What eight million women want Part 14

I think I hear a chorus of protesting voices: "We don't have anything to do with the servant cla.s.s you are describing. Our girls are respectable. They meet their friends at church. They come to us from reputable employment offices, which would not deal with them if they were not all right."

Are you sure you know this? What, after all, do you really know about your servants? What do you know about the employment office that sent her to you? What do you know of the world inhabited by servants and the people who deal in servants? Can you not imagine that it might be different from the one you live in so safely and comfortably?

Are you willing to know the facts about the world, the underworld, from which the girl who cooks your food and takes care of your children is drawn? Do you care to know how a domestic spends the time between places, how she gets to your kitchen or nursery, the kind of homes she may have been in before she came to you? Make a little descent into that underworld with a girl whose experience is matched with those of many others.

Nellie B---- was an Irish girl, strong, pretty of face, and joyful of temperament. The quiet Indiana town where she earned her living as a cook offered Nellie so little diversion that she determined to go to Chicago to live. She gave up her place, and with a month's wages in her pocket went to the city.

It was late in the afternoon when her train reached the station. Nellie alighted, bewildered and lonely. She had the address of an employment agency, furnished her by an acquaintance. Nellie slept that night, or rather tossed sleepless in the agency lodging house, on a dirty bed occupied by two women besides herself. In all her life she had never been inside such a filthy room, or heard such frightful conversation.

Therefore next morning she gladly paid her exorbitant bill of one dollar and seventy-five cents, besides a fee of two dollars and a half for obtaining employment, and accepted the first place offered her.

The house she was taken to seemed to be conducted rather strangely.

Meals were at unusual hours, and the household consisted largely of young women who received many men callers. For about a week Nellie did her work unmolested. At the end of the week her mistress presented her with a low-necked satin dress and asked her if she would not like to a.s.sist in entertaining the men. Simple-minded Nellie had to have the nature of the entertaining explained to her, and she had great difficulty in leaving the house after she had declined the offer. She had hardly any money left, and the woman refused to pay her for her week's work.

Nellie knew of no other employment agency, so she was obliged to return to the one she left. When she reproached the agent for sending her to a disreputable house he shrugged his shoulders and replied: "Well, I send girls where they're wanted. If they don't like the place they can leave."

The fact is, they cannot always leave when they want to. Miss Kellor's investigators found an office in Chicago which sent girls to a resort in Wisconsin which was represented as a summer hotel. This notorious place was surrounded by a high stockade which rendered escape impossible.

The investigators found offices in other cities which operate disreputable houses in summer places. To these the proprietors send the handsomest of their applicants for honest work.

Three girls sent to a house of this kind found themselves prisoners. One girl made such a disturbance by screaming and crying that the proprietor literally kicked her out of the house. The investigators for the Intermunic.i.p.al Committee on Household Research saw this girl in a hospital, insane and dying from the treatment she had received. Another of the three escaped from the place. She, too, was discovered in a state of dementia. The fate of the third girl is obscure.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SERVANT GIRL AND THE EMPLOYMENT AGENCY]

Not all employment agencies cater to this trade. Not all would consent to be accessory to women's degradation. But the employment agency business, taken by and large, is disorganized, haphazard, out of date.

It is operated on a system founded in lies and extortion. The offices want fees--fees from servants and fees from employers. They encourage servants to change their employment as often as possible. Often a firm will send a girl to a place, and a week or two later will send her word that they have a better job for her. Sometimes they arrange with her to leave her place after a certain period, promising her an easier position or a better wage. They favor the girl who changes often. "You're a nice kind of a customer!" jeered one proprietor to a girl who boasted that she had been in a family for five years. The girl was a _customer_ to him, and she was nothing more.

To his profitable customer the agent is often very accommodating. If she lacks references he writes her flattering ones, or loans her a reference written by some woman of prominence. References, indeed, are often handed around like pa.s.sports among Russian revolutionists.

Many of these unpleasant facts were brought to light in the course of the investigation made by the Intermunic.i.p.al Committee on Household Research. The result of their report was a model employment agency law, pa.s.sed by the New York State Legislature, providing for a strict licensing system, rigid forms of contract, regulation of fees, and inspection by special officers of the Bureau of Licenses. The law applies only to cities of the first cla.s.s, and unfortunately has never been very well enforced. Perhaps it has not been possible to enforce it.

