DOMESTIC SERVICE

DOMESTIC SERVICE

BY
LUCY MAYNARD SALMON

SECOND EDITION

WITH AN ADDITIONAL CHAPTER ON DOMESTIC
SERVICE IN EUROPE

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1901

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1897,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped February, 1897. Revised edition
printed March, 1901.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith
Norwood, Mass. U.S.A.

“The reform that applies itself to the household must not be partial. It must correct the whole system of our social living. It must come with plain living and high thinking; it must break up caste, and put domestic service on another foundation. It must come in connection with a true acceptance by each man of his vocation,—not chosen by his parents or friends, but by his genius, with earnestness and love.”

EMERSON.

PREFACE

The basis of the following discussion of the subject of domestic service is the information obtained through a series of blanks sent out during the years 1889 and 1890. Three schedules were prepared—one for employers, one for employees, and one asking for miscellaneous information in regard to the Woman’s Exchange, the teaching of household employments, and kindred subjects.[1] These schedules were submitted for criticism to several gentlemen prominent in statistical investigation, and after revision five thousand sets were distributed. These were sent out in packages containing from five to twenty-five sets through the members of the Classes of 1888 and 1889, Vassar College, and single sets were mailed, with a statement of the object of the work, to the members of different associations presumably interested in such investigations. These were the American Statistical Association, the American Economic Association, the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, the Vassar Alumnæ, and the women graduates of the University of Michigan. They were also sent to various women’s clubs, and many were distributed at the request of persons interested in the work.

Of the five thousand sets of blanks thus sent out, 1025 were returned filled out by employers, twenty being received after the tabulation was completed. These gave the facts asked for with reference to 2545 employees. The returns received from employers thus bore about the same proportion to the blanks distributed as do the returns received in ordinary statistical investigation carried on without the aid of special agents or legal authority. The reasons why a larger number were not returned are the same as are found in all such inquiries, with a few peculiar to the nature of the case. The occupation investigated is one that does not bring either employer or employee into immediate contact with others in the same occupation, and it is therefore believed that the relations between employer and employee are purely personal, and thus not a proper subject for statistical inquiry. Another reason assigned was the fear that the agitation of the subject would cause employees to become dissatisfied, while a third reason was the large number of questions included in the blanks, and the fact that no immediate and possibly no remote benefit would accrue to those filling them out. Another reason frequently assigned was that all of the questions could not be answered, and that, therefore, replies to others could not be of service. Several of the questions, however, were framed with the understanding that in many cases they could not be definitely answered; as the question, “How many servants have you employed since you have been housekeeping?” The fact that often no reply could be given, was as significant of the condition of the service as a detailed statement could have been.

No success had been anticipated in securing replies from employees; but as any study of domestic service would be incomplete without looking at it from this point of view, the attempt was made. As a result, 719 blanks were returned filled out. In some instances employees, hearing of the inquiry, wrote for schedules and returned them answered. In a few cases correspondence was carried on with women who had formerly been in domestic service. The influences that operated to prevent employers from answering the inquiries made had even greater force in the case of employees. In addition, there was present a hesitation to commit anything to writing, or to sign a name to a document the import of which was not clearly understood by them.

The limited amount of information that could be given explains the small number of returns received to the third schedule,—about two hundred.

The returns received were sent to the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, where, by the courtesy of the chief of the bureau, they were collated during the spring and summer of 1890, under the special direction of the chief clerk, in accordance with a previously arranged scheme of tables. The general plan of arrangement adopted was to class the schedules with reference to employers, first alphabetically by states and towns, and second alphabetically by population. The schedules were then classed with reference to employees, first by men and women, and second by place of birth. The various statistical devices used in the Massachusetts Bureau were employed in tabulating the material, and greatly facilitated the work.

Fifty large tables were thus prepared, and by various combinations numerous smaller ones were made. The classification thus adopted made it possible to give all the results either in a general form or with special reference to men and women employees, the native born and the foreign born, and to all of the branches of the service. It was also possible to study the conditions of the service geographically, and with reference to the population and to other industrial situations.

The most detailed tables made out concerned the wage question, including a presentation of classified wages, average wages with the percentage of employees receiving the same wages as the average, and also more or less than the average, a comparison of wages paid at different times and of wages received in domestic service and in other employments. For the purposes of comparison, the writer also classified the salaries paid to about six thousand teachers in the public schools in sixteen representative cities, as indicated by the reports of city superintendents for the year during which information concerning domestic service had been given on the schedules. Through the courtesy of a large employment bureau in Boston, the wages received by nearly three thousand employees were ascertained and used for comparison. The most valuable results of the investigation possibly were those growing out of the consensus of opinion obtained from employers and employees regarding the nature of the service considered as an occupation. The greater proportion of these tables can be found in Chapter V.

The question must naturally arise as to how far the returns received through such investigation can be considered representative. It has seemed to the writer that they could be considered fairly so. Investigations of this character must always be considered typical rather than comprehensive. It is difficult to fix the exact number to be considered typical as between a partial investigation and a census which is exhaustive. In some cases it is possible to obtain a majority in numbers, in others it is not. If the number of returns, however, passes the point where it would be considered trivial, the number between this and the majority may perhaps be regarded as representative. By the application of a similar principle, the expression at the polls of the wishes of the twentieth part of the inhabitants of a state is recognized as the will of the majority. But, while the returns can be considered only fairly representative as regards numbers, they seem entirely so as regards conditions. It is believed that every possible condition under which domestic service exists, as regards both employer and employee, is represented by the returns received, and that, therefore, the conclusions drawn from these results cannot be wholly unreasonable. Moreover, the circulars were sent out practically at random, and, therefore, do not represent any particular class in society, except the class sufficiently interested in the subject to answer the questions asked. If the returns thus secured can be regarded in any sense as representative, the results based on them may be considered as indicating certain general conditions and tendencies, although the conclusions reached may be modified by later and fuller researches.

The question must also arise as to what it is hoped will be accomplished through this investigation. It is not expected that all, or even any one of the perplexing questions connected with domestic service will be even partially answered by it; it is not expected that any individual housekeeper will have less trouble to-morrow than to-day in adjusting the difficulties arising in her household; it will not enable any employer whose incompetent cook leaves to-day without warning to secure an efficient one without delay. It is hoped, however, that the tabulation and presentation of the facts will afford a broader basis for general discussion that has been possible without them, that a knowledge of the conditions of domestic service beyond their own localities and households will enable some housekeepers in time to decide more easily the economic questions arising within every home, that it will do a little something to stimulate discussion of the subject on other bases than the purely personal one. The hope has also come that writers on economic theory and economic conditions will recognize the place of domestic service among other industries, and will give to the public the results of their scientific investigations of the subject, that the great bureaus of labor—always ready to anticipate any demand of the public—will recognize a demand for facts in this field of work.

The writer has followed the presentation of facts by a theoretical discussion of doubtful and possible remedies. But if fuller and more searching official investigation, establishing a substantial basis for discussion, should point to conclusions entirely at variance with those here given, no one would more heartily rejoice than herself. It may reasonably be said that in view of the character of the investigation no conclusions at all should have been advanced by the investigator. Three things, however, seemed to justify the intrusion of personal views; a recognition of the prevalent anxiety to find a way out of existing difficulties, a belief that improvement can come only as each one is willing to make some contribution to the general discussion, and a conviction that no one should criticise existing conditions unless prepared to suggest others that may be substituted for them.

The following discussion would have been impossible without the hearty co-operation of the thousand and more employers and the seven hundred employees who filled out the schedules distributed. The great majority of these were personally unknown to the writer, and she can express only in this public way her deep appreciation of their kindness, as she also wishes to do to the many friends, known and unknown, who assisted in distributing the schedules. She also desires to express her obligation to the Hon. Carroll D. Wright, for help received in preparing the schedules and for the receipt of advance sheets from the Census of 1890; to the Hon. Horace G. Wadlin and Mr. Charles F. Pidgin, for the courtesies extended at the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, and also to Professor Davis R. Dewey, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; to Dean Marion Talbot of the University of Chicago, and to Professor Mary Roberts Smith, of the Leland Stanford Junior University; to Mrs. John Wilkinson of Chicago, Mrs. John H. Converse of Philadelphia, and Mrs. Helen Hiscock Backus of Brooklyn, for their constant encouragement and assistance in the work. Most of all the writer is under obligation to Miss A. Underhill for her assistance in reading both the manuscript and the proof of the work, and for the preparation of the Index.

Articles bearing on the subject have at different times appeared in the Papers of the American Statistical Association, The New England Magazine, The Cosmopolitan, and The Forum. These have been freely used in the work, and the writer acknowledges the courtesy of the publishers and editors of these periodicals in allowing this use of her papers.

January 18, 1897.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

It has seemed advisable in sending out a second edition of this work to add a supplementary chapter on the condition of domestic service in Europe. This is based largely on the inquiries made in season and out of season at different times during the past ten years of heads of households and of housekeepers in England, France, Germany, and Italy. It has naturally been impossible to sum up in a single chapter the mass of information thus gleaned, but a few features common to all of these countries have been indicated, as well as some peculiar to each. The literature bearing directly on the subject is very meagre, but a few titles have been indicated.

For information bearing on this part of the work, I am under special obligation to M. Levasseur of Paris, to Miss Collet of the Labor Department of the Board of Trade, London, to Miss E. M. Hall of Rome, to Professor Victor Böhmert, recently of the Royal Statistical Bureau, Dresden, and to Mrs. J. H. W. Stuckenberg of Cambridge, recently of Berlin.

January, 1901.

CONTENTS

DOMESTIC SERVICE

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

Domestic service has been called “the great American question.” If based on the frequency of its discussion in popular literature, foundation for this judgment exists. Few subjects have attracted greater attention, but its consideration has been confined to four general classes of periodicals, each treating it from a different point of view. The popular magazine article is theoretical in character, and often proposes remedies for existing evils without sufficient consideration of the causes of the difficulty. Household journals and the home departments of the secular and the religious press usually treat only of the personal relations existing between mistress and maid. The columns of the daily press given to “occasional correspondents” contain narrations of personal experiences. The humorous columns of the daily and the illustrated weekly papers caricature, on the one side, the ignorance and helplessness of the housekeeper, and, on the other side, the insolence and presumption of the servant. In addition to this, in many localities it has passed into a common proverb that, among housekeepers, with whatever topic conversation begins, it sooner or later gravitates towards the one fixed point of domestic service, while among domestic employees it is none the less certain that other phases of the same general subject are agitated.

