 | IX.
SERVANTS. House and home papers |  |
9. IX.
SERVANTS.
IN the course of my papers various domestic revolutions
have occurred. Our Marianne has gone
from us with a new name to a new life, and a modest
little establishment not many squares off claims about
as much of my wife's and Jenny's busy thoughts as
those of the proper mistress.
Marianne, as I always foresaw, is a careful and
somewhat anxious housekeeper. Her tastes are fastidious;
she is made for exactitude: the smallest
departures from the straight line appear to her shocking
deviations. She had always lived in a house
where everything had been formed to quiet and order
under the ever-present care and touch of her mother;
nor had she ever participated in these cares more than
to do a little dusting of the parlor ornaments, or wash
the best china, or make sponge-cake or chocolate-caramels.
Certain conditions of life had always appeared
so to be matters of course that she had never
conceived of a house without them. It never occurred
to her that such bread and biscuit as she saw at the
every table, — that the silver would not always be as
bright, the glass as clear, the salt as fine and smooth,
the plates and dishes as nicely arranged as she had
always seen them, apparently without the thought or
care of any one, — for my wife is one of those housekeepers
whose touch is so fine that no one feels it.
She is never heard scolding or reproving, — never
entertains her company with her recipes for cookery
or the faults of her servants. She is so unconcerned
about receiving her own personal share of credit for
the good appearance of her establishment, that even
the children of the house have not supposed that there
is any particular will of hers in the matter, — it all
seems the natural consequence of having very good
servants.
One phenomenon they had never seriously reflected
on, — that, under all the changes of the domestic cabinet
which are so apt to occur in American households,
the same coffee, the same bread and biscuit, the same
nicely prepared dishes and neatly laid table always
gladdened their eyes; and from this they inferred only
that good servants were more abundant than most
people had supposed. They were somewhat surprised
when these marvels were wrought by professedly green
hands, but were given to suppose that these green
hands must have had some remarkable quickness or
ice-creams, clear soups, and delicate biscuits
could be made by a raw Irish girl, fresh from her
native Erin, seemed to them a proof of the genius of
the race; and my wife, who never felt it important to
attain to the reputation of a cook, quietly let it pass.
For some time, therefore, after the inauguration of
the new household, there was trouble in the camp.
Sour bread had appeared on the table, — bitter, acrid
coffee had shocked and astonished the palate, — lint
had been observed on tumblers, and the spoons had
sometimes dingy streaks on the brightness of their
first bridal polish, — beds were detected made shockingly
awry, — and Marianne came burning with indignation
to her mother.
“Such a little family as we have, and two strong
girls,” said she, — “everything ought to be perfect;
there is really nothing to do. Think of a whole batch
of bread absolutely sour! and when I gave that away,
then this morning another exactly like it! and when I
talked to cook about it, she said she had lived in
this and that family, and her bread had always been
praised as equal to the baker's!”
“I don't doubt she is right,” said I. “Many families
never have anything but sour bread from one end
of the year to the other, eating it unperceiving, and
with good cheer; and they buy also sour bread of the
their estimation the only virtue necessary in the article.”
“Could you not correct her fault?” suggested my
wife.
“I have done all I can. I told her we could not
have such bread, that it was dreadful; Bob says it
would give him the dyspepsia in a week; and then
she went and made exactly the same; — it seems to
me mere wilfulness.”
“But,” said I, “suppose, instead of such general
directions, you should analyze her proceedings and
find out just where she makes her mistake, — is the
root of the trouble in the yeast, or in the time she
begins it, letting it rise too long? — the time, you
know, should vary so much with the temperature of
the weather.”
“As to that,” said Marianne, “I know nothing. I
never noticed; it never was my business to make
bread; it always seemed quite a simple process, mixing
yeast and flour and kneading it; and our bread at
home was always good.”
“It seems, then, my dear, that you have come to
your profession without even having studied it.”
My wife smiled, and said, —
“You know, Marianne, I proposed to you to be our
family bread-maker for one month of the year before
you married.”
“Yes, mamma, I remember; but I was like other
girls; I thought there was no need of it. I never
liked to do such things; perhaps I had better have
done it.”
“You certainly had,” said I; “for the first business
of a housekeeper in America is that of a teacher.
