ECONOMICS AND ETHICS IN DOMESTIC SERVICE

The cynic observed yesterday that the interests of womankind were confined to the three D’s—Dress, Disease, and Domestics. To-day the bicycle has become a formidable competitor of dress and promises to do its part toward settling some of the disputed questions in regard to the rival it has partially supplanted. Biology is wrestling with disease, and bids fair to be the victor. Domestics still hold the field, but if business methods are introduced into the household, as it seems inevitable will be the case, the interests of women will have passed on and upward from the three D’s to the three B’s, and the cynic will be forced to turn his attention from woman to a more fruitful field.

It is not indeed strange that the old conception of household service should haveyielded so slowly its place in the thoughts of women. The whole subject of economic theory of which it is but a part is itself a recent comer in the field of discussion; it was scarcely more than a century and a quarter ago that Adam Smith wrote his “Wealth of Nations” and gave a new direction to economic thought.

As a result of these economic studies of the present century something has already been done to improve industrial conditions outside of the household. They have led to improved factory legislation, to better relations between employer and employee, to wide discussion of the principles on which business is conducted, but what has been accomplished has been brought about through an unrest and an agitation that have often brought disaster in their train.

From this general economic discussion the household has been in the main cut off, largely because it has been considered as belonging to the domain of sentiment rather than of business, because the household hasshrunk from all agitation and discussion of the questions with which it is immediately concerned, because it has refused to see that progress is conditioned on this agitation and discussion, because it has cried “Peace, peace, when there was no peace.” It is this very aloofness that constitutes to-day the most serious obstacle in the way of any improvement in domestic service—the failure on the part of men and women everywhere to recognize that the occupation is governed by economic law, that it is bound up inextricably with every other phase of the labor question, and that the initial step toward improvement must be the recognition of this fact. Housekeepers everywhere resent what they deem interference with their personal affairs; they betray an ill-concealed irritation when the economic side of the question is presented to them, and they believe, if their own household machinery runs smoothly, that no friction exists anywhere and that their own responsibility has ceased. Nothing to-dayis so characteristic of women as a class as their inability to assume an impersonal attitude toward any subject under discussion, while in methods of work they are prone to work from day to day and seldom plan for results to be reached years after a project has been set on foot.

This means that before any improvement in household affairs can come, the attitude of mind with which they are approached must undergo a radical change; both men and women must recognize the analogy between domestic service and other forms of labor, and must work, not for more competent cooks and parlor-maids in their individual households, not for any specific change for the better to-morrow, but for improvements in the system—improvements, the benefits of which will be reaped not by this but by subsequent generations. It is a fact from which we cannot escape that domestic service has been affected by historical and economic development, that it is to-day affected by economic conditions, thatit must in the future be in like manner affected by them. That we do not all see these facts does not in the least alter their existence. Nothing is so inexorable as law. Law works itself out whether recognized or not. If we accept the workings of the law and aid in its natural development, peace and harmony result; if we resist the action of law and struggle against it, we do not stay its progress but we injure ourselves as the bird that beats its wings against prison-bars. “Delhi is far,” said the old king of Delhi when told that an enemy had crossed his border. “Delhi is far,” he answered when told that the enemy was in sight. “Delhi is far,” he repeated when the enemy was at the gate. “Delhi is far,” he still repeated when the sword of the enemy was at his throat.

Yet certainly we may hope that another view is coming to prevail, and that housekeepers will not shrink from the storm and stress period that is the inevitable accompaniment of discussion of household affairs,but will bring the courage of their convictions to bear on the discussion of the problem. It is indeed encouraging to find so many of them beginning their studies of household affairs, not with a proposal of remedies that may chance to meet the disease, but with a recognition of the existence of a great question to be investigated, with a determination to understand the problem.

What is the problem that is presented to the housekeeper? To have a healthy, happy, virtuous and useful household. What are some of the external conditions necessary to such a household? Palatable, nourishing food, regularity of meals, prompt and efficient service. With what tools has the young housekeeper heretofore been expected to grapple with the problem in her own home? Instinct, intuition, love of home, the cardinal virtues, especially meekness and humility, orthodox views in regard to the relation of the housekeeper to her home, and a belief that personal experience, however restricted, is an infallible guide.

What has been the result? Often disastrous failure, sometimes a measurable degree of success, always an unnecessary expenditure of time, money, and mental, physical, and spiritual energy. That most pathetic story in “Pratt Portraits,” “A New England Quack,” has had more than one counterpart in the household. The results of innocent quackery there may not always be so consciously pathetic, the effects may be more subtile, but they are none the less fatal. Dora Copperfield has been, unhappily for the race, no mere picture of the imagination.

