Business Hours and Wages Are Helping Women to Solve the Servant Problem
BY LOUISE F. NELLIS
WANTED: A HOME ASSISTANT—Eight hours a day; six days a week. Sleep and eat at home. Pay, twelve dollars a week.
Whenever this notice appears in the Help Wanted column of a city newspaper, fifty to one hundred answers are received in the first twenty-four hours!
"Why," we hear some one say, "that seems impossible! When I advertised for a maid at forty dollars a month with board and lodging provided, not a soul answered. Why are so many responses received to the other advertisement?"
Let us look more closely at the first notice.
Wanted: A Home Assistant! How pleasant and dignified it sounds; nothing about a general houseworker or maid or servant, just Home Assistant! We can almost draw a picture of the kind of young woman who might be called by such a title. She comes, quiet, dignified, and interested in our home and its problems. She may have been in an office but has never really liked office work and has always longed for home surroundings and home duties.
I remember one case I was told of—a little stenographer. She had gladly assumed her new duties as Home Assistant, and had wept on the first Christmas Day with the family because it was the only Christmas she had spent in years in a home atmosphere. Or perhaps the applicant for the new kind of work in the home may have been employed in a department store and found the continuous standing on her feet too wearing. She welcomes the frequent change of occupation in her new position. Or she may be married with a little home of her own, but with the desire to add to the family income. We call these Home Assistants, Miss Smith or Mrs. Jones, and they preserve their own individuality and self-respect.
"Well, I would call my housemaid anything if I could only get one," says one young married woman. "There must be more to this new plan than calling them Home Assistants and addressing them as Miss."