Prisoners of Poverty: Women Wage-Workers, Their Trades and Their Lives

“I don’t see why people are surprised that we don’t rush into places,” said a shop-girl. “Our world may be a very narrow world, and I know it is; but for all that, it’s the only one we’ve got, and right or wrong, we’re out of it if we go into service. A teacher or cashier or anybody in a store, no matter if they have got common-sense, doesn’t want to associate with servants. Somehow you get a sort of smooch. Young men think and say, for I have heard lots of them, ‘Oh, she can’t amount to much if she hasn’t brains enough to make a living outside of a kitchen!’ You’re just down once for all if you go into one.”

“I don’t agree with you at all,” said a young teacher who had come with her. “The people that hire you go into kitchens and are not disgraced. What I felt was, for you see I tried it, that they oughtn’t to make me go into livery. I was worn out with teaching, and so I concluded to try being a nurse for a while. I found two hard things: one, that I was never free for an hour from the children, for I took meals and all with them, and any mother knows what a rest it is to go quite away from them, even for an hour; and the other was that she wanted me to wear the nurse’s cap and apron. She was real good and kind; but when I said, ‘Would you like your sister, Miss Louise, to put on cap and apron when she goes out with them?’ she got very red, and straightened up. ‘It’s a very different matter,’ she said; ‘you must not forget that in accepting a servant’s place you accept a servant’s limitations.’ That finished me. I loved the children, but I said, ‘If you have no other thought of what I am to the children than that, I had better go.’ I went, and she put a common, uneducated Irish girl in my place. I know a good many who would take nurse’s places, and who are sensible enough not to want to push into the family life. But the trouble is that almost every one wants to make a show, and it is more stylish to have the nurse in a cap and apron, and so she is ordered into them.”

“I’ve tried it,” said one who had been a dressmaker and found her health going from long sitting. “My trouble was, no conscience as to hours; and I believe you’ll find that is, at the bottom, one of the chief objections. My first employer was a smart, energetic woman, who had done her own work when she was first married and knew what it meant, or you’d think she might have known. But she had no more thought for me than if I had been a machine. She’d sit in her sitting-room on the second floor and ring for me twenty times a day to do little things, and she wanted me up till eleven to answer the bell, for she had a great deal of company. I had a good room and everything nice, and she gave me a great many things, but I’d have spared them all if only I could have had a little time to myself. I was all worn out, and at last I had to go. There was another reason. I had no place but the kitchen to see my friends. I was thirty years old and as well born and well educated as she, and it didn’t seem right. The mistresses think it’s all the girls’ fault, but I’ve seen enough to know that women haven’t found out what justice means, and that a girl knows it, many a time, better than her employer. Anyway, you couldn’t make me try it again.”

“My trouble was,” said another, who had been in a cotton-mill and gone into the home of one of the mill-owners as chambermaid, “I hadn’t any place that I could be alone a minute. We were poor at home, and four of us worked in the mill, but I had a little room all my own, even if it didn’t hold much. In that splendid big house the servants’ room was over the kitchen, – hot and close in summer, and cold in winter, and four beds in it. We five had to live there together, with only two bureaus and a bit of a closet, and one washstand for all. There was no chance to keep clean or your things in nice order, or anything by yourself, and I gave up. Then I went into a little family and tried general housework, and the mistress taught me a great deal, and was good and kind, only there the kitchen was a dark little place and my room like it, and I hadn’t an hour in anything that was pleasant and warm. A mistress might see, you’d think, when a girl was quiet and fond of her home, and treat her different from the kind that destroy everything; but I suppose the truth is, they’re worn out with that kind and don’t make any difference. It’s hard to give up your whole life to somebody else’s orders, and always feel as if you was looked at over a wall like; but so it is, and you won’t get girls to try it, till somehow or other things are different.”

Last on the record came a young woman born in Pennsylvania in a fairly well-to-do farmer’s house.

“I like house-work,” she said. “There’s nothing suits me so well. We girls never had any money, nor mother either, and so I went into a water-cure near the Gap and stayed awhile. Now the man that run it believed in all being one family. He called the girls helpers, and he fixed things so’t each one had some time to herself every day, and he tried to teach ’em all sorts of things. The patients were cranky to wait on, but you felt as if you was a human being, anyhow, and had a chance. Well, I watched things, and I said it was discouraging, sure enough. I tried to do a square day’s work, but two-thirds of ’em there shirked whenever they could; half did things and then lied to cover their tracks. I was there nine months, and I learned better’n ever I knew before how folks ought to live on this earth. And I said to myself the fault wasn’t so much in the girls that hadn’t ever been taught; it was in them that didn’t know enough to teach ’em. A girl thought it was rather pretty and independent, and showed she was somebody, to sling dishes on the table, and never say ‘ma’am’ nor ‘sir,’ and dress up afternoons and make believe they hadn’t a responsibility on earth. They hadn’t sense enough to do anything first-rate, for nobody had ever put any decent ambition into ’em. It isn’t to do work well; it’s to get somehow to a place where there won’t be any more work. So I say that it’s the way of living and thinking that’s all wrong; and that as soon as you get it ciphered out and plain before you that any woman, high or low, is a mean sneak that doesn’t do everything in the best way she can possibly learn, and that doesn’t try to help everybody to feel just so, why, things would stop being crooked and folks would get along well enough. Don’t you think so?”