The problem should not in itself be an insoluble one; a happy, well-ordered household ought to be the normal condition of every home. But to expect to secure this end with the means given a young housekeeper is often to expect the impossible. Behind the housekeeper is not only personal ignorance but all the force of tradition; she must face difficulties so deep-seated as to seem almost inherent and ineradicable.

One of the greatest of these difficulties is the belief that the subject is not worthy of consideration and that time and strength are wasted in discussing it. This attitude of mind is well illustrated by Lord Orrery’s “Remarks on the Life and Writings of Swift,” apropos of Swift’s “General Instructions to Servants.”[11]Lord Orrery may not indeed have been altogether free from malice and jealousy in penning these words, and he certainly showed himself deficient in a sense of humor, but whatever his motive, his comments on Swift’s work illustrate fairly well a belief still prevalent. “How much time,” Lord Orrery comments, “must have been employed in putting together such a work! What an intenseness of thought must have been bestowed upon the lowest and most slavish scenes of life!... A man of Swift’s genius ought constantly to have soared into higher regions. He ought to have looked upon persons of inferior abilities as children, whom nature hadappointed him to instruct, encourage, and improve. Superior talents seem to have been intended by Providence as public benefits; and the person who possesses such blessings is certainly answerable to heaven for those endowments which he enjoys above the rest of mankind. Let him jest with dignity, and let him be ironical upon useful subjects; leaving poor slaves to heat their porridge, or drink their small beer, in such vessels as they shall find proper.”[12]

Another great difficulty is the persistent refusal to consider domestic service as a question of general interest and a part of the labor question of the day. “What is needed,” an English critic remarks, “is an infallible recipe for securing a good £16 girl and for keeping her when secured.” But alas, who shall give an infallible recipe for accomplishing the impossible? Who shall lay down the principle that will make coal-miners contented with low wages andlong hours, that will make the employers of masons satisfied with bungling work that threatens life and limb, that will lull into ease a conscience aroused by the iniquities of the sweating system? Nothing can be more chimerical than to expect a perfect automatic adjustment of the household machinery while other parts of the industrial world are not in harmonious relation to each other.

A third obstacle is the persistent belief that nothing can be done until this magic recipe has been discovered. If it is suggested that one measure of alleviation is to take a part of the work out of the household it is answered that it is useless to propose it because all work cannot be taken out of the household, because the plan would not work in the rural districts, because it would not meet the case in England, because it is expensive. Certainly all these are valid objections to considering the plan a sovereign remedy. But to refuse to try a remedy that may prove of benefit in some householdsbecause it will not work in all is quite the same as to refuse to administer a medicine in case of fever because it will not also cure consumption.

The preceding is illustrative of another difficulty that is implied in it—a fundamental ignorance on the part of many housekeepers of the processes of reasoning. This is illustrated by the reasoning that many go through with in discussing the question:

“Public laundries are in the hands of men whose standard of perfection in laundry-work is a smooth shirt-front and a stiff collar and cuff. This standard of perfection cannot be applied to the laundering of linen and children’s clothing. Therefore, table-linen and children’s clothing must be laundered in the house.”

“My mother’s cook received a part of her wages in lodging and board. My cook receives a part of her wages in lodging and board. Therefore, my daughter’s cook will receive a part of her wages in lodging and board.”

“Negro employees lodge out of the house at the South. White employees do not lodge out of the house in England. Therefore employees cannot lodge out of the house at the North.”

“Employees should be treated with consideration. My employees are treated with consideration. Therefore all employees are treated with consideration.”

“Some employees are incompetent. Good results cannot be secured with incompetent employees. Therefore good service is impossible.”

The only way of meeting this difficulty is found in the slow process of careful, systematic education. What many housekeepers need is not so much instruction in cooking or domestic sanitation as training in calculus and quaternions, Herodotus and Livy, logic and geology.

Still another hindrance is the tone of certainty and finality that characterizes all discussions concerning the household. It is a part of the religious belief of many personsthat every woman has been foreordained by Providence to be a wife, mother, and housekeeper, and that any deviation from this fundamental law is an infringement on the designs of Providence. But some of us remember that scarcely more than fifty years ago Daniel Webster said in the United States Senate that slavery had been excluded from California and New Mexico by the law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation of the earth, and that he would not through the Wilmot Proviso take pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of nature or to reënact the will of God. Many apparently believe, through the same specious reasoning, that to provide instruction in household affairs would be in a similar way to reaffirm an ordinance of nature.