She can have a good table only by having practical
knowledge, and tact in imparting it. If she understands
her business practically and experimentally,
her eye detects at once the weak spot; it requires
only a little tact, some patience, some clearness in
giving directions, and all comes right. I venture to
say that your mother would have exactly such bread
as always appears on our table, and have it by the
hands of your cook, because she could detect and
explain to her exactly her error.”
“Do you know,” said my wife, “what yeast she
uses?”
“I believe,” said Marianne, “it 's a kind she makes
herself. I think I heard her say so. I know she
makes a great fuss about it, and rather values herself
upon it. She is evidently accustomed to being
praised for her bread, and feels mortified and angry,
and I don't know how to manage her.”
“Well,” said I, “if you carry your watch to a
watchmaker, and undertake to show him how to
regulate the machinery, he laughs and goes on his
he listens respectfully. So, when a woman who
knows nothing of woman's work undertakes to instruct
one who knows more than she does, she makes
no impression; but a woman who has been trained
experimentally, and shows she understands the matter
thoroughly, is listened to with respect.”
“I think,” said my wife, “that your Bridget is worth
teaching. She is honest, well-principled, and tidy.
She has good recommendations from excellent families,
whose ideas of good bread it appears differ from
ours; and with a little good-nature, tact, and patience,
she will come into your ways.”
“But the coffee, mamma, — you would not imagine
it to be from the same bag with your own, so dark
and so bitter; what do you suppose she has done
to it?”
“Simply this,” said my wife. “She has let the
berries stay a few moments too long over the fire, —
they are burnt, instead of being roasted; and there
are people who think it essential to good coffee that
it should look black, and have a strong, bitter flavor.
A very little change in the preparing will alter this.”
“Now,” said I, “Marianne, if you want my advice,
I 'll give it to you gratis: — Make your own bread for
one month. Simple as the process seems, I think it
will take as long as that to give you a thorough knowledge
you will never need to make any more, — you will be
able to command good bread by the aid of all sorts
of servants; you will, in other words, be a thoroughly
prepared teacher.”
“I did not think,” said Marianne, “that so simple
a thing required so much attention.”
“It is simple,” said my wife, “and yet requires a
delicate care and watchfulness. There are fifty ways
to spoil good bread; there are a hundred little things
to be considered and allowed for that require accurate
observation and experience. The same process that
will raise good bread in cold weather will make sour
bread in the heat of summer; different qualities of
flour require variations in treatment, as also different
sorts and conditions of yeast; and when all is done,
the baking presents another series of possibilities
which require exact attention.”
“So it appears,” said Marianne, gayly, “that I must
begin to study my profession at the eleventh hour.”
“Better late than never,” said I. “But there is
this advantage on your side: a well-trained mind,
accustomed to reflect, analyze, and generalize, has an
advantage over uncultured minds even of double experience.
Poor as your cook is, she now knows more
of her business than you do. After a very brief
period of attention and experiment, you will not only
that you do, which is quite as much to the purpose.”
“In the same manner,” said my wife, “you will
have to give lessons to your other girl on the washing
of silver and the making of beds. Good servants do
not often come to us; they must be made by patience
and training; and if a girl has a good disposition and
a reasonable degree of handiness, and the housekeeper
understands her profession, she may make a
good servant out of an indifferent one. Some of my
best girls have been those who came to me directly
from the ship, with no preparation but docility and
some natural quickness. The hardest cases to be
managed are not of those who have been taught nothing,
but of those who have been taught wrongly, —
who come to you self-opinionated, with ways which
are distasteful to you, and contrary to the genius of
your housekeeping. Such require that their mistress
shall understand at least so much of the actual conduct
of affairs as to prove to the servant that there are
better ways than those in which she has hitherto been
trained.”
“Don't you think, mamma,” said Marianne, “that
there has been a sort of reaction against woman's
work in our day? So much has been said of the
higher sphere of woman, and so much has been done
to find some better work for her, that insensibly, I
degrading for a woman in good society to be much
tied down to family affairs.”
“Especially,” said my wife, “since in these Woman's-Rights
Conventions there is so much indignation
expressed at those who would confine her ideas
to the kitchen and nursery.”