How far the energetic speaker had solved the problem must be left to the reader, for whom there still certain unconsidered phases, all making part of the arraignment, scouted by those who are served, but more and more distinct and formidable in the mind of the server.

CHAPTER TWENTIETH.

MORE PROBLEMS OF DOMESTIC SERVICE

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.

The phases encountered here are born of the conditions of life in the cities and large towns; and denied as they may be by quiet householders whose knowledge of life is bounded by their own walls, or walls enclosing neighbors of like mind, they exist and face at once all who look below the surface. The testimony of the class itself might be open to doubt. The testimony of the physicians whose work lies among them, or in the infirmaries to which they come, cannot be impugned. Shirk or deny facts as we may, it is certain that in the great cities, save for the comparatively small proportion of quiet homes where old methods still prevail, household service has become synonymous with the worst degradation that comes to woman. Women who have been in service, and remained in it contentedly until marriage, unite in saying that things have so changed that only here and there is a young girl safe, and that domestic service is the cover for more licentiousness than can be found in any other trade in which women are at work.

Incredible as this statement at first appears, the statistics of hospitals and in infirmaries confirm it, and the causes are not far to seek. Household service has passed from the hands of Americans into those of the Irish first, and then a proportion of every European nation. So long as the supply came to us entirely from abroad we were comparatively safe. If the experience of the new arrival had been solely under thatched roof and on clay floors, at least sun could visit them and great chimneys gave currents of pure air, while simple food kept blood pure and gave small chance for unruly impulses to govern. But once with us demoralization began, and the tenement-house guaranteed sure corruption for every tenant. Even for the most decent there was small escape. To the children born in these quarters every inmost fact of human life was from the beginning a familiar story. Overcrowding, the impossibility of slightest privacy, the constant contact with the grossest side of life, soon deaden any susceptibility and destroy every gleam of modesty or decency. In the lowest order of all rules an absolute shamelessness which conceals itself in the grade above, yet has no less firm hold of those who have come up in such conditions.

There are many exceptions, many well-fought battles against their power, but our concern at present is not with these but with facts as they stand recorded. Physician after physician has given in her testimony and one and all agree in the statement that open prostitution is for many merely the final step, – a mere setting the seal to the story of ruin and licentiousness that has always existed. The women who adopt this mode of life because of want of work or low wages are the smallest of minorities. The illegitimate children for whom the city must care are not from this source. Often the mother is a mere child who has been deceived and outraged, but far more often she has entered a family prepared to meet any advances, and often directly the tempter.

It is this state of things which makes many mothers say: “My girl shall never run such risks. I’ll keep her from them as long as I can;” and unsavory as the details will seem, their knowledge is an essential factor in the problem. The tenement-house stands to-day not only as the breeder of disease and physical degeneration for every inmate, but as equally potent in social demoralization for the class who ignore its existence. Out of these houses come hundreds upon hundreds of our domestic servants, whose influence is upon our children at the most impressible age, and who bring inherited and acquired foulness into our homes and lives. And if such make but the smallest proportion of those who serve, they are none the less powerful and most formidable agents in that blunting of moral perception which is a more and more apparent fact in the life of the day. The records from which such knowledge is gleaned are not accessible to the general public. They are formulated only by the physician, whose business is silence, and who gives only an occasional summary of what may be found in the sewer underlying the social life of great cities. Decorously hidden from view the foul stream flows on, rising here and there to the surface, but instantly covered by popular opinion, which pronounces such revelations disgusting and considers suppression synonymous with extermination.

Naturally this phase of things is confined chiefly to the great cities, but the virus is portable and its taint may be discovered even in the remote country. It is one of the many causes that have worked toward the degradation of this form of service, but it is so interwoven and integral a part of the present social structure that temporary destruction would seem the inevitable result of change. Yet change must come before the only class who have legitimate place in our homes will or can take such place. If different ideals had ruled among us; if ease and freedom from obligation and “a good time” had not come to be the chief end of man to-day; if our schools gave any training from which boy or girl could go out into life with the best in them developed and ready for actual practical use, – this mass of undisciplined, conscienceless, reckless force would have been reduced to its lowest terms, and to dispose of the residuum would be an easy problem. As it is, we are at the mercy of the spirits we have raised, and no one word holds power to lay them. No axioms or theories of the past have any present application. It is because we cling to the old theories while diligently practising methods in absolute opposition to them, that the question has so complicated itself. We cannot go backward, but we can stop short and discover in what direction our path is tending and whether we are not wandering blindly in by-ways, when the public road is clear to see.

