These social barriers that now prevent so effectually the entrance into
domestic service of intelligent, well-educated, capable, and efficient
persons can all be swept away if employers as a class are willing to make
the effort. This effort will involve in some cases the relinquishing of
a favorite theory that employees can be made a part of the family with
which they are externally connected and, instead of this, assisting
them to live their own independent lives as citizens of the community
in a normal, happy way. It will involve in other cases abandoning the
assumption that domestic employees belong to a separate and obnoxious
class in society and cannot be met as individuals on the same plane as
are other persons of like attainments. It will involve in still other
cases the sacrifice of that personal vanity that is gratified by the
constant presence of those deemed to be of an inferior station. If
employers are willing to yield all of the points now often unconsciously
maintained by them in opposition to the teachings of political and
industrial history, the social objections that now hold against domestic
service as an employment will disappear. Sir Henry Sumner Maine has well
said, “The true equality of mankind lies in the future, not in the past.”
It is this true equality of the future, not the fictitious equality of
the past, that must free domestic service from the social ill-repute it
now bears.
CHAPTER XIII
POSSIBLE REMEDIES—SPECIALIZATION OF HOUSEHOLD EMPLOYMENTS
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. This
statement does not mean that both of these principles are carried out
perfectly, but that industrial progress has been made and is being made
along these lines, that the advance already made by household employments
has been in the same direction, and that the reforms proposed for the
household that diverge from these lines, however wise in themselves,
cannot lead to the best results because they are out of the current of
general progress.
In considering the historical phase of the subject, a long list of
articles was suggested[299] which were formerly made within the
household, but are now made out of the house both better and more cheaply
than they could be made at home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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