“There is reason in all things,” said I. “Woman's-Rights
Conventions are a protest against many former
absurd, unreasonable ideas, — the mere physical and
culinary idea of womanhood as connected only with
puddings and shirt-buttons, the unjust and unequal
burdens which the laws of harsher ages had cast upon
the sex. Many of the women connected with these
movements are as superior in everything properly
womanly as they are in exceptional talent and culture.
There is no manner of doubt that the sphere
of woman is properly to be enlarged, and that republican
governments in particular are to be saved
from corruption and failure only by allowing to woman
this enlarged sphere. Every woman has rights as a
human being first, which belong to no sex, and
ought to be as freely conceded to her as if she were
a man, — and first and foremost, the great right of
doing anything which God and Nature evidently have
fitted her to excel in. If she be made a natural
orator, like Miss Dickenson, or an astronomer, like
technical rules of womanhood be thrown in the way
of her free use of her powers. Nor can there be
any reason shown why a woman's vote in the state
should not be received with as much respect as in
the family. A state is but an association of families,
and laws relate to the rights and immunities which
touch woman's most private and immediate wants
and dearest hopes; and there is no reason why sister,
wife, and mother should be more powerless in the
state than in the home. Nor does it make a woman
unwomanly to express an opinion by dropping a slip
of paper into a box, more than to express that same
opinion by conversation. In fact, there is no doubt,
that, in all matters relating to the interests of education,
temperance, and religion, the state would be a
material gainer by receiving the votes of women.
“But, having said all this, I must admit, per contra,
not only a great deal of crude, disagreeable talk in
these conventions, but a too great tendency of the
age to make the education of women anti-domestic.
It seems as if the world never could advance, except
like ships under a head-wind, tacking and going too
far, now in this direction, and now in the opposite.
Our common-school system now rejects sewing from
the education of girls, which very properly used
to occupy many hours daily in school a generation
put through algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and the
higher mathematics, to the entire neglect of that
learning which belongs distinctively to woman. A
girl cannot keep pace with her class, if she gives
any time to domestic matters; and accordingly she
is excused from them all during the whole term of
her education. The boy of a family, at an early age,
is put to a trade, or the labors of a farm; the father
becomes impatient of his support, and requires of
him to care for himself. Hence an interrupted education,
— learning coming by snatches in the winter
months or in the intervals of work. As the result,
the females in our country towns are commonly, in
mental culture, vastly in advance of the males of
the same household; but with this comes a physical
delicacy, the result of an exclusive use of the brain
and a neglect of the muscular system, with great
inefficiency in practical domestic duties. The race
of strong, hardy, cheerful girls, that used to grow up
in country places, and made the bright, neat, New
England kitchens of old times, — the girls that could
wash, iron, brew, bake, harness a horse and drive him,
no less than braid straw, embroider, draw, paint, and
read innumerable books, — this race of women, pride
of olden time, is daily lessening; and in their stead
come the fragile, easily fatigued, languid girls of a
common things. The great danger of all this, and
of the evils that come from it, is that society by and
by will turn as blindly against female intellectual
culture as it now advocates it, and, having worked
disproportionately one way, will work disproportionately
in the opposite direction.”
“The fact is,” said my wife, “that domestic service
is the great problem of life here in America; the
happiness of families, their thrift, well-being, and
comfort, are more affected by this than by any one
thing else. Our girls, as they have been brought
up, cannot perform the labor of their own families,
as in those simpler, old-fashioned days you tell of;
and what is worse, they have no practical skill with
which to instruct servants, and servants come to us,
as a class, raw and untrained; so what is to be done?
In the present state of prices, the board of a domestic
costs double her wages, and the waste she makes is
a more serious matter still. Suppose you give us an
article upon this subject in your `House and Home
Papers.' You could not have a better one.”
So I sat down, and wrote thus on
Servants and Service.
Many of the domestic evils in America originate
in the fact, that, while society here is professedly
life in every respect different from the life of the
Old World, yet these principles have never been so
thought out and applied as to give consistency and
harmony to our daily relations. America starts with
a political organization based on a declaration of the
primitive freedom and equality of all men. Every
human being, according to this principle, stands on
the same natural level with every other, and has the
same chance to rise according to the degree of power
or capacity given by the Creator. All our civil institutions
are designed to preserve this equality, as
far as possible, from generation to generation: there
is no entailed property, there are no hereditary titles,
no monopolies, no privileged classes, — all are to be
as free to rise and fall as the waves of the sea.