In all the cities examined by the Intermunic.i.p.al Committee on Household Research the investigators found the majority of employment agencies in close connection with the homes of the agents. In New York, of three hundred and thirteen offices visited, one hundred and twenty were in tenements, one hundred and seven in apartment houses, thirty-nine in residences and only forty-nine in business buildings. In Philadelphia, only three per cent of employment agencies were found in business buildings. Chicago made a little better showing, with nineteen per cent in business houses. The difficulty of properly regulating a business which is carried on in the privacy of a home is apparent. When an agency is in a business building it usually has conspicuous signs, and often the rooms are well equipped with desks, comfortable chairs, and other office furnishings. But the majority of agencies are of another description. Those dealing with immigrant girls are sometimes filthy rooms in some rear tenement, reached through a saloon or a barber shop facing the street. Often the other tenants of the building are fortune tellers, palmists, "trance mediums," and like undesirables.

A large number of these agencies operate lodging houses for their patrons. There is hardly a good word to say for most of these, except that they are absolutely necessary. Dirty, unsanitary, miserable as they usually are, if they were closed by law, hundreds, perhaps thousands of domestics temporarily out of work, would be turned into the streets.

Many are unfamiliar with the cities they live in. Many more are barred from hotels on account of small means. Often a girl finding it impossible to bring herself to lie down on the wretched beds provided by these lodging houses, leaves her luggage and goes out, not to return until morning. She spends the night in dance halls and other resorts.

According to Miss Kellor's report this description of employment agencies and lodging houses attached to them applies to about seventy-five per cent of all offices in the four cities examined. For greater accuracy the investigators made a brief survey of conditions in cities, such as St. Louis, New Haven, and Columbus, Ohio. The differences were slight, showing that the employment agency problem is much the same east and west.

Domestic servants have their industrial ups and downs like other workers. Sometimes they are able to pay the fees required in a high-cla.s.s employment office, while at other times they are obliged to have recourse to the cheaper places, where standards of honesty, and perhaps also, of propriety, are low. Domestic workers are the nomads of industry. Their lives are like their work,--impermanent, detached from others', un.o.bserved.

It is for the housekeepers of America to consider the plain facts concerning domestic service. Some of the conditions they can change.

Others they cannot. No one can alter the economic status of the kitchen.

Like the sweat shop, it must ultimately disappear.

What system of housekeeping will take the place of the present system cannot precisely be foretold. We know that the whole trend of things everywhere is toward co-operation. Within the past ten years think how much cooking has gone into the factory, how much washing into the steam laundry, how much sewing into the shop. As the cost of living increases, more and more co-operation will be necessary, especially for those of moderate income. At the present time millions of city dwellers have given up living in their own houses, or even in rented houses. They cannot afford to maintain individual homes, but must live in apartment houses, where the expenses of heat, and other expenses, notably water, hall, and janitor service, are reduced to a minimum because shared by all the tenants. There may come a time when the private kitchen will be a luxury of the very rich.

For a time, however, the private kitchen and the servant in the kitchen will remain. That is one servant problem. But the housekeeper still has another "servant problem," and I have tried to make it clear that this problem pretty closely involves the morals of the community.

Now this matter of community morals has begun to interest women profoundly. In many of their organizations women are studying and endeavoring to understand the causes of evil. They are securing the appointment of educated women as probation officers in the courts which deal with delinquent women and girls. Sincerely they are working toward a better understanding of the problem of the prodigal daughter.

Since about one-third of all these prodigals are recruited from the ranks of domestic workers it is possible for the housekeepers of the country to play an important part in this work. Every woman in the United States who employs one servant has a contribution to make to the movement. The power to humanize domestic service in her own household is in every woman's hand.

Loneliness, social isolation, the ban of social inferiority,--these cruel and unreasonable restrictions placed upon an entire cla.s.s of working women are out of tune with democracy. The right of the domestic worker to regular hours of labor, to freedom after her work is done, to a place to receive her friends, must be recognized. The self-respect of the servant must in all ways be encouraged.

Above all, the right of the domestic worker to social opportunity must be admitted. It must be provided for.