This popular discussion, which has assumed so many forms, has been almost exclusively personal in character. A somewhat different aspect of the case is presented when the problem is stated to be “as momentous as that of capital and labor, and as complicated as that of individualism and socialism.” This statement suggests that economic principles are involved, but the question of domestic service has been almost entirely omitted, not without reason, from theoretical, statistical, and historical discussions of economic problems. It has been omitted from theoretical discussions mainly because: (1) the occupation does not involve the investment of a large amount of capital on the part of the individual employer or employee; it therefore seems to be excluded from theoretical discussions of the relations of capital, wages, and labor; (2) no combinations have yet been formed among employers or employees; it is therefore exempt from such speculations as are involved in the consideration of trusts, monopolies, and trade unions; (3) the products of domestic service are more transient than are the results of other forms of labor; this fact must determine somewhat its relative position in economic discussion. Its exclusion, as a rule, from the statistical presentations of the labor question is also not surprising. The various bureaus of labor, both national and state, consider only those subjects for the investigation of which there is a recognized demand. They are the leaders of public opinion in the accumulation of facts, but they are its followers as regards the choice of questions to be studied. Public opinion has not yet demanded a scientific treatise on domestic service, and until it does the bureaus of labor cannot be expected to supply the material for such discussion.[2] Again, it is not surprising that the historical side of the subject has been overlooked, since household employments have been passive recipients, not active participants, in the industrial development of the past century. Yet it must be said that this negative consideration of the subject by theoretical, practical, and historical economists, and the positive treatment accorded it by popular writers, seems an unfair and unscientific disposition to make of an occupation in which by the Census of 1890 one and a half millions of persons are actively engaged,[3] to whom employers pay annually at the lowest rough estimate in cash wages more than $218,000,000,[4] for whose support they pay at the lowest estimate an equal amount,[5] and through whose hands passes so large a part of the finished products of other forms of labor.[6]

It is not difficult, however, to find reasons, in addition to the specific ones suggested, for this somewhat cavalier treatment of domestic service. The nature of the service rendered, as well as the relation between employer and employee, is largely personal; it is believed therefore that all questions involved in the subject can be considered and settled from the personal point of view. It follows from this fact that it is extremely difficult to ascertain the actual condition of the service outside of a single family, or, at best, a locality very narrow in extent, and therefore that it is almost impossible to treat the subject in a comprehensive manner. It follows as a result of the two previous reasons that domestic service has never been considered a part of the great labor question, and that it has not been supposed to be affected by the political, social, and industrial development of the past century as other occupations have been.

These various explanations of the failure to consider domestic service in connection with other forms of labor are in reality but different phases of a fundamental reason—the isolation that has always attended household service and household employments. From the fact that other occupations are largely the result of association and combination they court investigation and the fullest and freest discussion of their underlying principles and their influence on each other. Household service, since it is based on the principle of isolation, is regarded as an affair of the individual with which the public at large has no concern. Other forms of industry are anxious to call to their assistance all the legislative, administrative, and judicial powers of the nation, all the forces that religion, philanthropy, society itself can exert in their behalf. The great majority of housekeepers, if the correspondent of a leading journal is to be trusted, “do not require outside assistance in the management of their affairs, and consequently resent any interference in the administration of their duties.”

The question must arise, however, in view of the interdependence of all other forms of industry, whether it is possible to maintain this perfect separation with regard to any one employment, whether household employments are justified in resenting any intrusion into their domain, whether the individual employer is right in considering household service exclusively a personal affair. An answer to the question may be of help in deciding whether the difficulties that are found in the present system of domestic service arise in every case necessarily from the personal relations which exist between employer and employee, or are largely due to economic conditions over which the individual employer has no control. Still further, the conclusions reached must determine somewhat the nature of the forces to be set in motion to lessen these difficulties.

CHAPTER II
HISTORICAL ASPECTS OF DOMESTIC EMPLOYMENTS

It is impossible to understand the condition of domestic service as it exists to-day without a cursory glance at the changes in household employments resulting from the inventions of the latter part of the eighteenth century. These changes, unlike many others, came apparently without warning. At the middle of the last century steam was a plaything, electricity a curiosity of the laboratory, and wind and water the only known motive powers. From time immemorial the human hand unaided, except by the simplest machinery, had clothed the world. Iron could be smelted only with wood, and the English parliament had seriously discussed the suppression of the iron trade as the only means of preserving the forests. But during the last third of the century the brilliant inventions of Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, and Cartwright had made possible the revolutionizing of all forms of cotton and woollen industries; Watt had given a new motive power to the world; the uses of coal had been multiplied, and soon after its mining rendered safe; while a thousand supplementary inventions had followed quickly in the train of these. A new era of inventive genius had dawned, which was to rival in importance that of the fifteenth century.

The immediate result of these inventions was seen in the rapid transference of all the processes of cotton and woollen manufactures from the home of the individual weaver and spinner to large industrial centres, the centralization of important interests in the hands of a few, and a division of labor that multiplied indefinitely the results previously accomplished.

But the factory system of manufactures that superseded the domestic system of previous generations has not been the product of inventions alone. It has been pointed out by Mr. Carroll D. Wright[7] that while these inventions have been the material forces through which the change was accomplished, other agencies co-operated with them. These co-operating influences have been physical, as illustrated in the discoveries of Watt; philosophical, as seen in the works of Adam Smith; commercial, or the industrial supremacy of England considered as a result of the loss of the American colonies; and philanthropical, or those connected with the work of the Wesleys, John Howard, Hannah More, and Wilberforce. All these acting in conjunction with the material force—invention—have operated on manufacturing industries to produce the factory system of to-day. It is, indeed, because the factory system is the resultant of so many forces working in the past that it touches in the present nearly every great economic, social, political, moral, and philanthropic question.

Although comparatively few of these inventions have been intended primarily to lessen household labor, this era of inventive activity has not been without its effects on household employments. A hundred years ago the household occupations carried on in the average family included, in addition to whatever is now ordinarily done, every form of spinning and weaving cotton, wool and flax, carpet weaving and making, upholstering, knitting, tailoring, the making of boots, shoes, hats, gloves, collars, cuffs, men’s underclothing, quilts, comfortables, mattresses, and pillows; also, the making of soap, starch, candles, yeast, perfumes, medicines, liniments, crackers, cheese, coffee-browning, the drying of fruits and vegetables, and salting and pickling meat. Every article in this list, which might be lengthened, can now be made or prepared for use out of the house of the consumer, not only better but more cheaply by the concentration of capital and labor in large industrial enterprises. Moreover, as a result of other forms of inventive genius, the so-called modern improvements have taken out of the ordinary household many forms of hard and disagreeable labor. The use of kerosene, gas, natural gas, and electricity[8] for all purposes of lighting, and to a certain extent for heating and cooking; the adoption of steam-cleaning for furniture and wearing apparel; the invention of the sewing-machine and other labor-saving contrivances; the improvement of city and village water-works, plumbing, heat-supplying companies, city and village sanitation measures, including the collection of ashes and garbage,—these are all the results of modern business enterprise.

These facts are familiar, but the effects more easily escape notice. The change from individual to collective enterprises, from the domestic to the factory system, has released a vast amount of labor formerly done within the house by women with three results: either this labour has been diverted to other places, or into other channels, or has become idle. The tendency at first was for labor thus released to be diverted to other places. The home spinners and weavers became the spinners and weavers in factories, and later the home workers in other lines became the operatives in other large establishments. As machinery became more simple, women were employed in larger numbers, until now, in several places and in several occupations, their numbers exceed those of men employees.[9] This fact has materially changed the condition of affairs within the household. Under the domestic system of manufactures nearly all women spent part of their time in their own homes in spinning, weaving, and the making of various articles of food and clothing in connection with their more active household duties. When women came to be employed in factories, the division of labor made necessary a readjustment of work so that housekeeping duties were performed by one person giving all her time to them instead of by several persons each giving a part of her time. The tendency of this was at first naturally to decrease the number of women partially employed in household duties, and to increase the demand for women giving all their time to domestic work.

This readjustment of work in the home and in the factory brought also certain other changes that have an important bearing. The first employees were the daughters of farmers, tradesmen, teachers, and professional men of limited means, women of sturdy, energetic New England character. They were women who, in their own homes, had been the spinners and the weavers for the family and who had sometimes eked out a slender income by doing the same work in their homes for others disqualified for it. As machinery was simplified, and new occupations more complex in character were opened to women, their places were taken in factories by Irish immigrants as these in turn have been displaced by the French Canadians. All these changes in the personnel of factory operatives have meant that while much labor has been taken out of the household, that which remained has been performed by fewer hands, and also that women of foreign nationalities have been pressed into household service.

Another and later result of the change from the domestic to the factory system was the diversion of much of the labor at first performed within the household into entirely different channels. The anti-slavery agitation beginning about 1830 enlisted the energies of many women, and the discussions growing out of it were undoubtedly the occasion for the opening of entirely new occupations to them. Oberlin College was founded in 1833 and Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1837, thus forming the entering wedge for the entrance of women into higher educational work. Medical schools for women were organized and professional life made possible, while business interests began to attract the attention of many.

Another part of the labor released by mechanical inventions and labor-saving contrivances became in time idle labor. By idle labor is meant not only absolute idleness, but labor which is unproductive and adds neither to the comfort nor to the intelligence of society. Work that had previously been performed within the home without money remuneration came to be considered unworthy of the same women when performed for persons outside their own household and for a fixed compensation. The era of so-called fancy-work, which includes all forms of work in hair, wax, leather, beads, rice, feathers, cardboard, and canvas, so offensive to the artistic sense of to-day, was one product of this labor released from necessary productive processes. It was a necessary result because some outlet was needed for the energies of women, society as yet demanded that this outlet should be within the household, and the mechanical instincts were strong while the artistic sense had not been developed. It is an era not to be looked upon with derision, but as an interesting phase in the history of the evolution of woman’s occupation.[10]

Still another channel for this idle labor was found in what has been called “intellectual fancy-work.” Literary clubs and classes sprang up and multiplied, affording occupation to their members, but producing nothing and giving at first only the semblance of education and culture. Many of them became in time a stimulus for more thorough systematic work, but in their origin they were often but a manifestation of aimless activity, of labor released from productive channels.

The era of inventions and resulting business activity has therefore changed materially the condition of affairs within the household. Before this time all women shared in preparing and cooking food; they spun, wove, and made the clothing, and were domestic manufacturers in the sense that they changed the raw material into forms suitable for consumption. But modern inventions and the resulting change in the system of manufactures, as has been seen, necessarily affected household employments. The change has been the same in kind, though not in degree, as has come in the occupations of men. In the last analysis every man is a tiller of the soil, but division of labor has left only a small proportion of men in this employment. So in the last analysis every woman is a housekeeper who “does her own work,” but division of labor has come into the household as well as into the field, though in a more imperfect form. It has left many women in the upper and middle classes unemployed, while many in the lower classes are too heavily burdened; in three of the four great industries which absorb the energies of the majority of women working for remuneration—manufacturing, work in shops, and teaching—the supply of workers is greater than the demand, while in the fourth—domestic service—the reverse is the case. But it cannot be assumed that all of those in the first three classes have necessarily been taken from the fourth class. It has been well said that “through the introduction of machinery, ignorant labor is utilized, not created.” Many who under the old order would have been able to live only under the most primitive conditions, and whose labor can be used under the new order only in the simplest forms of manufacturing, would be entirely unfit to have the care of an ordinary household in its present complex form.

One more effect must be noted of this transference of many forms of household labor to large centres through the operation of inventive genius. It has been seen that many women have thus been left comparatively free from the necessity of labor. The pernicious theory has therefore grown up that women who are rich or well-to-do ought not to work, at least for compensation, since by so doing they crowd out of remunerative employment others who need it. It is a theory that overlooks the historical fact that every person should be in the last analysis a producer, it is based wholly on the assumption that work is a curse and not a blessing, and it does not take into consideration the fact that every woman who works without remuneration, or for less than the market rates, thereby lowers the wages of every person who is a breadwinner. It is a theory which if applied to men engaged in business occupations would check all industrial progress. It is equally a hindrance when applied to women.

