Guide to Hotel HousekeepingPalmer, Mary E. (Mary Elizabeth)
General
Guide to Hotel Housekeeping
Palmer, Mary E. (Mary Elizabeth)
Home economics; Hotels
To make a muslin cover for a poker-table, take a piece of muslin and cut
it round to fit the table, allowing six inches to hang down. Run a
casing on the edge of it, with a bias piece two inches wide. Run in the
casing, a drawing-string of common wrapping-twine. The drawing-string
must be as long as the muslin is around so it will not have to be
removed when laundered. After it is laundered, put it on the table and
pull the drawing-string, and tie under the table.
In small hotels where the parlor-maid is called on to perform all of
these manifold duties, she is assisted by the houseman.
ABOUT CHAMBERMAIDS.
Some person that does not know anything about the life of a chambermaid
will tell you that the "chambermaid has no protection, no morality, and
is without the influence of a fixed place or home atmosphere;" finally,
that "chamber-work is the most degrading occupation a girl can engage
in!"
If a girl is not capable of a higher calling, why should not she make
beds in a hotel when there is such a crying need from the hotel managers
for conscientious and painstaking work? It is not every girl that
Providence has blessed with a prima donna's voice. Not every girl can be
admitted on the vaudeville stage. Not all have had kind and wealthy
parents to send them through college and fit them for the higher
attainments.
_Chambermaid Can Take Care of Self._
The proprietor is ever ready to protect the maids from undue familiarity
from the male patrons of the hotel. This is seldom necessary. The
average maid meets an incivility with a cold disdain that puts to rout
a second attempt. Men that wreck women's lives are found outside of
hotels.
_Religion a Factor._
It is an undisputed fact that the Irish-American Catholic girls make the
best chambermaids. The comfort found in the Catholic religion
compensates for the loss of home ties. She is without any danger signal
save her own conscience, yet there does not exist on the face of the
earth a more moral class of girls than the Irish-American Catholic
chambermaids in the hotels of the United States.
She goes at her work determined to use her experience as a
stepping-stone to something higher. She encounters many pitfalls. She
makes a few mistakes, but during her stay in Yankeeland she has learned
President Roosevelt's maxim: "The man who never makes any mistakes is
the man who never does anything." She is consoled by it, and from her
pitfalls learns a lesson that enables her to avoid making the same
mistakes in the future.
_Not a Bad Day's Program._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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