Wanted: a Young Woman to Do Housework | Page 3

will find before many more years elapse there will be
no longer any woman willing to place her neck under the domestic
yoke.
If the principles set forth in the following pages can be popularized in a
comprehensive plan of which all the parts can be thoroughly
understood both by the housewife and her employee, ignorance and
inefficiency in the home will be presently abolished.
DIFFICULTY OF OBTAINING WOMEN TO DO HOUSEWORK
The present unsatisfactory condition of domestic labor in private
houses is not confined to any special city or country; it is universal.
Each year the difficulty of obtaining women to do housework seems to
increase and the demand is so much greater than the supply, that
ignorant and inefficient employees are retained simply because it is
impossible to find others more competent to replace them.
There is hardly a home to-day where, at one time or another, the
housewife has not gone through the unenviable experience of being
financially able and perfectly willing to pay for the services of some
one to help her in her housekeeping duties, and yet found it almost
impossible to get a really competent and intelligent employee. As a rule,
those who apply for positions in housework are grossly ignorant of the
duties they profess to perform, and the well trained, clever, and
experienced workers are sadly in the minority.
Women and young girls who face the necessity of self support, or who
wish to lead a life of independence, no longer choose housework as a
means of earning a livelihood. It is evident that there is a reason, and a
very potent one, that decides them to accept any kind of employment in
preference to the work offered them in a private home. Wages,
apparently, have little to do with their decision, nor other
considerations which must add very much to their material welfare,

such as good food in abundance, and clean, well ventilated sleeping
accommodations, for these two important items are generally included
at present in the salaries of household employees. Concessions, too, are
frequently made, and favors bestowed upon them by many of their
employers, yet few young girls, and still fewer women are content to
work in private families.
It is a deplorable state of affairs, and women seem to be gradually
losing their courage to battle with this increasingly difficult question:
How to obtain and retain one's domestic employees?
The peace of the family and the joy and comfort of one's home should
be a great enough incentive to awaken the housewife to the realization
that something must be wrong in her present methods. It is in vain that
she complains bitterly, on all occasions, of the scarcity of good servants,
asserting that it is beyond her comprehension why work in factories,
stores, and offices, should be preferred to the work she offers.
Is it beyond her comprehension? Or has she never considered in what
way the work she offers differs from the work so eagerly accepted?
Does she not realize that the present laws of labor adopted in business
are very different from those she still enforces in her own home? Why
does she not compare housework with all other work in which women
are employed, and find out why housework is disdained by nearly all
self supporting women?
Instead of doing this, she sometimes avoids the trouble of trying to
keep house with incompetent employees by living in hotels, or
non-housekeeping apartments; but for the housewife who does not
possess the financial means to indulge herself thus, or who still prefers
home life with all its trials to hotel life, the only alternative is to submit
to pay high wages for very poor work or to do a great part of the
housework herself. In both cases the result is bad, for in neither does
the family enjoy the full benefit of home, nor is the vexatious problem,
so often designated as the "servant question," brought any nearer to a
solution.
The careful study of any form of labor invariably reveals some need of

amelioration, but in none is there a more urgent need of reform than in
domestic labor in private homes.
It is more for the sake of the housewife than for her employee that a
reform is to be desired. The latter is solving her problem by finding
work outside the home, while the former is still unduly harassed by
household troubles. With a few notable exceptions, only those who are
unqualified to compete with the business woman are left to help the
householder, and the problem confronting her to-day is not so much
how to change inefficient to efficient help, but how to obtain any help
at all.
The spirit of independence has so deeply entered into the lives of
women of all classes,