A certain healing and correction would doubtless ensue could we but secure for the protection and education of industrial workers that nurture of health and morals which women have so long reserved for their own families and which has never been utilized as a directing force in industrial affairs.
When the family constituted the industrial organism of the day, the daughters of the household were carefully taught in reference to the place they would take in that organism, but as the household arts have gone outside the home, almost nothing has been done to connect the young women with the present great industrial system. This neglect has been equally true in ret yard to the technical and cultural sides of that system.
The failure to fit the education of women to the actual industrial life which is carried on about them has had disastrous results in two directions.
First, industry itself has lacked the mod ification which women might have brought to it had they committed the entire movement to that ( 198) growing concern for a larger and more satisfying life for each member of the community, a concern which we have come to regard as legitimate. Second, the more prosperous women would have been able to understand and adjust their own difficulties of household management in relation to the producer of factory products, as they are now utterly unable to do.
As the census of 1900 showed that more than half of the women employed in "gainful occupations" in the United States are engaged in households, certainly their conditions of labor lie largely in the hands of women employers.
At a conference held at Lake Placid by employers of household labor, it was contended that future historical review may show that the girls who are to-day in domestic service are the really progressive women of the age; that they are those who are fighting conditions which limit their freedom, and although they are doing it blindly, at least they are demanding avenues of self- expression outside their work; and that this struggle from conditions detrimental to their highest life is the ever-recurring story of the emancipation of first one class and then another. It was further contended that in this effort to become sufficiently educated to be able to understand the needs of an educated employer from an independent stand ( 199)-point, they are really doing the community a great service, and did they but receive co-operation instead of opposition, domestic service would lose its social ostracism and attract a more intelligent class of women. And yet this effort, perfectly reasonable from the standpoint of historic development and democratic tradition, receives little help from the employing housekeepers, because they know nothing of industrial development.
The situation could be understood only by viewing it, first, in the relation to recent immigration and, second, in connection with the factory system at the present stage of development in America. A review of the history of domestic service in a fairly prosperous American family begins with the colonial period, when the daughters of the neighboring farmers came in to "help" during the busy season. This was followed by the Irish immigrant, when almost every kitchen had its Nora or Bridget, while the mistress of the household retained the sweeping and dusting and the Saturday baking. Then came the halcyon days of German "second girls" and cooks, followed by the Swedes. The successive waves of immigration supply the demand for domestic service, gradually obliterating the fact that as the women became more familiar with ( 200) American customs, they as well as their men folk, entered into more skilled and lucrative positions.
In these last years immigration consists in ever- increasing numbers of South Italians and of Russian, Polish, and Rumanian Jews, none of whom have to any appreciable extent entered into domestic service. The Italian girls are married between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, and to live in any house in town other than that of her father seems to an Italian girl quite incomprehensible. The strength of the family tie, the need for "kosher" foods, the celebration of religious festivities, the readiness with which she takes up the sewing trades in which her father and brother are already largely engaged, makes domestic service a rare occupation for the daughters of the recent Jewish immigrants. Moreover, these two classes of immigrants have been quickly absorbed, as, indeed, all working people are, by the increasing demand for the labor of young girls and children in factory and workshops. The paucity of the material for domestic service is therefore revealed at last, and we are obliged to consider the material for domestic service which a democracy supplies, and also to realize that the administration of the household has suffered be- cause it has become unnaturally isolated from the rest of the community.
( 201) The problems of food and shelter for the family, at any given moment, must be considered in relation to all the other mechanical and industrial life of that moment, quite as the intellectual life of the family finally depends for its vitality upon its relation to the intellectual resources of the rest of the community. When the administrator of the household deliberately refuses to avail herself of the wonderful inventions going on all about her, she soon comes to the point of priding herself upon the fact that her household is administered according to traditional lines and of believing that the moral life of the family is so enwrapped in these old customs as to be endangered by any radical change. Because of this attitude on the part of contemporary housekeepers, the household has firmly withstood the beneficent changes and healing innovations which applied science and economics would long ago have brought about could they have worked naturally and unimpeded.