This revolutionizing of manufacturing processes through the substitution of the factory for the domestic system has thus rendered necessary a shifting of all forms of household labor. The division of labor here is but partially accomplished, and out of this fact arises a part of the friction that is found in household service.

Household employers and employees may be indifferent to the changes that the industrial revolutions of a century have brought, they may be ignorant of them all, but they have not been unaffected by them, nor can they remain unaffected by changes that may subsequently come in the industrial system. The interdependence of all forms of industry is so complete, that a change cannot revolutionize one without in time revolutionizing all. The old industrial régime cannot be restored, nor can household employments of to-day be put back to their condition of a hundred years ago.

CHAPTER III
DOMESTIC SERVICE DURING THE COLONIAL PERIOD

It has been seen how great a change the inventions of the past century have made in the character of household employments. A change in the nature of household service no less important has taken place by virtue of the political revolutions of the century, acting in connection with certain economic and social forces. The subject of domestic service looms up so prominently in the foreground to-day that there is danger of forgetting that it has a past as well as a present. Yet it is impossible to understand its present condition without comprehending, in a measure, the manner in which it has been affected by its own history. It is equally impossible to forecast its future without due regard to this history.

Domestic service in America has passed through three distinct phases. The first extends from the early colonization to the time of the Revolution; the second, from the Revolution to about 1850; the third, from 1850 to the present time.

During the colonial period service of every kind was performed by transported convicts, indented white servants or “redemptioners,” “free willers,” negroes, and Indians.[11]

The first three classes—convicts, redemptioners, and free willers—were of European, at first generally of English, birth. The colonization of the new world gave opportunity for the transportation and subsequent employment in the colonies of large numbers of persons who, as a rule, belonged to a low class in the social scale.[12] The mother country looked with satisfaction on this method of disposing of those “such, as had there been no English foreign Plantation in the World, could probably never have lived at home to do service for their Country, but must have come to be hanged, or starved, or dyed untimely of some of those miserable Diseases, that proceed from want, and vice.”[13] She regarded her “plantations abroad as a good effect proceeding from many evil causes,” and congratulated herself on being freed from “such sort of people, as their crimes and debaucheries would quickly destroy at home, or whom their wants would confine in prisons or force to beg, and so render them useless, and consequently a burthen to the public.”[14]

From the very first the advantage to England of this method of disposing of her undesirable population had been urged. The author of Nova Britannia wrote in 1609: “You see it no new thing, but most profitable for our State, to rid our multitudes of such as lie at home, pestering the land with pestilence and penury, and infecting one another with vice and villanie, worse than the plague it selfe.”[15] So admirable did the plan seem in time that between the years 1661 and 1668 various proposals were made to the King and Council to constitute an office for transporting to the Plantations all vagrants, rogues, and idle persons that could give no account of themselves, felons who had the benefit of clergy, and such as were convicted of petty larceny—such persons to be transported to the nearest seaport and to serve four years if over twenty years of age, and seven years if under twenty.[16] Virginia and Maryland[17] were the colonies to which the majority of these servants were sent, though they were not unknown elsewhere.[18]

Protests were often made against this method of settlement, both by the colonists themselves[19] and by Englishmen,[20] but it was long before the English government abandoned the practice of transporting criminals to the American colonies.[21]

Of the three classes of white, or Christian servants, as they were called to distinguish them from Indians and negroes, the free willers were evidently found only in Maryland. This class was considered even more unfortunate than that of the indented servants or convicts. They were received under the condition that they be allowed a certain number of days in which to dispose of themselves to the greatest advantage. But since servants could be procured for a trifling consideration on absolute terms, there was no disposition to take a class of servants who wished to make their own terms. If they did not succeed in making terms within a certain number of days, they were sold to pay for their passage.[22] The colonists saw very little difference between the transported criminals and political prisoners, the free willers, and the redemptioners who sold themselves into slavery, and as between the two classes—redemptioners and convicted felons—they at first considered the felons the more profitable as their term of service was for seven years, while that of the indented servants was for five years only.[23]

It is impossible to state the proportion of servants belonging to the two classes of transported convicts and redemptioners, but the statement is apparently fair that the redemptioners who sold themselves into service to pay for the cost of their passage constituted by far the larger proportion. These were found in all the colonies, though more numerous in the Southern and Middle colonies than in New England. In Virginia and Maryland they outnumbered negro slaves until the latter part of the seventeenth century.[24] In Massachusetts, apprenticed servants bound for a term of years were sold from ships in Boston as late as 1730,[25] while the general trade in bound white servants lasted until the time of the Revolution,[26] and in Pennsylvania even until this century.[27]

The first redemptioners were naturally of English birth, but after a time they were supplanted by those of other nationalities, particularly by the Germans and Irish. As early as 1718 there was a complaint of the Irish immigrants in Massachusetts.[28] In Connecticut “a parcel of Irish servants, both men and women,” just imported from Dublin, was advertised to be sold cheap in 1764.[29] In 1783 large numbers of Irish and German redemptioners entered Maryland, and a society was formed to assist the Germans who could not speak English.[30]

It has been said that a great majority of the redemptioners belonged at first to a low class in the social scale. A considerable number, however, both men and women, belonged to the respectable, even to the so-called upper classes of society.[31] They were sent over to prevent disadvantageous marriages,[32] to secure inheritances to other members of a family,[33] or to further some criminal scheme.

Many of these bond servants sold themselves into servitude, others were disposed of through emigration brokers,[34] and still others were kidnapped, being enticed on shipboard by persons called “spirits.”[35]

The form of indenture was simple, and varied but little in the different colonies. Stripped of its cumbersome legal phraseology, it included the three main points of time of service, the nature of the service to be performed, although this was usually specified to be “in any such service as his employer shall employ him,” and the compensation to be given.[36]

It sometimes happened that servants came without indenture. In such cases the law expressly and definitely fixed their status, though it was found extremely difficult to decide upon a status that could be permanent. Virginia, in particular, for a long time found it impossible to pass a law free from objections, and its experience will illustrate the difficulties encountered elsewhere. An early law in Virginia provided that if a servant came without indenture, he or she was to serve four years if more than twenty years old, five years if between twelve and twenty years of age, and seven years if under twelve.[37] Subsequently it was provided that all Irish servants without indenture should serve six years if over sixteen and that all under sixteen should serve until the age of twenty-four,[38] and this was again modified into a provision requiring those above sixteen years to serve four years and those under fifteen to serve until twenty-one, the Court to be the judge of their ages.[39] It was soon found, however, that the term of six years “carried with it both rigour and inconvenience” and that thus many were discouraged from coming to the country, and “the peopling of the country retarded.” It was therefore enacted that in the future no servant of any Christian nation coming without indenture should serve longer than those of the same age born in the country.[40] But as the law was also made retroactive, it was soon ordained that all aliens without indenture could serve five years if above sixteen years of age and all under that until they were twenty-four years old, “that being the time lymitted by the laws of England.”[41] This arrangement was equally unsatisfactory, since it was found that under it “a servant if adjudged never soe little under sixteene yeares pays for that small tyme three yeares service, and if he be adjudged more the master looseth the like.” It was then resolved that if the person were adjudged nineteen years or over he or she should serve five years, and if under that age then as many years as he should lack of being twenty-four.[42] This provision was apparently satisfactory, subsequent laws varying only in minor provisions concerning the details of the Act.[43]

The condition of the redemptioners seems to have been, for the most part, an unenviable one. George Alsop, it is true, writes in glowing terms of the advantages enjoyed in Maryland:

“For know,” he says, “That the Servants here in Mary-land of all Colonies, distant or remote Plantations, have the least cause to complain, either for strictness of Servitude, want of Provisions, or need of Apparel: Five dayes and a half in the Summer weeks is the alotted time that they work in; and for two months when the Sun predominates in the highest pitch of his heat, they claim an antient and customary Priviledge, to repose themselves three hours in the day within the house, and this is undeniably granted to them that work in the Fields.

“In the Winter time, which lasteth three months (viz.), December, January, and February, they do little or no work or employment, save cutting of wood to make good fires to sit by, unless their Ingenuity will prompt them to hunt the Deer, or Bear, or recreate themselves in Fowling, to slaughter the Swans, Geese, and Turkeys (which this Country affords in a most plentiful manner): For every Servant has a Gun, Powder and Shot allowed him, to sport him withall on all Holidayes and leasurable times, if he be capable of using it, or be willing to learn.”[44]

Hammond also says of Virginia:

“The Women are not (as is reported) put into the ground to worke, but occupie such domestique employments and houswifery as in England, that is dressing victuals, righting up the house, milking, imployed about dayries, washing, sowing, &c. and both men and women have times of recreations, as much or more than in any part of the world besides.... And whereas it is rumoured that Servants have no lodging other then on boards, or by the Fire side, it is contrary to reason to believe it: First, as we are Christians; next as people living under a law, which compels as well the Master as the Servant to perform his duty; nor can true labour be either expected or exacted without sufficient cloathing, diet, and lodging; all which both their Indentures (which must inviolably be observed) and the Justice of the Country requires.”[45]

A Glasgow merchant under date of January 19, 1714, also writes: “The servants are all well cloathed and provided with bedding as ye will see,” adding that some servants prefer “Mariland, the reason whereof is that Virginia is a little odious to the people here.”[46]

But these enthusiastic descriptions must be taken cum grano salis. The object of Alsop’s book was to stimulate emigration to Maryland, as is evident from the dedication to Lord Baltimore and to “all the Merchant Adventures for Mary-land.” The object of Leah and Rachel was the same, and others who wrote in a similar strain had evidently little personal knowledge of the condition of the redemptioners. The real life is more truly portrayed in the accounts given by the redemptioners themselves, and many of these are preserved.

The Anglesea Peerage Trial brings out the facts that the redemptioners fared ill, worked hard, lived on a coarse diet, and drank only water sweetened with a little molasses and flavored with ginger.[47] Eddis says the redemptioners were treated worse than the negroes, since the loss of a negro fell on his master; inflexible severity was exercised over the European servants who “groaned beneath a worse than Egyptian bondage.”[48]

Richard Frethorne, writing from Martin’s Hundred, gives a pitiful tale of the sufferings of the indented servants. “Oh! that you did see my daily and hourly sighs, groans, tears and thumps that I afford my own breast, and rue and curse the time of my birth with holy Job. I thought no head had been able to hold so much water as hath, and doth daily flow from mine eyes.”[49]

The maid who waited on the Sot-Weed Factor says:

“In better Times, e’re to this Land,

I was unhappily Trapann’d;

Perchance as well I did appear,

As any Lord or Lady here,

Not then a slave for twice two Year.

My Cloaths were fashionably new,

Nor were my Shifts of Linnen Blue;

But things are changed, now at the Hoe,

I daily work, and Bare-foot go,

In weeding Corn or feeding Swine,

I spend my melancholy Time.”[50]

Undoubtedly, in time, servants of all kinds received more consideration than had at first been given them;[51] in 1704 Madame Knight even complained of what she considered too great indulgence on the part of the Connecticut farmers towards their slaves.[52] Yet, even at the North, the lot of a servant was not an enviable one, though much was done by the laws of all the colonies to mitigate the condition of the redemptioners, as will be seen later in discussing the legal relations of masters and servants.

