Domestic labor

“ If these very difficulties—all of which exist elsewhere—are partially or entirely obviated by the employer of other forms of labor through the system of profit sharing, may it not reasonably be expected that they could be met in domestic service by the employment of similar means?
Domestic service, it is true, is not a wealth-producing occupation, but it is wealth-consuming probably beyond any other employment. The profit, therefore, must be negative, that is, economy in the use of time, materials, and appliances for work. ”

“ All these changes in the personnel of factory operatives have meant that while much labor has been taken out of the household, that which remained has been performed by fewer hands, and also that women of foreign nationalities have been pressed into household service. ”

“ A moderate style of housekeeping, small, compact, and simple domestic establishments, must necessarily be the general order of life in America. So many openings of profit are to be found in this country that domestic service necessarily wants the permanence which forms so agreeable a feature of it in the Old World. This being the case, it should be an object in America to exclude from the labors of the family all that can, with greater advantage, be executed out of it by combined labor. ”

“ These various explanations of the failure to consider domestic service in connection with other forms of labor are in reality but different phases of a fundamental reason—the isolation that has always attended household service and household employments. ”

“ It is idle to complain of poor servants and of poor mistresses so long as domestic service is divorced from general labor questions, and employers everywhere are ignorant of the economic laws, principles, and conditions underlying the household. Men and women might better give to the study of domestic service as an occupation the time and energy that now are absorbed in considering the vices and virtues of individual employees. ”

“ Much is heard regarding strikes and other forms of the eternal conflict between labor and capital; and yet the high rates paid, the concessions constantly made to the demands of employés, the conditions provided for them, would seem, at a superficial glance, to be such as to bridge over every difficulty. Domestic service is something that presents the greatest problem on the part of the employer. ”

“ The change from individual to collective enterprises, from the domestic to the factory system, has released a vast amount of labor formerly done within the house by women with three results: either this labour has been diverted to other places, or into other channels, or has become idle. ”

“ It should be shown to them, that, in this Country, labor has ceased to be degrading, in any class; that, in all classes, different grades of subordination must exist; and that it is no more degrading, for a domestic to regard the heads of a family as superiors in station, and treat them with becoming respect, than it is for children to do the same, or for men to treat their rulers with respect and deference. ”

“ It is a theory which if applied to men engaged in business occupations would check all industrial [15] progress. It is equally a hindrance when applied to women.
This revolutionizing of manufacturing processes through the substitution of the factory for the domestic system has thus rendered necessary a shifting of all forms of household labor. The division of labor here is but partially accomplished, and out of this fact arises a part of the friction that is found in household service. ”

“ They preferred any other employment, however laborious. Beyond all doubt, the labors of a well-regulated family are more healthy, more cheerful, more, interesting, because less monotonous, than the mechanical toils of a factory; yet the girls of New-England, with one consent, preferred the factory, and left the whole business of domestic service to a foreign population; and they did it mainly because they would not take positions in families as an inferior laboring-class by the side of others of their own age who assumed as their prerogative to live without labor. ”

“ The mere manual performance of domestic labors is not, indeed, absolutely necessary in the female head of the family of professional men; but, even here, and also in the case of great merchants and of gentlemen living on their fortunes, surely the head of the household ought to be able to give directions as to the purchasing of meal, salting meat, making bread, making preserves of all sorts ”

“ The efforts to remove the social stigma that now brands domestic service will not alone accomplish the desired result. Another means of lessening the difficulties in the modern household is to put all household employments on the same business basis as all employments outside of the household. The principles which lie at the foundation of modern business activities are division of labor and unconscious co-operation. ”

“ A house-mother of my acquaintance, whose husband owns a "section" farm, suffers much from illness, and has a large family, yet for months has been without any help in her work but that of her little girls,—the oldest not over twelve,—simply because she could not get a servant. The farmers themselves are under less necessity to labor than in many other parts of the country. Farms are comparatively large, and produce large crops, and it pays them to hire laborers. ”

“ In view of these changed and changing economic conditions it may be said that the immobility of labor, which has seemed to some economists so great an obstacle to the industrial advancement of women, [178] has practically ceased to exist in the case of domestic service. ”

“ It is surprising to foreigners that in the application of the division of labor principle to domestic work, we are actually behind them, that we still permit such excess of work and excess of waste in our domestic arrangements. Cooking and sewing, the two leading branches of domestic industry, are with them to a very large degree trades, while nursing and laundry-work are trades in a far greater degree than with us. ”

“ Knight, Madame, on treatment of servants in 1704, 28. Labor, division of, in women’s work, caused by factory system, 11; has resulted in unequal distribution of work, 13, 14; in household employments only partially accomplished, 15; characteristic of modern industry, 212; results in greater variety of products, 222. Labor of women more productive through specialization of household employments, 231, 232. Labor question, domestic service a part of, 129, 264. Laundresses, average wages, statistics, 89, 94-97. See also Cooks. Laundry work, better done out of the house, 222, 223 ”

