The Scandinavian Element in the United States: University of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, Vol. 111, No. 3, September, 1914Babcock, Kendric Charles
History
The Scandinavian Element in the United States: University of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, Vol. 111, No. 3, September, 1914
Babcock, Kendric Charles
Scandinavians -- United States
[320] _U. S. Tenth Census, 1880_, I, 676.
[321] _U. S. Twelfth Census Reports, 1900_, I, _Population_, Pt. 1,
CXCIII, and Tables 43, 46, 56.
In these two decades, large numbers of young unmarried women, moved by
the same economic motives as the young men, came to the United States
and took service among the Americans as domestic servants. The demand
for capable and well-trained servants far exceeded, and still exceeds,
the visible supply, and the wages which seemed high to the American
housewife seemed trebly high to the girl who received in cash wages in
the old home only $20 or $30 per year.[322] In the new service the girls
must perforce learn English rapidly or fail, so they learned the
language and also the ways of the American household. In return they
gave an honest, good-tempered, and trustworthy if sometimes clumsy
service. If they were not always evidently grateful for the instruction
and patience of the mistress of the household, if frequently they
married soon after they were trained into efficient and satisfactory
servants, they should not be condemned wholesale! While the marriages of
these strong, healthy, intelligent, domestically capable young women
with non-Scandinavian young men of the middle and lower classes
constitute the larger proportion of intermarriages, the intermarriage of
the American-born Scandinavian girls, trained in the public schools and
colleges, with American men is also frequent, and no reservation as to
the mixture of social classes needs to be made.
[322] _U. S. Consular Reports_ (1887) No. 76, 148; Young, _Labor in
Europe and America_, 681.
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