The condition of domestic service, however, still
retains about it something of the influences from
feudal times, and from the near presence of slavery
in neighboring States. All English literature, all the
literature of the world, describes domestic service in
the old feudal spirit and with the old feudal language,
which regarded the master as belonging to a privileged
class and the servant to an inferior one. There
is not a play, not a poem, not a novel, not a history,
that does not present this view. The master's rights,
like the rights of kings, were supposed to rest in his
was one who, from childhood, had learned “to order
himself lowly and reverently to all his betters.” When
New England brought to these shores the theory of
democracy, she brought, in the persons of the first
pilgrims, the habits of thought and of action formed
in aristocratic communities. Winthrop's Journal, and
all the old records of the earlier colonists, show
households where masters and mistresses stood on
the “right divine” of the privileged classes, howsoever
they might have risen up against authorities
themselves.
The first consequence of this state of things was
a universal rejection of domestic service in all classes
of American-born society. For a generation or two,
there was, indeed, a sort of interchange of family
strength, — sons and daughters engaging in the service
of neighboring families, in default of a sufficient
working-force of their own, but always on conditions
of strict equality. The assistant was to share the
table, the family sitting-room, and every honor and
attention that might be claimed by son or daughter.
When families increased in refinement and education
so as to make these conditions of close intimacy
with more uncultured neighbors disagreeable, they
had to choose between such intimacies and the performance
of their own domestic toil. No wages
take the condition of a servant on terms which they
thought applicable to that of a slave. The slightest
hint of a separate table was resented as an insult;
not to enter the front-door, and not to sit in the front-parlor
on state-occasions, was bitterly commented on
as a personal indignity.
The well-taught, self-respecting daughters of farmers,
the class most valuable in domestic service, gradually
retired from it. They preferred any other employment,
however laborious. Beyond all doubt, the
labors of a well-regulated family are more healthy,
more cheerful, more interesting, because less monotonous,
than the mechanical toils of a factory; yet
the girls of New England, with one consent, preferred
the factory, and left the whole business of domestic
service to a foreign population; and they did it mainly
because they would not take positions in families as
an inferior laboring-class by the side of others of
their own age who assumed as their prerogative to
live without labor.
“I can't let you have one of my daughters,” said
an energetic matron to her neighbor from the city,
who was seeking for a servant in her summer vacation;
“if you had n't daughters of your own, maybe
I would; but my girls ain't going to work so that your
girls may live in idleness.”
It was vain to offer money. “We don't need your
money, ma'am, we can support ourselves in other
ways; my girls can braid straw, and bind shoes, but
they ain't going to be slaves to anybody.”
In the Irish and German servants who took the
place of Americans in families, there was, to begin
with, the tradition of education in favor of a higher
class; but even the foreign population became more
or less infected with the spirit of democracy. They
came to this country with vague notions of freedom
and equality, and in ignorant and uncultivated people
such ideas are often more unreasonable for being
vague. They did not, indeed, claim a seat at the
table and in the parlor, but they repudiated many
of those habits of respect and courtesy which belonged
to their former condition, and asserted their
own will and way in the round, unvarnished phrase
which they supposed to be their right as republican
citizens. Life became a sort of domestic wrangle and
struggle between the employers, who secretly confessed
their weakness, but endeavored openly to assume the
air and bearing of authority, and the employed, who
knew their power and insisted on their privileges.
From this cause domestic service in America has
had less of mutual kindliness than in old countries.
Its terms have been so ill understood and defined
that both parties have assumed the defensive; and
society has often been the general servile war which
in one form or another was going on in their different
families, — a war as interminable as would be a struggle
between aristocracy and common people, undefined
by any bill of rights or constitution, and therefore
opening fields for endless disputes. In England,
the class who go to service are a class, and service is
a profession; the distance between them and their
employers is so marked and defined, and all the customs
and requirements of the position are so perfectly
understood, that the master or mistress has no fear of
being compromised by condescension, and no need of
the external voice or air of authority. The higher up
in the social scale one goes, the more courteous seems
to become the intercourse of master and servant; the
more perfect and real the power, the more is it veiled
in outward expression, — commands are phrased as
requests, and gentleness of voice and manner covers
an authority which no one would think of offending
without trembling.
