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-class 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', unobserved.
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.