The wages paid were, as a rule, small, though some complaints are found, especially in New England, of high wages and poor service.[53] More often the wages were a mere pittance. Elizabeth Evans came from Ireland to serve John Wheelwright for three years. Her wages were to be three pounds a year and passage paid.[54] Margery Batman, after five years of service in Charlestown, was to receive a she-goat to help her in starting life.[55] Mary Polly, according to the terms of her indenture, was to serve ten years and then receive “three barrells of corn and one suit of penistone and one suit of good serge with one black hood, two shifts of dowlas and shoes and hose convenient.”[56]

Peter Kalm writes of Pennsylvania in 1748: “A servant maid gets eight or ten pounds a year: these servants have their food besides their wages, but must buy their own clothes, and what they get of these they must thank their master’s goodness for.” He adds that it was cheaper to buy indented servants since “this kind of servants may be got for half the money, and even for less; for they commonly pay fourteen pounds Pennsylvania currency, for a person who is to serve four years.”[57] Even at the beginning of the present century wages had scarcely risen. Samuel Breck writes of two redemptioners whom he purchased in 1817: “I gave for the woman seventy-six dollars, which is her passage-money, with a promise of twenty dollars at the end of three years if she serves me faithfully; clothing and maintenance of course. The boy had paid twenty-six guilders toward his passage-money, which I agreed to give him at the end of three years; in addition to which I paid fifty-three dollars and sixty cents for his passage, and for two years he is to have six weeks’ schooling each year.”[58]

For the protection of both masters and servants the law sometimes interfered and attempted to regulate the matter of wages received at the end of an indenture. In Virginia by the code of 1705 every woman servant was to receive fifteen bushels of Indian corn and forty shillings in money, or the value thereof in goods.[59] In 1748 it was enacted “that every servant, male or female, not having wages, shall, at the expiration of his, or her time of service, have and receive three pounds ten shillings current money, for freedom dues, to be paid by his, or her master, or owner,”[60] and in 1758 the same law was re-enacted, but excepting convicts from the provisions of the Act.[61] In South Carolina all women servants at the expiration of their time were to have “a Wastcoat and Petticoat of new Half-thick or Pennistone, a new Shift of white Linnen, a new Pair of shoes and stockings, a blue apron and two caps of white Linnen.”[62] The laws of Pennsylvania provided that every servant who served faithfully four years should at the expiration of the term of servitude have a discharge and be duly clothed with two complete suits of apparel, one of which should be new,[63] while in Massachusetts and New York it was provided that all servants who had served diligently and faithfully to the benefit of their masters should not be sent away empty.[64] In North Carolina every servant not having yearly wages was to be allowed at the expiration of the term of service three pounds Proclamation money, besides one sufficient suit of wearing clothes.[65] In East New Jersey the law was more liberal and gave every servant two suits of apparel suitable for a servant, one good felling axe, a good hoe, and seven bushels of good Indian corn.[66] West New Jersey gave ten bushels of corn, necessary apparel, two horses, and one axe.[67] In Maryland a woman at the expiration of her term was to have the same provision of corn and clothes as men servants, namely, “a good Cloath suite either of Kersey or broad Cloath, a shift of white Linnen to be new, one new pair of shoes and stockings, two hoes one Ax and three barrˡˡˢ of Indian corn.”[68] A later act specified that women servants were to have “a Waist-coat and Petty-coat of new Half-thick, or Pennistone, a new Shift of White Linen, Shoes and Stockings, a blue Apron, Two Caps of White Linen, and Three Barrells of Indian Corn.”[69]

The test question to be applied to any system of service is—Is the service secured through it satisfactory? It has been seen that a considerable number of servants could be secured through the system of indenture, though probably less than the colonists desired, and that the wages paid them were, as a rule, remarkably low. But it must be said that the service received from indented servants was, as a rule, what might be expected from the class that came to America in that capacity.

It is easy to surmise the character of the service rendered at first in Virginia and the difficulties encountered by employers. Many of the redemptioners had been idlers and vagabonds, and for idlers and vagabonds, there as elsewhere, stringent laws were necessary. In 1610, under the administration of Sir Thomas Gates, various orders were passed with reference to pilfering on the part of launderers, laundresses, bakers, cooks, and dressers of fish.

“What man or woman soeuer, Laundrer or Laundresse appointed to wash the foule linnen of any one labourer or souldier, or any one else as it is their duties so to doe, performing little, or no other seruice for their allowance out of the store, and daily prouisions, and supply of other necessaries, vnto the Colonie, and shall from the said labourer or souldier, or any one else, of what qualitie whatsoeuer, either take any thing for washing, or withhold or steale from him any such linnen committed to her charge to wash, or change the same willingly and wittingly, with purpose to giue him worse, old or torne linnen for his good, and proofe shall be made thereof, she shall be whipped for the same, and lie in prison till she make restitution of such linnen, withheld or changed.”[70]

Even more stringent penalties are attached to purloining from the flour and meal given out for baking purposes.[71]

But it is not alone in Virginia that perplexed employers were found. John Winter, writing to Trelawny from Richmond Island, Maine, under date of July 10, 1639, says of a certain Priscilla:

“You write me of some yll reports is given of my Wyfe for beatinge the maid; yf a faire waye will not do yt, beatinge must, sometimes, vppon such Idlle girrells as she is. Yf you think yt fitte for my wyfe to do all the worke & the maide sitt still, she must forbeare her hands to strike, for then the worke will ly vndonn. She hath bin now 2 yeares ½ in the house, & I do not thinke she hath risen 20 times before my Wyfe hath bin vp to Call her, & many tymes light the fire before she Comes out of her bed. She hath twize gon a mechinge in the woodes, which we haue bin faine to send all our Company to seeke. We Cann hardly keep her within doores after we ar gonn to beed, except we Carry the kay of the doore to beed with us. She never Could melke Cow nor goat since she Came hither. Our men do not desire to haue her boyle the kittle for them she is so sluttish. She Cannot be trusted to serue a few piggs, but my wyfe most Commonly must be with her. She hath written home, I heare, that she was fame to ly vppon goates skins. She might take som goates skins to ly in her bedd, but not given to her for her lodginge. For a yeare & quarter or more she lay with my daughter vppon a good feather bed before my daughter being lacke 3 or 4 daies to Sacco, the maid goes into beed with her Cloth & stockins, & would not take the paines to plucke of her Cloths: her bedd after was a doust bedd & she had 2 Coverletts to ly on her, but sheets she had none after that tyme she was found to be so sluttish. Her beating that she hath had hath never hurt her body nor limes. She is so fatt & soggy she Cann hardly do any worke. This I write all the Company will Justify. Yf this maid at her lasy tymes, when she hath bin found in her ill accyons, do not deserue 2 or 3 blowes, I pray Judge You who hath most reason to Complaine, my wyfe or the maid.... She hath an vnthankefull office to do this she doth, for I thinke their was never that steward yt amonge such people as we haue Could giue them all Content. Yt does not pleas me well being she hath taken so much paines & Care to order things as well as she Could, & ryse in the morning rath, & go to bed soe latte, & to haue hard speches for yt.”[72]

Winter’s letters and reports to the London Company are as full of his trials with his servants indoors and out, as are the conferences to-day between perplexed employers. Even when fortune smiled on him and one promised well, misfortune overtook her.

“The maid Tomson had a hard fortune. Yt was her Chance to be drowned Cominge over the barr after our Cowes, & very little water on the barr, not aboue ½ foote, & we Cannot Judge how yt should be, accept that her hatt did blow from her head, & she to saue her hatt stept on the side of the barr.... I thinke yf she had lived she would haue proved a good servant in the house: she would do more worke then 3 such maides as Pryssyllea is.”[73]

It is true that Maine was a remote colony and the difficulty of obtaining good servants was presumably greater than in places more accessible. Yet the same tale of trial comes from Boston and from those whose means, character, and position in society would seem to exempt them from the difficulties more naturally to be expected in other places. Mrs. Mary Winthrop Dudley writes repeatedly in 1636 to her mother, Mrs. Margaret Winthrop, begging her to send her a maid, “on that should be a good lusty seruant that hath skille in a dairy.”[74] But how unsatisfactory the “lusty servant” proved a later letter of Mrs. Dudley shows:

“I thought it convenient,” she writes, “to acquaint you and my father what a great affliction I haue met withal by my maide servant, and how I am like through God his mercie to be freed from it; at her first coming me she carried her selfe dutifully as became a servant; but since through mine and my husbands forbearance towards her for small faults, she hath got such a head and is growen soe insolent that her carriage towards vs, especially myselfe is vnsufferable. If I bid her doe a thinge shee will bid me to doe it my selfe, and she sayes how shee can give content as wel as any servant but shee will not, and sayes if I loue not quietnes I was never so fitted in my life, for shee would make mee haue enough of it. If I should write to you of all the reviling speeches and filthie language shee hath vsed towards me I should but grieue you. My husband hath vsed all meanes for to reforme her, reasons and perswasions, but shee doth professe that her heart and her nature will not suffer her to confesse her faults. If I tell my husband of her behauiour towards me, vpon examination shee will denie all that she hath done or spoken: so that we know not how to proceede against her: but my husband now hath hired another maide and is resolved to put her away the next weeke.”[75]

Other members of the Winthrop family also have left an account of their trials of this kind. A generation later, July 7, 1682, Wait Winthrop wrote to Fitz-John Winthrop, “I feare black Tom will do but little seruis. He used to make a show of hanging himselfe before folkes, but I believe he is not very nimble about it when he is alone. Tis good to haue an eye to him, and if you think it not worth while to keep him, eyther sell him or send him to Virginia or the West Indies before winter. He can do something as a smith.”[76] In the third generation John Winthrop, the son of Wait Winthrop, wrote to his father from New London, Connecticut, 1717:

“It is not convenient now to write the trouble & plague we have had wᵗʰ this Irish creature the year past. Lying & unfaithfull; wᵈ doe things on purpose in contradiction & vexation to her mistress; lye out of the house anights, and have contrivances wᵗʰ fellows that have been stealing from oʳ estate & gett drink out of yᵉ cellar for them; saucy & impudent, as when we have taken her to task for her wickedness she has gon away to complain of cruell usage. I can truly say we have used this base creature wᵗʰ a great deal of kindness & lenity. She wᵈ frequently take her mistresses capps & stockins, hanckerchers &c., and dress herselfe, and away wᵗʰout leave among her companions. I may have said some time or other when she has been in fault, that she was fitt to live nowhere butt in Virginia, and if she wᵈ not mend her ways I should send her thither; thô I am sure no body wᵈ give her passage thither to have her service for 20 yeares, she is such a high spirited pernicious jade. Robin has been run away near ten days, as you will see by the inclosed, and this creature knew of his going and of his carrying out 4 dozen bottles of cyder, metheglin, & palme wine out of the cellar amongst the servants of the towne, and meat and I know not wᵗ.”[77]

The trials of at least one Connecticut housekeeper are hinted at in an Order of the General Court in 1645, providing that a certain “Susan C., for her rebellious carriage toward her mistress, is to be sent to the house of correction and be kept to hard labor and coarse diet, to be brought forth the next lecture day to be publicly corrected, and so to be corrected weekly, until order be given to the contrary.”[78]

But it is undoubtedly in the legislation of the colonial period that one finds the best reflection of colonial service, and one may say of it, as Judge Sewall wrote to a friend when sending him a copy of the Statutes at Large for 1684, “You will find much pleasant and profitable Reading in it.”[79] Numerous acts were passed in all the colonies determining the relation between masters and servants, and these laws were most explicit in protecting the interests of both parties—a fact often indicated by the very name of the act, as that of 1700 in Pennsylvania, entitled “For the just encouragement of servants in the discharge of their duty, and the prevention of their deserting their master’s or owner’s service.”[80]

In the legislation in regard to service and servants, it is impossible always to discriminate between the general class of either bound or life servants and the particular class of domestic employees. But the smaller class was comprised in the larger, and household servants had the benefit of all legislation affecting servants as a whole. Few or no laws were passed specifically for the benefit of domestic employees.