It is certain that many among the most intelligent working-women look longingly toward domestic service as something that might offer much more individual possibility of comfort and contentment than the trades afford. But save for one here and there who has chanced to find an employer who knows the meaning of justice as well as of human sympathy, the mass turn away hopeless of any change in methods. Yet reform among intelligent employers could easily be brought about were the question treated from the standpoint of justice, and the demand made an equally imperative and binding one for each side. The mistresses who command the best service are those who make rigorous demands, but keep their own side of the bargain as rigorously. They are few, for the American temperament is one of submission, varied by sudden bursts of revolt, and despairing return to a worse state than the first. A training-school school for mistresses is as much an essential as one for the servants. The conditions of modern life come more complicated with every year; and as simplification becomes for the many less and less possible, it is all the more vitally necessary to study the subject from the new standpoint, settle once for all how and why we have failed, and begin again on the new foundation.

Here then stands the arraignment of domestic service under its present conditions, given point by point as it has formulated itself to those who urged to turn to it. The mistresses’ side defines itself as sharply; but when all is said the two are one, the demand one and the same for both. Men who work for wages work a specified number of hours, and if they shirk or half fulfil their contract, find work taken from them. Were the same arrangement understood as equally binding in domestic service, thousands of self-respecting women would not hesitate to enter it. Family life cannot always move in fixed lines, and hours must often vary; but conscientious tally could be kept, and over-hours receive the pay they have earned. A conscience on both sides would be the first necessity; and it is quite certain that the master of the house would require education as decidedly as the mistress, woman’s work within home walls being regarded as something continuous, indefinable, and not worth formal estimate.

In spite of the enormous increase of wealth, the mass are happily what, for want of a better word, must be called middle class. But one servant or helper can usually be kept, and most often she is one who has used our kitchens as kindergartens, adding fragments of training as she passed from one to the other, ending often as fairly serviceable and competent. Sure of her place she becomes tyrant, and nothing can alter this relation but the appearance upon the scene of organized trained labor, making a demand for absolute fairness of treatment and giving it in return. Once certain that the reign of incompetence was over, the present order of servers would make haste to seek training-schools, or accept the low wages which would include personal training from the mistress, promotion being conditioned upon faithful obedience to the new order.

What are the stipulations which every self-respecting girl or woman has the right to make? They are short and simple. They are absolutely reasonable, and their adoption would be an education to every household which accepted them: —

1. A definition of what a day’s work means, and payment for all over-time required, or certain hours of absolute freedom guaranteed, especially where the position is that of child’s nurse.

2. A comfortably warmed and decently furnished room, with separate beds if two occupy it, and both decent place and appointments for meals.

3. The heaviest work, such as carrying coal, scrubbing pavements, washing, etc., to be arranged for if this is asked, with a consequent deduction in the wages.

4. No livery if there is feeling against it.

5. The privilege of seeing friends in a better part of the house than the kitchen, and security from any espionage during such time, whether the visitors are male or female. This to be accompanied by reasonable restrictions as to hours, and with the condition that work is not to be neglected.

6. Such a manner of speaking to and of the server as shall show that there is no contempt for housework, and that it is actually as respectable as other occupations.

Were such a schedule as this printed, framed, and hung in every kitchen in the land, and its provisions honestly met, household revolution and anarchy would cease, and the whole question settle itself quietly and once for all. And this in spite of a thousand inherent difficulties known to every housekeeper, but which would prove self-adjusting so soon as it was learned that service had found a rational basis. At present, with the majority of mistresses, it is simply unending struggle to get the most out of the unwilling and grudging server, hopelessly unreasonable and giving warning on faintest provocation. Yet these very women, turning to factory life, where fixed and inexorable law rules with no appeal, submit at once and become often skilled and capable workers. It is certain that domestic service must learn organization as every other form of industry has learned it, and that mistresses must submit to something of the same training that is needed by the maid. Nor need it be feared that putting such service on a strictly business basis will destroy such kindliness as now helps to make the relation less intolerable. On the contrary, with justice the foundation and a rigorous fulfilment of duty on both sides will come a far closer tie than exists save in rarest instances, and homes will regain a quality long ago vanished from our midst. Such training will be the first step toward the co-operation which must be the ultimate solution of many social problems.

It has failed in many earlier attempts because personal justice was lacking; but even one generation of sustained effort to simplify conditions would insure not only a different ideal for those who think at all, but the birth of something better for every child of the Republic.