But in America all is undefined. In the first place,
there is no class who mean to make domestic service a
profession to live and die in. It is universally an expedient,
a stepping-stone to something higher; your
best servants always have something else in view as
soon as they have laid by a little money; some form of
own is constantly in mind. Families look forward to
the buying of landed homesteads, and the scattered
brothers and sisters work awhile in domestic service
to gain the common fund for the purpose; your seamstress
intends to become a dress-maker, and take in
work at her own house; your cook is pondering a
marriage with the baker, which shall transfer her toils
from your cooking-stove to her own. Young women
are eagerly rushing into every other employment, till
female trades and callings are all overstocked. We
are continually harrowed with tales of the sufferings
of distressed needle-women, of the exactions and extortions
practised on the frail sex in the many branches
of labor and trade at which they try their hands; and
yet women will encounter all these chances of ruin
and starvation rather than make up their minds to
permanent domestic service. Now what is the matter
with domestic service? One would think, on the
face of it, that a calling which gives a settled home, a
comfortable room, rent-free, with fire and lights, good
board and lodging, and steady, well-paid wages, would
certainly offer more attractions than the making of
shirts for tenpence, with all the risks of providing
one's own sustenance and shelter.
I think it is mainly from the want of a definite idea
of the true position of a servant under our democratic
avoided in America, that it is the very last thing which
an intelligent young woman will look to for a living.
It is more the want of personal respect toward those
in that position than the labors incident to it which
repels our people from it. Many would be willing to
perform these labors, but they are not willing to place
themselves in a situation where their self-respect is
hourly wounded by the implication of a degree of inferiority
which does not follow any kind of labor or service
in this country but that of the family.
There exists in the minds of employers an unsuspected
spirit of superiority, which is stimulated into
an active form by the resistance which democracy inspires
in the working-class. Many families think of
servants only as a necessary evil, their wages as exactions,
and all that is allowed them as so much taken
from the family; and they seek in every way to get
from them as much and to give them as little as possible.
Their rooms are the neglected, ill-furnished,
incommodious ones, — and the kitchen is the most
cheerless and comfortless place in the house. Other
families, more good-natured and liberal, provide their
domestics with more suitable accommodations, and
are more indulgent; but there is still a latent spirit
of something like contempt for the position. That
they treat their servants with so much consideration
prostrate gratitude; and they are constantly disappointed
and shocked at that want of sense of inferiority
on the part of these people which leads them
to appropriate pleasant rooms, good furniture, and
good living as mere matters of common justice.
It seems to be a constant surprise to some employers
that servants should insist on having the same
human wants as themselves. Ladies who yawn in their
elegantly furnished parlors, among books and pictures,
if they have not company, parties, or opera to diversify
the evening, seem astonished and half indignant that
cook and chambermaid are more disposed to go out
for an evening gossip than to sit on hard chairs in the
kitchen where they have been toiling all day. The
pretty chambermaid's anxieties about her dress, the
time she spends at her small and not very clear mirror,
are sneeringly noticed by those whose toilet-cares
take up serious hours; and the question has never
apparently occurred to them why a serving-maid
should not want to look pretty as well as her mistress.
She is a woman as well as they, with all a
woman's wants and weaknesses; and her dress is as
much to her as theirs to them.
A vast deal of trouble among servants arises from
impertinent interferences and petty tyrannical exactions
on the part of employers. Now the authority of
domestics extends simply to the things they have contracted
to do and the hours during which they have
contracted to serve; otherwise than this, they have no
more right to interfere with them in the disposal of
their time than with any mechanic whom they employ.
They have, indeed, a right to regulate the hours of
their own household, and servants can choose between
conformity to these hours and the loss of their
situation; but, within reasonable limits, their right to
come and go at their own discretion, in their own time,
should be unquestioned.
If employers are troubled by the fondness of their
servants for dancing, evening company, and late hours,
the proper mode of proceeding is to make these matters
a subject of distinct contract in hiring. The more
strictly and perfectly the business matters of the first
engagement of domestics are conducted, the more
likelihood there is of mutual quiet and satisfaction in
the relation. It is quite competent to every house-keeper
to say what practices are or are not consistent
with the rules of her family, and what will be inconsistent
with the service for which she agrees to pay.