These laws worked both ways. On the one hand, they were intended to protect the servant from the selfishness and cruelty of those masters who would be inclined to take advantage of their position; on the other hand, they protected the master who had invested his capital in servants, and asked protection for it at the hands of the law, as he sought protection for any other form of property.

Several general classes of laws are found for the protection of servants. The first provides that no servant, bound to serve his or her time in a province, could be sold out of the province, without his or her consent.[81] A second class of laws compelled masters and mistresses to provide their servants with wholesome and sufficient food, clothing, and lodging;[82] and a third provided that if a servant became ill during the time of his service, his master should be under obligation to care for him, and heavy penalties were sometimes incurred by a master who discharged a servant when sick.[83]

The law went even further and protected servants against unjust cruelty, especially against every form of bodily maiming. If a white servant lost an eye or a tooth at the hands of his master or mistress, he gained his freedom, and could sometimes recover further compensation, if the Court so adjudged.[84] If servants fled from the cruelty of their master, they were to be protected, though notice of such protection was to be sent to the master and the magistrate.[85] In New York if a master or dame tyrannically and cruelly abused a servant, the latter could complain to the constable and overseers, who were instructed to admonish the master on the first offence, and on the second, to protect the servant in the house until relief could be obtained through the Courts.[86] In North Carolina no Christian servant could be whipped without an order from the justice of the peace; if any one presumed so to do, the person offending was to pay forty shillings to the party injured.[87] Immoderate punishment also subjected the master to appear before the County Court to answer for his conduct.[88] When New Jersey became a royal province in 1702, the instructions of the Crown to Lord Cornbury included a provision that he should “endeavor to get a Law past for the restraining of any inhuman Severity, which by ill Masters or Overseers, may be used towards their Christian Servants, and their Slaves, and that Provision be made therein, that the wilfull killing of Indians and Negroes may be punished with Death, and that a fit Penalty be imposed for the maiming of them.”[89] Moreover, in North Carolina complaints of servants against their masters could be heard without formal process of action.[90] In Pennsylvania the law of 1771 provided that every indented servant should obtain a legal residence in the city or place where he or she had first served his or her master sixty days, or if he had afterwards served twelve months in any other place, he was at liberty to choose his residence in either place. In South Carolina a master denying a certificate at the expiration of a servant’s time was to forfeit two pounds.[91]

Important as these provisions were in the interest of the servant, the law protected the master even more carefully and specifically. The great danger to him was in the loss of servants through their escaping from service and being harbored by friendly sympathizers or rival employers. The law dealt rigorously with both classes of offenders. In South Carolina stubborn, refractory, and discontented servants, who ran away before their term of service expired, were obliged to serve their masters three times the period of their absence.[92] In Pennsylvania every servant absenting himself without leave for one day or more was to serve, at the expiration of his time, five days for every day’s absence, and in addition, to give satisfaction to his master for any damages or charges incurred through his absence.[93] In East New Jersey runaways were to serve double the time of their absence, and also to give satisfaction for the costs and damages caused by their absence.[94] In North Carolina runaways who would not tell the name of their master, either because unable to speak English or through obstinacy, were to be committed to jail and advertised for two months. Servants absenting themselves were to serve double time.[95] In South Carolina a servant who ran away was to serve one week for every day’s absence, but the whole time was not to exceed two years.[96] Servants running away with slaves were to be considered felons. In Maryland absenting servants were to serve additional time at the discretion of the Court, ten days, or not exceeding that, for every day’s absence, and to give satisfaction for costs incurred.[97]

The temptation to harbor runaways was great, not so much from philanthropic motives as because of the scarcity of labor, and every colony supplemented its legislation against runaways by corresponding acts carrying penalties for harboring them. In East New Jersey the offender was fined five pounds and was to make full satisfaction to the master or mistress for costs and damages sustained because of the absence, while any person who knowingly harbored or entertained a runaway, “except of real charity,” was to pay the master or mistress of the servant ten shillings for every day’s entertainment and concealment and to be fined at the discretion of the Court.[98] In Connecticut the presumption was that if servants were entertained after nine o’clock at night they were runaways, and the head of the family so entertaining them was to forfeit five shillings to the complainer and five shillings to the town treasurer. Any Indian hiding a runaway was to forfeit forty shillings for every such offence or suffer a month’s imprisonment.[99] In South Carolina runaways were not to be harbored under a penalty of two pounds for every day and night the servant was so entertained, but the total amount forfeited was not to exceed treble the value of the servant’s time remaining to be served.[100] In New York any one proved to have connived at the absence of a servant was to forfeit twenty pounds to the master or dame and five pounds to the Court. Any one knowingly harboring a runaway was to forfeit ten shillings for every day’s entertainment.[101] In Pennsylvania any one concealing a servant forfeited twenty shillings for each day’s concealment.[102] In Rhode Island any person entertaining a servant after nine o’clock at night forfeited five shillings for each offence.[103] In Maryland, by an act of 1692, persons harboring runaways were to forfeit five hundred pounds of tobacco for every hour’s entertainment, one half to the government and one half to the informer.[104] By a later act the person harboring runaways was to forfeit one hundred pounds of tobacco for every hour’s entertainment, one half to go to the public schools and one half to the party aggrieved.[105] This was intended to meet evasions of the previous laws on the part of those who harbored runaways a few hours at a time and then helped them on their way. Free negroes or mulattoes harboring runaways were to forfeit one thousand pounds of tobacco for every such offence, one half for the use of free schools and one half to the party aggrieved.[106] By a later act, servants harboring runaways were to be punished by the magistrate by lashes, not to exceed thirty-nine, on the bare back.[107]

On the other hand, every incentive was held out to assist in the return of runaways. In North Carolina any person who assisted in taking up runaways was rewarded, the reward being gauged by the number of miles away from the master’s house that the servant was taken.[108] In Pennsylvania any one apprehending a runaway servant and returning him or her to the sheriff of the county was to receive ten shillings if the runaway was taken within ten miles of the master’s house and twenty shillings if at a distance of more than ten miles.[109] In Connecticut any Indian who returned a runaway to the nearest authority was to receive as a reward two yards of cloth.[110] In Maryland the allowance was two hundred pounds of tobacco, while Indians were to receive a match coat or its value.[111] Persons in Virginia, Delaware, or the northern parts of America, who apprehended runaways from Maryland, were to receive four hundred pounds of tobacco, and the servant was to reimburse his master by additional servitude.[112] Every precaution to prevent runaways was taken. Indian, negro, and mulatto servants were not to travel without a pass,[113] nor were slaves to leave their plantation without leave, except negroes wearing liveries.[114] In Connecticut servants were not to go abroad after nine o’clock at night,[115] in Massachusetts they were not to frequent public houses,[116] and in South Carolina and Massachusetts innkeepers were not to harbor them.[117]

Yet the life under a master or mistress was often such as to tempt a servant to escape; added to a condition that often involved hard work, poor lodging, and insufficient food and clothing, was the infliction of humiliating corporal punishment in case of disobedience or disorder. In Connecticut a servant could be punished by the magistrate not to exceed ten stripes for one offence.[118] The Rhode Island law was similar.[119] In North Carolina runaways were to receive from the constable as many lashes as the justice of the peace should think fit, “not exceeding the Number of thirty-nine, well laid on, on the Back of such Runaway,” while disobedient servants were to be punished with corporal punishment, not to exceed twenty-one lashes. In cases where free persons suffered punishment by being fined, servants were whipped.[120] In South Carolina a servant for striking his master or mistress was to serve not more than six months’ additional time, or be punished with not more than twenty-one stripes.[121] In Massachusetts and New York any servants who had been unfaithful, negligent, or unprofitable in their service, notwithstanding good usage from their masters, were not to be dismissed until they had made satisfaction according to the judgment of the civil authorities.[122]

In nearly every colony heavy penalties followed attempts to carry on trade or barter with servants. In North Carolina a freeman trading with a servant forfeited treble the value of the goods traded for and six pounds in addition; if unable to pay the fine he was himself sold as a servant. A servant trading or selling the property of his master was to serve his master additional time, the length to be fixed by the Court.[123] In East New Jersey the penalty was five pounds for the first offence and ten pounds for each subsequent one; the offending servant was to be whipped by the person to whom he had tendered such sale, the reward of half a crown being paid by the master or mistress to the person administering the punishment.[124] In Pennsylvania any one trading secretly with a servant was to forfeit to the master three times the value of the goods, and the servant at the expiration of his time was to render satisfaction to the master to double the value of the goods, and, if black, was to be whipped in the most public place in the township.[125] Trading with servants was prohibited in Connecticut[126] and in Massachusetts.[127] In South Carolina any one buying, selling, or bartering with a servant was to forfeit treble the value of the goods and ten pounds to the informer; the offending servant was to be whipped on the bare back in the watch-house at Charleston.[128] In New York servants were forbidden to trade under penalty of fine or corporal punishment. Those trading with servants were to restore the commodities to the master and to forfeit double their value to the poor of the parish.[129] In Maryland the penalty was two thousand pounds of tobacco, one half to go to the king and one half to the master.[130]

Many miscellaneous provisions in different colonies must have seemed oppressive. In New Jersey and South Carolina servants could not marry without the consent of their masters.[131] In Massachusetts no covenant servant in the household with any other could be an office holder.[132] In Pennsylvania innkeepers were forbidden to trust them.[133] In North Carolina servants making false complaints in regard to illness were to serve double the time lost, and the same penalty followed if they were sent to jail for any offence.[134] No slave was to go armed in North Carolina, and if one was found offending, the person making the discovery was to appropriate the weapon for his own use, and the servant was to receive twenty lashes on his or her bare back. One servant on each plantation, however, was exempted from the law, but such an one must carry a certificate of permission.[135] In Massachusetts servants were to be catechised once a week[136] and were not to wear apparel exceeding the quality and condition of their persons or estates under penalty of admonition for the first offence, a fine of twenty shillings for the second, and forty shillings for the third offence.[137]

The obligation of the master to a servant-owning and slave-owning community was recognized in North Carolina in a positive law prohibiting a master from setting free a negro or mulatto on any pretence whatsoever, except for meritorious services to be judged and allowed by the County Court, and even in this case a license was to be previously obtained.[138] In Massachusetts Bay servants were not to be set free until they had served out their time.[139] In Connecticut a slave set free was to be maintained by his master if he came to want.[140]

In view of all these restrictions on servants of a personal, industrial, and political character it seems strange that even any from their number should have been able, at the expiration of their term of service, to break away from the spirit of this bondage and reach a higher position in the social scale; yet many of the redemptioners became in time, especially at the North, respectable and even prominent members of the community.[141] The women often married planters[142] and in turn became the employers of servants. Yet these are the exceptions. For a long time the redemptioners were considered the off-scourings of English cities, and they formed a distinct class in the social order lower than their masters or employers. In view of this fact, a reproach was of necessity attached to all belonging to the class and to the designation applied to them. Their descendants ultimately formed the class of poor whites,—the lowest stratum in the social order whose members were held in contempt even by the negroes.