For the individual standing alone, hampered by many cares and distracted over the whole household problem, action may seem impossible. But if the most rational members of a community would band together, send prejudice and tradition to the winds, and make a new declaration of independence for the worker, it is certain that the tide would turn and a new order begin. Till such united, concerted action can be brought about there is small hope of reform, and it can come only through women. Dismiss sentiment. Learn to look at the thing as a trade in which each seeks her own advantage, and in which each gains the more clearly these advantages are defined. It is a hard relation. It demands every power that woman can bring to bear upon it. It is an education of the highest faculties she owns. It means a double battle, for it is with ourselves that the fight begins. Liberty can only come through personal struggle. It is easy to die for it, but to live for it, to deserve it, to defend it forever is another and a harder matter. Still harder is it to know its full meaning and what it is that makes the battle worth fighting. Union to such ends will be slow, but it must come: —

“Freedom is growth and not creation:One man suffers, one man is free.One brain forges a constitution,But how shall the million souls be won?Freedom is more than a revolution —He is not free who is free alone.”

Is this the word of a dreamer whose imagination holds the only work of reconstruction, and whose hands are powerless to make the dream reality? On the contrary, many years of experience in which few of the usual troubles were encountered, added to that of others who had thought out the problem for themselves, have demonstrated that reform is possible. Precisely such conditions as are here specified have been in practical operation for many years. The homes in which they have ruled have had the unfailing devotion of those who served, and the experiment has ceased to come under that head, and demonstrated that order and peace and quiet mastery of the day’s work may still be American possessions. Count this imperfect presentation then as established fact for a few, and ask why it is not possible to make it so for the many.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIRST.

END AND BEGINNING

The long quest is over. It ends; and I turn at last from those women, whose eyes still follow me, filled with mute question of what good may come. Of all ages and nations and creeds, all degrees of ignorance and prejudice and stupidity; hampered by every condition of birth and training; powerless to rise beyond them till obstacles are removed, – the great city holds them all, and in pain and want and sorrow they are one. The best things of life are impossible to them. What is worse, they are unknown as well as unattainable. If the real good of life must be measured by the final worth of the thing we make or get by it, what worth is there for or in them? The city holds them all, – “the great foul city, – rattling, growling, smoking, stinking, – a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore.”

The prosperous have no such definition, nor do they admit that it can be true. For the poor, it is the only one that can have place. We pack them away in tenements crowded and foul beyond anything known even to London, whose “Bitter Cry” had less reason than ours; and we have taken excellent care that no foot of ground shall remain that might mean breathing-space, or free sport of child, or any green growing thing. Grass pushes its way here and there, but for this army it is only something that at last they may lie under, never upon. There is no pause in the march, where as one and another drops out the gap fills instantly, every alley and by-way holding unending substitutes. It is not labor that profiteth, for body and soul are alike starved. It is labor in its basest, most degrading form; labor that is curse and never blessing, as true work may be and is. It blinds the eyes. It steals away joy. It blunts all power whether of hope or faith. It wrecks the body and it starves the soul. It is waste and only waste; nor can it, below ground or above, hold fructifying power for any human soul.

Here then we face them, – ignorant, blind, stupid, incompetent in every fibre, – and yet no count of such indictment alters our responsibility toward them. Rather it multiplies it in always increasing ratio. For it is our own system that has made these lives worthless, and sooner or later we must answer how it came, that living in a civilized land they had less chance than the heathen to whom we send our missionaries, and upon whose occasional conversions we plume ourselves as if thus the Kingdom of Heaven were made wider. If it is true that for many only a little alleviation is possible, a little more justice, a little better apportionment of such good as they can comprehend, it is also true that something better is within the reach of all.

How then shall we define it, and what possibility of alteration for either lives or conditions lies before us? Nothing that can be of instant growth; and here lies the chief discouragement, since as a people we demand instantaneousness, and would have seed, flower, and fruit at the same moment. Admit patience, capacity to wait, and to work while waiting, as the first term of the equation, and the rest arrange themselves.

For the greater part of social reformers, co-operation has stood as the initial and most essential step, as the fruit that could be plucked full-grown; and experience in England would seem to have demonstrated the belief as true. It is the American inability to wait that has proved it untrue for us, and until very lately made failure our only record; but there is a deeper reason than a merely temperamental one. The abolition of the apprentice system, brought about by the greed of master and men alike, has abolished training and slow, steady preparation for any trade. An American has been regarded as quick enough and keen enough to take in the essential features of a calling, as it were, at a glance, and apprenticeship has been taken as practically an insult to national intelligence. Law has kept pace with such conviction, and thus the door has been shut in the face of all learners, and foreigners have supplied our skilled workmen and work-women. The groundwork of any better order lies, if not in a return to the apprentice system, then in a training from the beginning, which will give to eye and hand the utmost power of which they are capable. Industrial education is the foundation, and until it has in its broadest and deepest sense become the portion of every child born on American soil, that child has missed its birthright.