I don’t wonder they take to drinking and smoking. There’s something unreasonable about the whole thing. Here are girls nowadays ready to do men’s work for half men’s wages, so that fellows can scarcely get work at all. When I was in the City the other day I saw a great crowd of men round an office. They were pushing right up the stairway and half across the road. I thought there must have been a murder. I said to a commissionaire who was standing by, ‘What’s up?’ ‘Oh,’ says he, ‘these people are applying for a clerk’s place that’s advertised.’ ‘Anything specially good?’ I asked. ‘No, sir, only a pound a week,’ he answered. And I know it’s always so. Yet our ways of living are all getting dearer, and no woman is ready to be well paid for doing what we can’t do for ourselves. It’s inconsistent! It’s abominable!”
Lucy could not help laughing. “Don’t say ‘Women won’t do what men can’t do,’” she answered. “Don’t you know it is a favourite masculine reflection on feminine inferiority that all the great cooks are men! If that be so, then men are also likely to be the best average cooks. If they are so hard pressed for work, why do not some of them turn towards work which is crying for workers, and in which we always hear they could excel? A cook with a wage of eighteen or twenty pounds a year, and a thoroughly good home provided, is far better off than the earner of a weekly wage of a pound.”
“Oh, well,” said Tom, “I can well believe that. But why can’t women stick to cooking themselves? It’s women’s work.”
“Not if they can’t do it so well as we hear men can,” persisted Lucy.
“Well, you see, it would seem a come-down for a man,” Tom candidly confessed. “A clerkship—domestic service; they have a different sound.”
“Just so,” said Lucy, “and that being the man’s standpoint, the girls have naturally adopted it too. What reason is there in such a standpoint? On the face of it, which work is the more honourable—securing and maintaining the comfort of homes, or entering figures in a ledger and addressing envelopes? Which sphere gives the more scope for individual talent and character? And until this perverted standpoint is changed, all our present miseries will continue and increase. I have got my share, and you are finding yours. What is your housemate, Mr. Hinton, going to do?”
“He’s one of the lucky ones!” said Tom. “His married sister and her husband are coming into London, and they mean to let him have their spare room.”
A sudden idea flashed upon Lucy’s mind.