It has been said that the redemptioners were found in all the colonies, though they were more numerous in the Middle and Southern colonies than in New England. But it was difficult to keep white servants for any length of time in a country where land was cheap and the servant soon in turn became a master.[143] It was undoubtedly this difficulty that led to the substitution for white servants of Indians and negro slaves. Indian servants were apparently more numerous in the New England colonies, while negro slavery gained its strongest foothold in the South.

The employment of Indians as servants grew up naturally in New England and was continued for at least a hundred years.[144] Their presence was regarded as almost providential by the New Englanders, hard pressed for assistance in house and field. When the question of the right and wrong of the matter was suggested by the troubled conscience, an easy answer was found: was it not sin to suffer them longer to maintain the worship of the devil when they were needed so sorely as slaves?[145] But like the redemptioners, their service so eagerly sought often proved unsatisfactory. Hugh Peter wrote to John Winthrop, September 4, 1639, “My wife desires my daughter to send to Hanna that was her mayd, now at Charltowne, to know if shee would dwell with vs, for truly wee are so destitute (hauing now but an Indian) that wee know not what to doe.”[146] More unfortunate still was the young clergyman, the Rev. Peter Thatcher. He records in his diary at Barnstable, May 7, 1679, “I bought an Indian of Mr. Checkley and was to pay 5£ a month after I received her and five pound more in a quarter of a year.” A week later he writes, “Came home and found my Indian girl had liked to have knocked my Theodora on head by letting her fall, whereupon I took a good walnut stick and beat the Indian to purpose till she promised to do so no more.”[147]

In every section negro slavery grew up side by side with white and Indian slavery,[148] though its hold even upon the South was far from strong until the end of the seventeenth century. It is both unnecessary and impossible to discuss in this place the question of slavery[149] and its relation to the larger subject of service. The close of the colonial period saw it firmly established at the South, where it supplanted the system of white servitude, while at the North both black and white slavery gave place to free labor.

The details of the history of domestic service during the colonial period may seem unnecessary to an understanding of domestic service as it is to-day, but an examination of them must show the existence during that period of principles and conditions that must modify the judgment concerning the conditions of to-day. No wish is more often expressed than that it might be possible to return to the Arcadian days when service was abundant, excellent, and cheap. But those days did not exist in America during the colonial period. The conditions at that time bear a marked resemblance to those of to-day. The social position of all servants was lower than that of their employers, and the gulf between the two was more difficult to span. Service was difficult to obtain and unsatisfactory when secured. Servants complained of hard work and ill treatment, and masters of ungrateful servants and inefficient service, and both masters and servants were justified in their complaints. The legal relations between master and servant were explicitly defined as regards length of service, wages paid, and the mutual obligations of both parties to the contract during the period of service. But this very definiteness of the contract was due to the fact that the relationship between the two parties was an arbitrary one and could not have been preserved without this legal assistance. In default of a better one, the system of white servitude may have served its age fairly well; but its restoration, if the restoration were possible, would do nothing to relieve in any way the strain and pressure of present conditions.

CHAPTER IV
DOMESTIC SERVICE SINCE THE COLONIAL PERIOD

It has been said that domestic service in America has passed through three distinct phases. The second phase began about the time of the Revolution, when at the North the indented servants as a class were gradually supplanted by free laborers, and at the South by negro slaves who inherited with large interest the reproach attached to the redemptioners. The social chasm that had existed at the North between employer and employee, under the system of bonded servants, disappeared. The free laborers, whether employed in domestic service or otherwise, were socially the equal of their employers, especially in New England and in the smaller towns. They belonged by birth to the same section of the country, probably to the same community; they had the same religious belief, attended the same church, sat at the same fireside, ate at the same table, had the same associates; they were often married from the homes[150] and buried in the family lots of their employers.[151] They were in every sense of the word “help.”[152] A survival of this condition is seen to-day in farming communities, especially at the West. In the South, on the contrary, the social chasm became impassable as negro slavery entirely displaced white labor.

This democratic condition at the North seemed especially noteworthy to European travellers,[153] and it was one to which they apparently never became accustomed. Harriet Martineau, in planning for her American journey, was perplexed by the difficulty of securing a travelling companion. “It would never do,” she says, “as I was aware, to take a servant, to suffer from the proud Yankees on the one hand and the debased slaves on the other.”[154] On arriving here, she found “the study of domestic service a continual amusement,” and what she saw “would fill a volume.”[155] “Boarding-house life,” she says, “has been rendered compulsory by the scarcity of labour,—the difficulty of obtaining domestic service.”[156] But she was quick to appreciate the difference between the spirit of service she found in America and that with which she was familiar in the old world. She writes:

“I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen, and from having little hospitable designs frustrated, than witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe. In England, servants have been so long accustomed to this subservience; it is so completely the established custom for the mistress to regulate their manners, their clothes, their intercourse with friends, and many other things which they ought to manage for themselves, that it has become difficult to treat them any better. Mistresses who abstain from such regulation find that they are spoiling their servants; and heads of families who would make friends of their domestics find them little fitted to reciprocate the duty. In America it is otherwise: and may it ever be so!... One of the pleasures of travelling through a democratic country is the seeing no liveries. No such badge of menial service is to be met with throughout the States, except in the houses of the foreign ambassadors at Washington.”

She then gives illustrations to show “of how much higher a character American domestic service is than any which would endure to be distinguished by a badge.”[157]

De Tocqueville, also, found, that “the condition of domestic service does not degrade the character of those who enter upon it, because it is freely chosen, and adopted for a time only; because it is not stigmatized by public opinion and creates no permanent inequality between the servant and the master.”[158]

Francis J. Grund was also able to appreciate the difference between external servility and true self-respect, for he writes in 1837: “There are but few native Americans who would submit to the degradation of wearing a livery, or any other badge of servitude. This they would call becoming a man’s man. But, on the other hand, there are also but few American gentlemen who would feel any happier for their servants wearing coats of more than one color. The inhabitants of New England are quite as willing to call their servants ‘helps,’ or ‘domestics,’ as the latter repudiate the title of ‘master’ in their employers.” And he adds, “Neither is an American servant that same indolent, careless, besotted being as an European.” He has another word of praise too for the American servants, “who work harder, and quicker than even in England.”[159]

The absence of livery was a subject of constant comment. William Cobbett, in 1828, asserts that “the man (servant) will not wear a livery, any more than he will wear a halter round his neck.... Neither men nor women will allow you to call them servants, and they will take especial care not to call themselves by that name.” He explains the avoidance of the term “servant” by the fact that slaves were called servants by the English, who having fled from tyranny at home were shy of calling others slaves; free men therefore would not be called servants.[160]

But while the democratic spirit that prevailed during this period found commendation in the eyes of those of similar tendencies, it often evoked only mild surprise or a half sneer. Mrs. Trollope found that “the greatest difficulty in organizing a family established in Ohio, is getting servants, or, as it is there called, ‘getting help,’ for it is more than petty treason to the Republic to call a free citizen a servant.”[161] Chevalier asserted that “on Sunday an American would not venture to receive his friends; his servants would not consent to it, and he can hardly secure their services for himself, at their own hour, on that day.”[162] Samuel Breck considers that “in these United States nothing would be wanting to make life perfectly happy (humanly speaking) had we good servants.”[163] Isabella Bird wrote of Canada in 1854, “The great annoyance of which people complain in this pleasant land is the difficulty of obtaining domestic servants, and the extraordinary specimens of humanity who go out in this capacity.” “The difficulty of procuring servants is one of the great objections to this colony. The few there are know nothing of any individual department of work,—for instance, there are neither cooks nor housemaids, they are strictly ‘helps,’—the mistress being expected to take more than her fair share of the work.”[164] The conditions she found there were the same as in the United States.

Thomas Grattan wrote of the condition:

“One of the subjects on which the minds of men and women in the United States seem to be unanimously made up, is the admitted deficiency of help.... Disguise it as we may, under all the specious forms of reasoning, there is something in the mind of every man which tells him he is humiliated in doing personal service to another.... The servile nature of domestic duties in Europe, and more particularly in England, is much more likely to make servants liable to the discontent which mars their merits, than the common understanding in America, which makes the compact between ‘employer’ and ‘help’ a mere matter of business, entailing no mean submission on the one hand, and giving no right to any undue assumption of power on the other.... Domestic service is not considered so disgraceful in the United States, as it is felt to be in the United Kingdom.”[165]

Grattan’s observations lead him to believe that the democratic spirit is not always to be deplored.

“An American youth or ‘young lady’ will go to service willingly, if they can be better paid for it than for teaching in a village school, or working on a farm or in a factory.... They satisfy themselves that they are helps, not servants,—that they are going to work with (not for) Mr. so and so, not going to service,—they call him and his wife their employers, not their master and mistress.”[166]

But like all Europeans, he never ceases to be surprised by this spirit, particularly by those manifestations of it that led to active work on the part of the mistress of a home and to the use of the word “help.” “There are no housekeepers,” he writes, “or ladies’ maids. The lady herself does all the duties of the former.... Servants are thus really justified in giving to themselves the favorite designation of ‘helps.’”[167] But he closes a long and interesting chapter on the subject with the prophecy, “They (employers) will, by degrees, give up the employment of native servants who will be in future less likely than even now to submit to their pretensions, and confine themselves to the fast increasing tribes of Irish immigrants.”[168]

Curiously enough nearly forty years earlier Madame d’Arusmont had written of friends who thought of coming to America and urged, “Let them by all means be advised against bringing servants with them. Foreign servants are here, without doubt, the worst; they neither understand the work which the climate renders necessary, nor are willing to do the work which they did elsewhere.”[169] She, like all travellers, found that however subservient domestic servants might be when they left Europe, the first contact with the democratic atmosphere of America wrought a sudden change; subserviency disappeared, and the servant boasted of his equality with all. She explains that those educated in America perceive the difference placed between the gentleman and the laborer by education and conditions, but the foreigner taking a superficial view of the matter sees no difference.[170]

This second period in the history of domestic service continued from about the time of the Revolution until 1850. It was the product of the rapid growth of democratic ideas fostered by the Revolution and the widespread influence of the French philosophical ideas of the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was a period chiefly characterized by social and industrial democracy, as the political system was also in its spirit democratic. This democratic industrial spirit showed itself in the universal use at the North of the term “help,” in the absence of liveries and all distinguishing marks of service, in the intolerance on the part of both employer and employee of servility and subserviency of manner, in the bridging of the social chasm between master and servant as long as the free employment of native born Americans continued, and in the hearty spirit of willingness with which service was performed. The results of this democratic régime were the difficulty of securing help, since new avenues of independent work were opening out to women and the class of indented servants had disappeared; the lack of all differentiation in household work, since the servant conferred a favor in “going out to work” and did what she knew how to do without troubling to learn new kinds of work; and, most important, the subtle change that the democratic atmosphere everywhere wrought in the servants who came from Europe.