It is much better to regulate such affairs by cool contract
in the outset than by warm altercations and
protracted domestic battles.
As to the terms of social intercourse, it seems somehow
that their servants owe them and their family more
respect than they and the family owe to the servants.
But do they? What is the relation of servant to employer
in a democratic country? Precisely that of a
person who for money performs any kind of service
for you. The carpenter comes into your house to
put up a set of shelves, — the cook comes into your
kitchen to cook your dinner. You never think that
the carpenter owes you any more respect than you
owe to him because he is in your house doing your
behests; he is your fellow-citizen, you treat him with
respect, you expect to be treated with respect by him.
You have a claim on him that he shall do your work
according to your directions, — no more. Now I apprehend
that there is a very common notion as to the
position and rights of servants which is quite different
from this. Is it not a common feeling that a servant
is one who may be treated with a degree of freedom
by every member of the family which he or she may
not return? Do not people feel at liberty to question
servants about their private affairs, to comment on
their dress and appearance, in a manner which they
would feel to be an impertinence, if reciprocated?
Do they not feel at liberty to express dissatisfaction
with their performances in rude and unceremonious
terms, to reprove them in the presence of company,
shall be expressed only in terms of respect?
A woman would not feel herself at liberty to talk to
her milliner or her dressmaker in language as devoid
of consideration as she will employ towards her cook
or chambermaid. Yet both are rendering her a service
which she pays for in money, and one is no more
made her inferior thereby than the other. Both have
an equal right to be treated with courtesy. The master
and mistress of a house have a right to require
respectful treatment from all whom their roof shelters;
but they have no more right to exact it of servants
than of every guest and every child, and they themselves
owe it as much to servants as to guests.
In order that servants may be treated with respect
and courtesy, it is not necessary, as in simpler patriarchal
days, that they sit at the family-table. Your
carpenter or plumber does not feel hurt that you do
not ask him to dine with you, nor your milliner and
mantua-maker that you do not exchange ceremonious
calls and invite them to your parties. It is well understood
that your relations with them are of a mere
business character. They never take it as an assumption
of superiority on your part that you do not admit
them to relations of private intimacy. There may be
the most perfect respect and esteem and even friendship
between them and you, notwithstanding. So it
any person understand that there are quite other reasons
than the assumption of personal superiority for
not wishing to admit servants to the family privacy.
It was not, in fact, to sit in the parlor or at the table,
in themselves considered, that was the thing aimed at
by New England girls, — these were valued only as
signs that they were deemed worthy of respect and
consideration, and, where freely conceded, were often
in point of fact declined.
Let servants feel, in their treatment by their employers,
and in the atmosphere of the family, that their
position is held to be a respectable one, let them feel
in the mistress of the family the charm of unvarying
consideration and good manners, let their work-rooms
be made convenient and comfortable, and their private
apartments bear some reasonable comparison in
point of agreeableness to those of other members of
the family, and domestic service will be more frequently
sought by a superior and self-respecting class.
There are families in which such a state of things prevails;
and such families, amid the many causes which
unite to make the tenure of service uncertain, have
generally been able to keep good permanent servants.
There is an extreme into which kindly disposed
people often run with regard to servants, which may
be mentioned here. They make pets of them. They
and, through indolence and easiness of temper, tolerate
neglect of duty. Many of the complaints of
the ingratitude of servants come from those who have
spoiled them in this way; while many of the longest
and most harmonious domestic unions have sprung
from a simple, quiet course of Christian justice and
benevolence, a recognition of servants as fellow-beings
and fellow-Christians, and a doing to them as we would
in like circumstances that they should do to us.
The mistresses of American families, whether they
like it or not, have the duties of missionaries imposed
upon them by that class from which our supply of
domestic servants is drawn. They may as well accept
the position cheerfully, and, as one raw, untrained
hand after another passes through their family, and
is instructed by them in the mysteries of good housekeeping,
comfort themselves with the reflection that
they are doing something to form good wives and
mothers for the Republic.
