The Ladies Home Journal believes that, no less than factory and commercial worker, the oldest of home workers—the “domestic”—should be protected by standardization of wages, hours and living conditions. An editorial in the March issue says:
There is today practically no standard of wages for domestic help. The wages vary in different cities: in fact they vary in a city and a neighboring suburb. One “employment agency” fixes one wage: another settles on a different wage. There is no equitable fairness either to mistress or servant. No one really knows what is fair. The same haphazard system applies to hours of work. Neither employer nor servant knows what constitutes a fair day’s work for a cook or a maid. The whole question should be threshed out and adjusted to a standard just as are other branches of labor. Whether the eight-hour idea can be effectively worked out in the home is a question: more likely we shall have to begin on a ten-hour-day basis and gradually adjust ourselves to an eight-hour schedule with extra pay for extra hours. Employer and helper should know exactly where each stands on both questions of hours and wages. There is no further reason why, gradually, the system of our servants living outside of our homes should not be generally brought into vogue—the same as the working women engaged in all business lines. It is now done in “flats” and “apartments” where there is no room for servants’ quarters, and there is really no reason why the system should not be followed in houses where there is room. This would give a freedom of life to the servant that she does not now have, and which lack of freedom, and hours of her own and a life of her own, is the chief source of objection to domestic service, while the employers’ gain would lie in the fact that our homes could be smaller in proportion to the number of servants for whom we must now have rooms. In other words there seems to be no practical reason, except a blind adherence to custom, why the worker in the home should not be placed on exactly the same basis as the worker in the office, the store or the factory. That this idea is destined to come in the future, and in the near future, admits of no doubt. Of course it will take some time to consider all the phases of the matter that make home service different from office or store service. But we shall never solve the question of domestic service until we first place it on a practical business basis.
In the library of Clark University the volumes of Charles Booth’s Life and Labor of London are bound under the title A Survey of London.
BOOKS
THE EVOLUTION OF A COUNTRY COMMUNITY
By Warren H. Wilson. The Pilgrim Press. 221 pp. Price $1.25; by mail of The Survey $1.35.
Because Dr. Wilson has made a clear and pointed statement of fundamental conditions, the student of rural sociology is grateful for this book, even though much of what it contains is obvious to him. Throughout, the writer shows his belief that the rural population can be improved by a socially actuated church. Although he believes that a country church should be inspirational he makes clear the fact that the church cannot succeed unless it enters into the whole life of the farm, economic and otherwise. For instance, Dr. Wilson very properly insists that if a farmer is producing but sixty bushels of potatoes on an acre of land which should yield three hundred bushels he is guilty of a wrong that should be denounced just as stridently as the doctrinal sins which have so long occupied the attention of rural pastors. In the co-operation of these activities rather than in actual union the writer sees promise of a solution of many of the problems of the country church. He shows clearly that people cannot be united in religion until they are united in their social economy.
“The business of the church is to organize co-operative enterprises, economic, social and educational, and ... to educate them in the advantages of life together. Co-operation must become a gospel.”