Yonkers, New York, a large town on the Hudson River, points out one way toward this end. In Yonkers there has been established a Women's Inst.i.tute for the exclusive use of domestics. It has an employment agency and supports cla.s.ses in domestic science for those girls who wish to become more expert workers. There are club rooms and recreation parlors where the girls receive and meet their friends--including their men friends. A group of liberal-minded women established this unique inst.i.tution, which is well patronized by the superior cla.s.s of domestic workers in Yonkers. The dues are small, and members are allowed to share club privileges with friends. It is not unusual for employers to present their domestics with membership cards. It cannot be said that the Women's Inst.i.tute has solved the servant problem for Yonkers, but many women testify to its happy effects on their own individual problems.

The Committee on Amus.e.m.e.nts and Vacation Resources of Working Girls in New York is collecting a long list of farmhouses and village homes in the mountains and near the sea where working girls, and this includes domestics, may spend their vacations for very little money.

Every summer, as families leave the city for country and seaside, domestics are thrown out of employment. A department in the Women's Club can examine vacation possibilities for domestics. The clubs can also deal with the employment agency. Some women's organizations have already taken hold of this department. The Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston conducts a very large and flourishing employment agency.

Women's clubs can study the laws of their own community in regard to public employment agencies. They can investigate homes for immigrant girls and boarding-houses for working women.

Preventive work is better than reform measures, but both are necessary in dealing with this problem. Women have still much work to do in securing reformatories for women. New York is the first State to establish such reformatories for adult women. Private philanthropy has offered refuges and semipenal inst.i.tutions. The State stands aloof.

Even in New York public officials are strangely skeptical of the possibilities of reform. Last year the courts of New York City sent three thousand delinquent women to the workhouse on Blackwell's Island,--a place notorious for the low state of its _morale_. They sent only seventeen women to Bedford Reformatory, where a healthy routine of outdoor work, and a most effective system administered by a scientific penologist does wonders with its inmates. Nothing but the will and the organized effort of women will ever solve the most terrible of all problems, or remove from society the reproach of ruined womanhood which blackens it now.

NOTES:

Note 1: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1904.

CHAPTER X

VOTES FOR WOMEN

Although Woman Suffrage has been for a number of years a part of the program of the International Council of Women, the American Branch, represented by the General Federation of Women's Clubs, at first displayed little interest in the subject. Although many of the club women were strong suffragists, there were many others, notably women from the Southern States, who were violently opposed to suffrage. Early in the club movement it was agreed that suffrage, being a subject on which there was an apparently hopeless difference of opinion, was not a proper subject for club consideration.

The position of the women in regard to suffrage was precisely that of the early labor unions toward politics. The unions, fearing that the labor leaders would use the men for their own political advancement, resolved that no question of politics should ever enter into their deliberations.

In the same way the club women feared that even a discussion of Woman Suffrage in their state and national federation meetings would result in their movement becoming purely political. They wanted to keep it a non-partisan benevolent and social affair.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SUFFRAGETTES IN LONDON ADVERTISING A MEETING]

Somehow, in what mysterious manner no one can precisely tell, the reserve of the club women towards the suffrage question began some years ago to break down. At the St. Louis Biennial of 1904 part of a morning session was given up to the suffrage organizations. Several remarkable speeches in favor of the suffrage were made, and there is no doubt that a very deep impression was made, even upon those women openly opposed to the movement. Six years later, at the biennial meeting held in Cincinnati, Ohio, in June, 1910, an entire evening was given up to an exhaustive discussion of both sides of the question.

Dating from that evening a stranger visiting the convention might almost have thought that the sole object of the gathering was a discussion of the right of women to the ballot. Women floated through the corridors of the hotel talking suffrage. They talked suffrage in little groups in the dining-room, they discussed it in the street cars going to and from the convention.

The local suffrage clubs had planned a banquet to the visiting suffragists and had calculated a maximum of one hundred and fifty applications for tickets.

Three days before the banquet they had had nearly three hundred applications, and when the hour for the banquet arrived every available seat, the room's limit of three hundred and seventy-five, was occupied.

Outside were women offering ten dollars a plate and clamoring for the privilege of merely listening to the after-dinner speakers. Something must have happened in the course of those eight years to make such an astounding change in the att.i.tude of the club women.

The fact is that until the club women had been at work at practical things for a long period of years, they did not realize the social value of their own activities. They thought of their work as benevolent and philanthropic. That they were performing community service, _citizens_'

service, they did not remotely dream. There is nothing surprising in their _navete_. It is a fact that in this country, although every one knows that women own property, pay taxes, successfully manage their own business affairs, and do an astonishing amount of community work as well, no one ever thinks of them as citizens.