This condition of free, democratic, native born white service at the North and compulsory slave service at the South continued practically unchanged until about the middle of the century. Between 1850 and 1870 four important political changes occurred which revolutionized the personnel in domestic service and consequently its character. These changes brought about the third period in the history of the subject.

The first of these changes was due to the Irish famine of 1846. Previous to this time the immigration to this country from Ireland had been small, averaging not more than twenty thousand annually between 1820 and 1846. In the decade preceding the famine the average number of arrivals had been less than thirty-five thousand annually. In 1846 the number was 51,752, and this was more than doubled the following year, the report showing 105,536 arrivals in 1847. In 1851 the number of arrivals from Ireland had risen to 221,253. Since that time the number has fluctuated, but between fifty and seventy-five thousand annually come to this country from Ireland.[171] A large proportion of these immigrants—forty-nine per cent during the decade from 1870 to 1880—have been women who were classed as “unskilled laborers.” Two occupations were open to them. One was work in factories where as manufacturing processes became more simple unskilled labor could be utilized. The Irish immigrants, therefore, soon displaced in factories the New England women who had found, as has been seen,[172] new opportunities for work of a higher grade. The second occupation open to the Irish immigrants was household service. Here physical strength formed a partial compensation for lack of skill and ignorance of American ways, and the Irish soon came to form a most numerous and important class engaged in domestic employments.[173]

A second important European change, influencing the condition of domestic service, was the German Revolution of 1848 with the events preceding and resulting from it. Before this period the emigration from Germany had been insignificant, fewer than fifteen thousand having come to this country annually between 1830 and 1840. In 1840, owing to political reasons, the number had risen to 29,704. It soon became evident that the hopes raised by the accession of the new monarch were without foundation, and emigration rapidly increased until the number of emigrants coming to America reached 74,281 in 1847. During the year of the Revolution the number decreased, but the failure of the cause of the revolutionary party and the political apathy that followed again increased the movement towards America. This reached its climax in 1854, when the sympathies of the Court had been openly expressed during the Crimean War in favor of Russian despotism. During this year the number of Germans arriving in this country was 215,009—a number equalled but once since that time, although the number has averaged nearly a hundred and fifty thousand annually during the last decade.[174] A large number of these immigrants have been women, the proportion of women emigrating from Germany being greater than from any other foreign country except Ireland.[175] The ranks of domestic service have been recruited from their number also, the Germans being second only to the Irish as regards the number and proportion engaged in this occupation.[176]

A third political influence affecting the question was the establishment of treaty relations between the United States and China in 1844. This fact and the discovery of gold in California in 1848, together with the building of the Union Pacific railroad in 1867-1869, opened the doors to the immigration of considerable numbers of Chinese. Many of these found their way into domestic service, and on the Pacific coast they became formidable competitors of household servants of other nationalities.[177]

The political and economic conditions in Europe and the breaking down of long-established customs in Asia have thus since 1850 brought to this country large numbers of men and women who have performed the household service previously done by native born Americans. The presence of the Irish in the East, of the Germans in the West, of the Scandinavians in the Northwest, and of the Chinese on the Pacific coast has thus introduced a new social, as well as a new economic, element at the North. It has led to a change in the relation of employer and employee; the class line which was only faintly drawn in the early part of the century between employer and “help” has been changed into a caste line which many employers believe it to their interest to preserve. The native born American fears to lose social position by entering into competition with foreign labor.

While this change, owing to political conditions in the Old World, was taking place at the North in the character of the service, a similar change was taking place at the South growing out of the abolition of slavery in 1863. The negroes who had previously performed all domestic service for their personal expenses have since then received for the same service a small remuneration in money. This fact prevents now as effectually as during the slavery period any competition in domestic service on the part of native born white employees. It does not prevent all competition on the part of foreign born white employees, since prejudice against the negro does not exist in Europe owing to the fact that negro slavery has not prevailed there. The effects of these great movements upon the nature and personnel of domestic service will be discussed later in considering its present condition. They have had a direct and conspicuous influence on the condition of domestic service and even in the use of the term applied to those who engage in it.

But other political influences more subtle and possibly more far-reaching in their effect have been at work. Our loose naturalization laws, and the determining of the qualifications for the right of suffrage by as many standards as there are states, have made the enormous number of men coming to this country annually an easy prey to scheming politicians and demagogues. The labor vote, the Irish vote, the German vote, have been flattered and sought by party managers until the wage-earning man feels that “like Atlas of old he carries the world on his shoulders.” If the laboring man feels the weight of the world, his wife and daughter believe that some share of the burden rests on them. The democratic tendencies of the country, the political practices of the day, have everywhere broken down the high wall of separation between employer and employee. They are subversive even in the household of that patriarchal relationship that has been driven from every stronghold but this.

While the political movements of the century have thus changed the personnel of domestic service in America, the development of the material resources of the country has affected its status. Before the present century employees of every kind were in a sense stationary. This was due partly to the influence of the English poor laws; partly to the system of indenture which bound a servant for seven, five, or four years, and to the system of slavery which bound the servant for life; partly to the system of apprenticeship which made the servant a member of the family of his master; partly to the custom prevailing in the country districts and small towns for unmarried workmen in all industries to board with their employers; and partly to the lack of facilities for cheap and easy means of communication between different sections of the country. There was no mobility of labor as regards either employment or place of employment—a fact true alike of domestic service and of other occupations. But this condition of affairs gradually changed. As has been seen, indented servants disappeared and every employee was free to break as well as to make an engagement for service. The establishment of the factory system of manufactures and the consequent substitution of mechanical for skilled processes of labor broke down the system of apprenticeship, and workmen of every occupation, except domestic service, ceased to be members of the families of their employers. A mobility of labor was made possible such as could not have been secured under the old system. At a later time the great era of railroad development and similar enterprises gave opportunity for a certain mobility as regards place of employment. The tide of western emigration due to the discovery of gold and the cheapness of western land caused much shifting of labor among the non-capitalist class, and this was increased as means of communication were rendered more easy. The establishment of companies to encourage foreign immigration with the object of developing the material resources of the country was another weight in the scale in favor of greater mobility of labor as regards both place and employment. The abolition of slavery removed the last important legal barrier against perfect mobility.

All of these industrial movements have been important factors in changing the condition and character of domestic service. It is true, in a general sense, that every great change in economic conditions affects all occupations. But domestic service has through these causes been affected in certain specific ways. The employee who disliked housework, but to whom no other occupation had been open, could go into a factory or a mill, since no time was consumed in learning the simple processes of mechanical work. Every invention formed the basis for a new occupation. Domestic service had a hundred competitors in a field where before the era of inventions it had stood alone. Moreover, these new occupations required little skill, no preparation, and possessed the charm of novelty. Again, the rapid development of railroad interests, with the increase of competition and consequent lowering of passenger rates, often influenced families emigrating to the West to take with them their trusted employees. The same fact made it possible for women seeking new employments to go from place to place in ways unthought of in the early part of the century.

In view of these changed and changing economic conditions it may be said that the immobility of labor, which has seemed to some economists so great an obstacle to the industrial advancement of women,[178] has practically ceased to exist in the case of domestic service. In fact, industrial development has so far changed conditions that the problem has now come to be how to make this form of labor not more mobile, but more stable. One illustration of this is found in the fact that when seven hundred domestic employees represented on the schedules were asked how many of them had ever been engaged in any other occupation, twenty-seven per cent replied that they had. The mobility as to the place of labor was found to be even greater. Twenty-seven per cent of the native born employees did not reside in the same state in which they were born, and adding to these the number of foreign born, it was found that sixty-eight per cent did not reside in their native country or state. Moreover, this statement is below the truth as it does not take into account the number of changes made within a single year and refers to only one change from place of birth to present residence.[179]

An indication of these various changes in the condition of domestic service during these different periods is seen in the history of the word “servant.” As used in England and in law at the time of the settlement of the American colonies it signified any employee, and no odium was in any way attached to the word.[180] But five things led to its temporary disuse: first, the reproach connected with the word through the character and social rank of the redemptioners; second, the fact that when the redemptioners gave place at the South to negro slaves the word “servant” was transferred to this class,[181] and this alone was sufficient to prevent its application to whites;[182] third, the levelling tendencies that always prevail in a new country; fourth, the literal interpretation of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence; and fifth, the new social and political theories resulting from the introduction of French philosophical ideas. At the North the word “help” as applied especially to women superseded the word “servant,” while at the South the term “servant” was applied only to the negro. From the time of the Revolution, therefore, until about 1850 the word “servant” does not seem to have been generally applied in either section to white persons of American birth.[183]

Since the introduction of foreign labor at the middle of the century, the word “servant” has again come into general use as applied to white employees, not, however, as a survival of the old colonial word, but as a reintroduction from Europe of a term signifying one who performs so-called menial labor, and it is restricted in its use, except in a legal sense, to persons who perform domestic service. The present use of the word has come not only from the almost exclusive employment of foreigners in domestic service, but also because of the increase of wealth and consequent luxury in this country, the growing class divisions, and the adoption of many European habits of living and thinking and speaking.[184]

These simple historical facts are one explanation of the unwillingness of American women to engage in work stigmatized by an offensive term applied to no other class of laborers.

In studying the question of domestic service, therefore, the fact cannot be overlooked that certain historical influences have affected its conditions; that political revolutions have changed its personnel, and industrial development its mobility. It is as impossible to dream of restoring the former condition of household service as it is of restoring former household employments, and neither is to be desired. In each case the question is one of preparing for the next step in the process of evolution, not of retrograding toward a condition impossible to restore. Any attempt to secure a change for the better in the present condition of domestic service must be ineffective if it does not take into consideration these historic aspects of the subject.

CHAPTER V
ECONOMIC PHASES OF DOMESTIC SERVICE[185]

The attempt has been made in the foregoing chapters to indicate the extent to which domestic employments and domestic service have been influenced by industrial and political events arising outside of the household, and apparently having little or no connection with it. That domestic service is amenable to some of the general economic laws and conditions which affect other occupations and that it is also governed by economic laws developed within itself will perhaps be evident from an examination of a few of these economic conditions and principles. These may be stated for the sake of brevity in the form of propositions.

The first group of propositions to be suggested concerns the number and distribution of persons of foreign birth engaged in domestic service.

(1) A large proportion of the domestic employees in the United States are of foreign birth. This is evident from the following table prepared from the schedules sent out:[186]

TABLE I
Place of Birth of Employees

The statement may be more fully illustrated from the Eleventh Census, which shows that the number of foreign born in domestic service is 30.86 per cent of the entire number.[187] The geographical distribution of the different classes of domestic employees is seen from Table II on the following page.

Another illustration of the same point is found by an examination of the relative number of native born and foreign born domestic employees in the individual states and territories. In nine states and territories the number of foreign born domestic employees exceeds the number of native born white employees,[188] in sixteen about one half of the white domestic employees are of foreign birth,[189] in twenty-four states and territories the number of native born white employees largely exceeds the foreign born,[190] while in fifteen states colored employees are in excess.[191] It will be seen that the states in which the number of native born white domestic employees exceeds the number of the foreign born are those states having relatively a small number of foreign born residents.[192] A still more specific illustration is found in the experience of one state. In Massachusetts in 1885, the foreign born domestic servants formed 60.24 per cent of the entire number.[193]

TABLE II
Domestic Employees in the United States, 1890

These different illustrations seem to show the truth of the proposition stated.