The complaints made of Irish girls are numerous
and loud; the failings of green Erin, alas! are but
too open and manifest; yet, in arrest of judgment, let
us move this consideration: let us imagine our own
daughters between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four,
untaught and inexperienced in domestic affairs
as they commonly are, shipped to a foreign shore to
as a whole they would do much better. The girls that
fill our families and do our house-work are often of
the age of our own daughters, standing for themselves,
without mothers to guide them, in a foreign country,
not only bravely supporting themselves, but sending
home in every ship remittances to impoverished friends
left behind. If our daughters did as much for us,
should we not be proud of their energy and heroism?
When we go into the houses of our country, we find
a majority of well-kept, well-ordered, and even elegant
establishments where the only hands employed are
those of the daughters of Erin. True, American women
have been their instructors, and many a weary
hour of care have they had in the discharge of this
office; but the result on the whole is beautiful and
good, and the end of it, doubtless, will be peace.
In speaking of the office of the American mistress
as being a missionary one, we are far from recommending
any controversial interference with the religious
faith of our servants. It is far better to incite them
to be good Christians in their own way than to run
the risk of shaking their faith in all religion by pointing
out to them the errors of that in which they have
been educated. The general purity of life and propriety
of demeanor of so many thousands of undefended
no home but their church, and no shield but their
religion, are a sufficient proof that this religion exerts
an influence over them not to be lightly trifled with.
But there is a real unity even in opposite Christian
forms; and the Roman Catholic servant and the Protestant
mistress, if alike possessed by the spirit of
Christ, and striving to conform to the Golden Rule,
cannot help being one in heart, though one go to
mass and the other to meeting.
Finally, the bitter baptism through which we are
passing, the life-blood dearer than our own which is
drenching distant fields, should remind us of the preciousness
of distinctive American ideas. They who
would seek in their foolish pride to establish the pomp
of liveried servants in America are doing that which
is simply absurd. A servant can never in our country
be the mere appendage to another man, to be marked
like a sheep with the color of his owner; he must be
a fellow-citizen, with an established position of his
own, free to make contracts, free to come and go, and
having in his sphere titles to consideration and respect
just as definite as those of any trade or profession
whatever.
Moreover, we cannot in this country maintain to
any great extent large retinues of servants. Even
with ample fortunes they are forbidden by the general
and difficult to manage. Every mistress of a
family knows that her cares increase with every additional
servant. Two keep the peace with each other
and their employer; three begin a possible discord,
which possibility increases with four, and becomes
certain with five or six. Trained housekeepers, such
as regulate the complicated establishments of the Old
World, form a class that are not, and from the nature
of the case never will be, found in any great numbers
in this country. All such women, as a general thing,
are keeping, and prefer to keep, houses of their own.
A moderate style of housekeeping, small, compact,
and simple domestic establishments, must necessarily
be the general order of life in America. So many
openings of profit are to be found in this country, that
domestic service necessarily wants the permanence
which forms so agreeable a feature of it in the Old
World.
This being the case, it should be an object in America
to exclude from the labors of the family all that
can, with greater advantage, be executed out of it
by combined labor.
Formerly, in New England, soap and candles were
to be made in each separate family; now, comparatively
few take this toil upon them. We buy soap of
the soap-maker, and candles of the candle-factor. This
no family makes its own bread, and better bread cannot
be eaten than what can be bought at the appropriate
shops. No family does its own washing, the
family's linen is all sent to women who, making this
their sole profession, get it up with a care and nicety
which can seldom be equalled in any family.
How would it simplify the burdens of the American
housekeeper to have washing and ironing day expunged
from her calendar! How much more neatly
and compactly could the whole domestic system be
arranged! If all the money that each separate family
spends on the outfit and accommodations for washing
and ironing, on fuel, soap, starch, and the other et
ceteras, were united in a fund to create a laundry for
every dozen families, one or two good women could
do in first rate style what now is very indifferently
done by the disturbance and disarrangement of all
other domestic processes in these families. Whoever
sets neighborhood laundries on foot will do much to
solve the American housekeeper's hardest problem.
Finally, American women must not try with three
servants to carry on life in the style which in the Old
World requires sixteen, — they must thoroughly understand,
and be prepared to teach, every branch of
housekeeping, — they must study to make domestic
service desirable, by treating their servants in a way
respected, — and there will gradually be evolved
from the present confusion a solution of the domestic
problem which shall be adapted to the life of a new
and growing world.
| IX.
SERVANTS. House and home papers | |