“ If the father earned enough money to pay the rent and a few other necessary expenses, the mother could and did, feed and clothe herself and her children by her own labours when she possessed enough capital to confine herself wholly to domestic industry. ”

“ The home, by consenting to use factory products and by employing outside help, has involved itself in the great labor problem; by educating its daughters to support themselves in occupations unconnected with its management it has complicated its original problem of household administration ”

“ 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. ”

“ Though the testimony given in the preceding chapter on this topic includes the chief objection to be made by the class of workers who would seem to be most benefited by accepting household service, there remain still one or two phases seldom mentioned, but forming an essential portion of the argument against it. They belong, not to the order we have had under consideration, but to that below it from which the mass of domestic servants is recruited, and with which the housekeeper must most often deal. ”

“ Wages are too often regulated by the employer’s bank account, hours of service by his caprice, and moral questions by his personal convenience. The [122] employer is too often the autocrat in his own home. He considers that neither his neighbor nor the general public has any more concern in the business relations existing between himself and his domestic employees than it has in the price he pays for a dinner service or in the color and cut of his coat. ”

“ As to the terms of social intercourse, it seems somehow to be settled in the minds of many employers that their servants owe them and their family more respect than they and the family owe to the servants. But do they? What is the relation of servant to employer in a democratic country? Precisely that of a person who for money performs any kind of service for you. The carpenter comes into your house to put up a set of shelves—the cook comes into your kitchen to cook your dinner. ”

“ And here comes in the economic law that those occupations which admit the labor of women and children pay the whole family what the man alone receives in the occupations in which he is the sole bread-winner. ”

“ Home-work the unions will have none of, and therefore, wherever the collective bargain has been struck and kept, there we find the giving out of work from the factory absolutely forbidden, the home guarded from the entrance of the contractor, motherhood respected, babyhood defended from the outrage of child labor, and a higher standard of living secured for the family by the higher and securer earnings of the normal breadwinners. ”

“ I think I hear the two millions of American ladies protesting with one voice, "Why, even in the country, the wives and daughters of the village shopkeepers think it beneath them to stand behind the counter, and are those of our city merchants, of our professional men, to condescend to the sordid employment?" ”

“ What adulation, too, has been expended upon the work of even the domestic servant, with comparisons in plenty unfavorable to the factory occupations into which girls still persist in drifting. Yet in freedom and in social status, two of the tests by which to judge the relative desirability of occupations, the paid domestic employments take inferior ranks. ”

“ A glance at our periodical literature does indeed show unusual interest in all questions affecting domestic life. Economists are asking why the wages paid for domestic service are higher than those paid the average woman in other occupations, and why, in spite of this, the demand for household workers is greater than the supply. ”

“ This same early writer on domestic economy divides the servants, who, in a large household, were very numerous, into three classes: those who were employed on a sudden, and only for a certain work, with regard to whom the principal caution given is to bargain with them for the price of their labour before they begin; those who were employed for a certain time in a particular description of work, as tailors, shoemakers, butchers, and others, who always came to work in the house on materials belonging to the master of the house, or harvest-men, &c., in the country ”

“ The home furnished nearly all its own food, spun and made its clothes, trained its own children, and knew scarcely any community endeavor or any syndication of effort except in the church.
The industrial revolution took labor largely out of the home into the factory. Except for farm life, the husband became an outside worker and the older boys followed him to the distant shop or factory. Earning a living ceased to be a family act and became a social act in a larger sphere. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They thus kept their households decently clad and the surplus of their labors they sold to such as chose to buy rather than make for themselves. In this way the female part of families by their industry and strict economy frequently supported the whole domestic circle, evincing the strength of their attachment and the value of their service. ”

“ As employer, he plays the cheap labor of a disfranchised class against the employe, thus in a measure undermining his independence, making wife and daughter in the world of work the rivals of husband and father. ”

“ And, so, the individual workman who gets his wife and children to assist him may thus increase his income; but in occupations where it has become habitual for the wife and children of the laborer to supplement his work, it is notorious that the wages earned by the whole family do not on the average exceed those of the head of the family in occupations where it is usual for him only to work. Swiss family labor in watch making competes in cheapness with American machinery. ”

“ It is impossible to understand the condition of domestic service as it exists to-day without a cursory glance at the changes in household employments resulting from the inventions of the latter part of the eighteenth century. ”

“ Now the women who do all the cooking, washing, and sewing of their families, the wives of small farmers, mechanics, and labourers, as well as those who hire out their time, servants, mill-hands, shop-girls, seamstresses, etc., are still self-supporting, still producers, because they perform a large part of all the lighter manual labour needed for the sustenance and well-being of the community. ”

“ Further, in the numerous households where husband and wife alike go out to work—perhaps at the same form of labour, as is the case in many factory districts—the woman on returning home (after working all day, just as her husband does, to contribute her share to the weekly expenses necessary for the support of household and children) has to cook, clean, sew, etc., in the time which her husband can employ as he chooses. ”