Not only does this tone of finality characterize the household when it is assumed that because the majority of women will always choose to be housekeepers, therefore all women must be housekeepers, but thesame tone of finality also characterizes methods in the household. It is interesting to read to-day the objections raised fifty years ago to the use of anesthetics in surgery; it was argued that since pain was sent by heaven, it was sacrilegious to use any means of alleviating it. It may be of equal interest fifty years hence to read the protests of our contemporaries against the present effort to combat instinct with science.

Another difficulty is the inherent proneness of Americans to look for results before establishing the conditions on which alone results are to be based. The nervous haste that characterizes us physically as a nation also characterizes us mentally. We seize eagerly suggestions and scorn the slow processes through which alone suggestions can be made realities; then comes the inevitable reaction and we drift into the fatalistic tendency to put up with evils rather than fight against them.

One other general difficulty is the assumption that any improvement in domesticservice must mean putting the domestic employee on a plane of absolute equality with the employer. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth than this. It is doubtful whether equality ever meant either in America or in France what the rhetorical phrases of the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man would on the surface seem to imply. Certainly to-day we interpret equality to mean that all persons should have the opportunity of making of themselves all that is possible; to jump at the conclusion that reform in domestic service means subscription to the literal interpretation of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence is to make an unwarranted assumption. If, however, we were to accept the doctrine of equality, it would be with an appreciation of what it involves. The establishment of social equality would sometimes mean the elevation of the employer to the natural social and moral position of the employee. Our presentsocial status is well characterized by the late Lawrence Oliphant in “The Tender Recollections of Irene Macgillicuddy,” where the heroine describes her mother, suddenly elevated in the social scale, as being very democratic toward all those who were socially above her and very aristocratic toward all those who were socially below her. It is specious, not genuine, democracy that to-day blocks the progress of improvement in domestic service.

These are general conditions that confront any and all attempts to put the household on a more reasonable basis. Not less serious are the specific economic conditions existing in the household. One of these is the truck system of wages.

In every other occupation the truck system has disappeared; formerly the teacher boarded around, the minister received an annual donation party, and the tailor and the carpenter shared the home of the master workman. The more recent attempt to pay employees in part in orders for householdsupplies on an establishment kept by the head of a factory or a mill has met with the most bitter protest. The truck system of payment in general industry is antiquated and disadvantageous to both parties of the labor contract. But in the household it is accepted as one of the foreordained provisions of the household, and meets with neither protest nor objection.

That the difficulties in the way of substituting another method of payment are very great must be accepted by all, but to say that it is impossible to bring about a change before any attempt has been made is idle. Wherever negroes are employed the custom is almost universal for them to live in their own homes. In many families the experiment among white employees has been made successfully. It has been made on a somewhat extensive scale at the hotel at Saranac Inn, New York, where the employees lodge in a large house fitted up attractively with a dining-room that is used for dancing, while a billiard-room andsmoking-room are provided for the married men who board in the house with their wives. So far these experiments are only variations of the truck system; the negro employees sleep at home, but have their meals in the families of their employers; in Saranac Inn the boarding-house for employees is owned and managed by the proprietor of the hotel. But they are illustrations of the fact that in limited areas it has been found possible to take the employee out of the house of the employer as far as lodging is concerned. To accomplish this must be the first step toward any modification of the truck system. Fifty years ago the teacher who “boarded ’round” probably looked on the truck system as an inevitable accompaniment of the occupation. Teaching is being raised from an occupation to a profession and one of the elements in the change is the fact that wages have been put on a different plane.

Another economic difficulty that some persons have found lies in the fact that, ashas been said, the substitution of contract for status is at once the object and the method of modern civilization, and that domestic service owes nearly all of its difficulties to the fact that it is based on status. The reason why it has not been transferred to contract is because it is part of family life and no one has as yet shown how the family can be preserved as an institution if its members rest their relations on contract and not on status.

This may be true if the domestic employee is to be considered a part of the family. Yet just here is the anomaly and the fallacy of the objection. The domestic employee is not, and cannot be, a part of the family; she never in all her history has had more than a semblance of such a relationship and even that semblance has long since disappeared. The presence of the domestic employee in the family is not essential to the existence of the family; the domestic employee comes and goes, but the family remains. More than this, it must besaid that the presence of the domestic employee does something to destroy the integrity of the family life. Family life presupposes the existence of congenial tastes and sympathetic relationships. It argues nothing against domestic service as an occupation that those engaged in it are rarely those who would be chosen as life companions or even as temporary companions by those with whom the accident of occupation has thrown them.

Yet more than this must be said. The statement that family life cannot be preserved if its members rest their relations on contract ignores the fact that the tendency in family life is precisely in this direction. The wife has her allowance, sons and daughters are given their allowances, financial dealings between members of the same family are becoming more definite and even legal in their character, and the result is not the disintegration of the family as it passes from status to contract, but a greater freedom of the individualmembers and therefore a more complex and perfect organization of the family relationships.

Another economic difficulty lies in the fact that so much of the service is largely personal in character, and that, therefore, payments are regulated by personal feelings and not by a recognized standard of payment. The result of this is the obnoxious system of fees—a system difficult to be done away with as long as employees expect to receive them. Fees could be abolished by the action of the employers, but as long as they prefer to have their employees paid by other persons—a practice that would be tolerated by no other class of employers—the initiative will not come from them. Fees could be abolished by the action of the individuals disposed to give them, but so long as men selfishly believe that money ought to purchase privileges that are not rights, the initiative will not come from them. Fees could be abolished by the concerted action of employees, but so long asthey are ignorant of economic principles and indifferent to the social results of the system, the initiative will not come from them. But one of the hopeful signs of the times is the recent statement that in Paris waiters are coming to appreciate the fact that fees ultimately must mean smaller wages, since employers not only refuse to pay their employees but demand a certain percentage of the fees received. The movement among the waiters to refuse fees and to insist on wages paid by employers is full of promise.

What, then, are the conditions under which improvement in domestic service is possible?

First of all must come that attitude of mind that is willing to recognize not only the impossibility of separating domestic service from other parts of the household life, but still more the impossibility of separating the economic conditions within the household from the economic conditions without, a willingness to give upa priorireasoning in regard to domestic employments and to study the historical and economic development of the household. All superficial treatment of the question must fail of securing the desired results, and all treatment must be superficial that does not rest on the solid basis of economic history and theory.

Granted, then, the existence of economic conditions in the household, the method of procedure is the same as in all other fields of action. In medicine the first step is to diagnose the case; in law, to take evidence; in mathematics, to state the problem; in science, to marshal the facts. No set ofa prioriprinciples can be assumed in the household with the expectation that the household will conform to them. Investigation to-day stands at the door of every entrance into a new field and bars the way to any attempt to force a passage without its aid. The household has been slow to accept the inexorable fact that it must demolish its Chinese wall of exclusion andthrow open its facts to investigation, but this is the inevitable end.

Next to the household, the most conservative element in society is the school. Yet the school is already yielding to the spirit of the times. It has been pointed out in a recent number of the “Atlantic Monthly”[13]that the profession of teaching, starting with a definite and final code of principles of education, has clung tenaciously to it, and it is but to-day that the occupation is realizing that it can make progress only as progress is made in other fields, and that is through scientific investigation; only to-day is it coming to appreciate that all conclusions to be valid must be based on facts. Every occupation has passed through the same experience and the law of progress that governs all development will work itself out in the household. Minds open to conviction and trained to scientific investigation are the prerequisites for an improved condition in domestic service.

Is it said that this discussion of the subject has dealt only with its economic phases and has ignored the ethical side? Alas, life is everywhere one long protest against a varying standard of ethics. Shall we separate the ethics of household service from the ethics of the shop, the ethics of the factory, the ethics of the professions? Shall we be governed by one code in the family, by another code in the church, by a third code in the school, and a fourth code in the state? Is the subject of ethics to be divided and pigeon-holed in compartments labeled “ethics for domestic service,” “ethics for skilled labor,” “ethics for unskilled labor,” “ethics for employers,” and “ethics for employees?” Who shall separate any question in economics, nay more, any question in life from its ethical phases? Who shall declare that the ethical code for one is not the ethical code for all?

It is said that every book is but the elaboration of a single idea. In a similar way all discussion of domestic service must haveits beginning and its end with the idea that no improvement is possible that is not inaugurated by that class in society that sees most clearly the economic as well as the ethical elements involved in it, and that work by the slow methods of careful, patient investigation is the only way by which its difficulties, all too evident, may be lessened, not for ourselves but for those who shall come after us.

FOOTNOTES:[11]Works of Swift,XI, 365-441.[12]Cited fromRemarks on the Life and Writings of Swift, p. 179, inWorks of Swift,XI, 365.[13]Frederic Burk,The Training of Teachers, October, 1897.

[11]Works of Swift,XI, 365-441.

[12]Cited fromRemarks on the Life and Writings of Swift, p. 179, inWorks of Swift,XI, 365.

[13]Frederic Burk,The Training of Teachers, October, 1897.

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