(2) The converse of the preceding proposition is also true—the concentration of women of foreign birth engaged in remunerative occupations is on domestic service.

The Eleventh Census shows that, in 1890, 59.37 per cent of all foreign white women at work were engaged in domestic and personal service. This leaves only 40.63 per cent to be distributed among all other gainful occupations.[200] A specific illustration in the case of an individual state is seen in Massachusetts. Here the percentage of the foreign born in the entire population is 27.13, while, as stated above, the number of foreign born women in domestic service is 60.24 per cent.[201]

(3) The foreign born population as a class seek the large cities.

In 1890 the persons of foreign birth in the United States formed 14.77 per cent of the entire population. But of the total foreign population, 44.13 per cent was found in the one hundred and twenty-four cities having a population of twenty-five thousand or more.[202]

(4) The foreign countries having the largest absolute representation in the largest cities are Ireland, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, and Canada and Newfoundland. The following table shows the relative number of persons born in these countries who are found in the United States as a whole, and in the large cities:

TABLE III
Proportion of Persons of Foreign Birth in the United States

(5) The foreign countries having the largest absolute and relative representation in domestic service are, in order, Ireland, Germany, Sweden and Norway, Great Britain, and Canada and Newfoundland. This will be evident from the following table, which indicates the place of birth of all persons of foreign birth engaged in domestic service and the per cent of each nationality so engaged:

TABLE IV
Place of Birth of Domestic Employees

Similar results were reached through individual schedules sent out. The returns as made by employers and employees show that the place of birth of foreign born employees and the relative percentages are as follows:

TABLE V
Number of Foreign Born in Domestic Service

This group of five propositions in regard to the number and distribution of the foreign born engaged in domestic service seems to indicate that in this country, with the exception of the sections employing colored servants, domestic service is as a rule performed by persons of foreign birth belonging to a few well-defined classes as regards nationality, who prefer city to country life. The facts given are an understatement of the influence exerted on domestic service by persons of foreign extraction, since they do not take into consideration the factor of foreign parentage.

A second group of propositions may be suggested in regard to the general distribution of domestic employees.

(1) The number of domestic servants is absolutely and relatively small in agricultural and sparsely settled states.

This will be evident by the reference to the accompanying chart, which shows the number of persons to each domestic servant in each of the states. The states last in the list, where the smallest relative number of servants is employed, are all large in area, and as a rule have the smallest population in proportion to the area of settlement. This condition is probably due to the two facts that all housework is as a rule performed without remuneration by housewives, since they are more free from social and other interruptions than are women in cities, and also to the aversion of domestics as a class to country life.

(2) The number of domestic servants is absolutely and relatively large in those states containing a large urban population.

Chart showing the Number of Persons to each Domestic Employee in the Various States and Territories and the District of Columbia

This is also made evident by the diagram. Forty-nine of the fifty largest cities in the United States are found in the first thirty-four states in the list; only one of the fifty is found in the last fifteen states. The fact is apparently most clearly shown in the case of the District of Columbia, which has an almost exclusively urban population and ranks first with reference to the number of servants employed. The condition here, however, is due not so much to its urban character as to the employment of colored help and the fact that the city contains an abnormally large number of temporary residents requiring a disproportionate amount of service. The truth of the proposition is better indicated by the examples of New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, which stand nearly at the head of the list and contain seventeen of the fifty largest cities.

(3) The aggregate wealth of a state has little appreciable effect on the relative number of domestic servants employed.

This is evident from a study of the relative true and assessed valuation of real and personal property in the different states.[203] In more than one half the states it has no apparent connection whatever with the relative number of servants.

(4) The per capita wealth of a state has, with the exception of the Southern states as a class, a somewhat important bearing on the relative number of servants employed.

This will be seen from an examination of the per capita assessed valuations of real and personal property in the various states.[204] The rank of each state in the class of per capita wealth and in the relative number of domestic servants employed, with the exception named, does not vary materially. The variation in the Southern states is due to the presence of negro employees. The extremely low wages paid by employers enables them to command the services of a larger number of persons for the same expenditure of money than is possible at the North.

These facts may be considered as indicative in a general way of the truth of the current opinion that an increase in income generally shows itself first in the employment of additional service. They prove nothing absolutely on this point, however, as they are too general in character.

(5) Domestic employees are found in the largest numbers, relatively and absolutely, in the large cities. The fifty largest cities in the United States contain 18.04 per cent of the total population of the country. They have, however, 32.32 per cent of the total number of domestic servants. To put the same fact in another way, domestic servants constitute 2.32 per cent of the total population, but 4.07 per cent of the population of the fifty largest cities. The force of gravity exerted, therefore, by the large cities seems to act with nearly twice the power on the class of domestic employees that it does on the population as a whole.

The conclusion seems to follow that in general employers in large cities have less difficulty in securing servants than have persons living elsewhere, but that they are practically restricted in their choice to those of foreign birth. The conclusion does not follow that these employers have less difficulty than have others in dealing with the question of domestic service, since the facts given concern only the number of servants, not the quality of service.

(6) The proportion of persons engaged in domestic service varies with geographical location and prevailing industry.

This fact is indicated by the chart, which shows that in Southern cities, where the colored population is large, and in New York and Boston, which are ports of entry and therefore able to secure a large number of foreign born servants, the proportion of servants to the total population is large. In cities where the leading occupation is manufacturing, as Lowell, Paterson, and Fall River, the proportion of servants is small. In cities where the industrial conditions are similar the proportions are similar.

Chart showing the Number of Persons to each Domestic Employee in the Fifty Largest Cities

The same fact may be illustrated in two other ways. In Washington, Richmond, Atlanta, Memphis, and Nashville,—the five cities having the largest number of domestic employees in proportion to the population,—the domestic employees constitute in each city more than fourteen per cent of the entire number of persons engaged in all gainful occupations. In these five cities more than one third of all women engaged in remunerative occupations are in domestic service. On the other hand, in Camden, Trenton, Lowell, Paterson, and Fall River,—the five cities having the smallest number of domestic employees in proportion to the population,—the per cent of domestic employees with reference to the total number of persons engaged in all gainful occupations is less than seven, while in Lowell and Paterson only ten per cent and in Fall River only seven per cent of all women engaged in remunerative occupations are in domestic service. The following table will show these contrasts:

TABLE VI
Domestic Servants and Women compared with those in Gainful Occupations

(7) Neither per capita wealth nor aggregate wealth has an appreciable influence in determining the number of servants in cities.

Three illustrations of this are seen: (1) Washington, Richmond, Atlanta, Memphis, and Nashville rank respectively as regards per capita wealth, 13, 27, 19, 24, and 41, although they are the five cities that head the list in the proportion of servants to the total population; (2) Lowell and Fall River are at the foot of the list as regards the proportion of servants, but rank 10 and 12 in per capita wealth; (3) Nashville ranks fifth in the number of servants and Paterson forty-ninth, while both rank nearly the same in point of wealth.[205] There are indeed many instances where there is apparent connection between these two conditions, but they seem rather to be illustrations of the following point:

(8) The prevailing industry of a city, rather than its population or wealth, determines the number of domestic employees.

This conclusion seems to follow naturally as a result of the two previous propositions, but a few other facts in support of it may be mentioned. In eleven of the fifty principal cities the proportion of domestic servants to the total population is smaller than is the proportion in the states in which they are severally located.[206] The leading occupation in each of these cities is some form of manufacturing, and in each of them the proportion of persons engaged in manufacturing processes is larger than, with few exceptions, in the other cities. This fact explains the apparent contradiction between this statement and the one that domestic servants are found in the largest proportions in the largest cities.

That manufacturing industries tend to decrease the number of domestic employees in a city is both a cause and a result. The competition in industry draws women from domestic service, and at the same time a large part of the population in a manufacturing city is unable or does not care to employ large numbers of servants. It has been seen, however, that several of the manufacturing cities rank comparatively high in per capita wealth.

It seems possible in view of the facts stated in this second group of propositions to draw these conclusions. In states containing a relatively high urban population it is possible for wealth to command the services of a large proportion of persons for work in domestic service. But in cities where wealth comes into competition with manufacturing industries the proportion of domestic servants is small. Where such competition does not exist the proportion is large. In other words, persons are willing to enter domestic service for a consideration in cities where no other avenues of work are open to them with the qualifications they possess. They are unwilling to do so where such openings do exist.

A third group of propositions remains to be considered concerning the subject of wages. They may be thus stated:

(1) Wages in domestic service vary in different sections according to the economic conditions of the several localities.

TABLE VII
Average Weekly Wages by Geographical Section

This principle is illustrated by Table VII on the preceding page based on a classification of the returns received through individual schedules relating to 2,545 employees.

The difference indicated apparently conforms to the general variation in wages in different sections indicated by the Fourth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor,[207] and by examination of a considerable number of reports of various state bureaus of labor. The slight exception in the case of the wages of men on the Pacific coast is accidental, owing to the small number of returns.

(2) Skilled labor commands higher wages than unskilled labor.

This will be evident from Table VIII on the following page based on the schedules received from employers and employees and the returns from a Boston employment bureau.

In every instance it is seen that it is the skilled laborer—the cook—who commands the highest wages. The general servant who is expected to unite in herself all the functions of all the other employees named in the list becomes, on account of this fact, an unskilled worker, and, therefore, receives the lowest wages. The same principle holds true in the case of the seamstress and the laundress, the gardener and the choreman. It is difficult to make a deduction in the case of men employed in household service, since no universal custom prevails, as with women employees, in regard to adding to the wages paid in money, board, lodging, and other personal expenses.

TABLE VIII
Average Weekly and Daily Wages by Occupations

A corollary to the proposition may be added. The skilled laborer is a better workman than the unskilled laborer. The question was asked of employers, “What is the nature of the service rendered? Is it ‘excellent,’ ‘good,’ ‘fair,’ or ‘poor’?” The replies show that in proportion to the number of answers the largest percentage of service characterized as “excellent” is rendered by cooks, while the largest percentage characterized as “poor” is given by the general servants. These are, it is true, matters of opinion; and without a fixed standard, which it is impossible to secure, such judgments can have no absolute value. But the fact is of interest as showing the opinion of a large number of housekeepers. The following table will show the results in regard to these two classes of employees:

TABLE IX
Nature of Service rendered

(3) The foreign born in domestic service receive higher wages than the native born.

This was found to be true in every class of occupations, in every section, in the case of both men and women, and in the returns made by both employers and employees. But two trifling exceptions were found, both accidental. The principle cannot of course be stated absolutely as the facts at command are far from exhaustive, but so striking a uniformity cannot be considered purely accidental. An explanation is found in three facts: (1) the preference of the foreign born for the large cities, where wages in domestic service are higher than in the country; (2) the large proportion of negroes among the native born; (3) the relatively better class of foreign born than of native born women who enter domestic service. This statement must be made somewhat dogmatically here, since its proof demands a discussion of the entire subject of the unwillingness of native born women to enter domestic service.

(4) The wages of men engaged in domestic service are higher than the wages of women.

This will be evident by reference to Table VII and to Table VIII. Two things, however, must be borne in mind: first, that nearly all the men classified as cooks are employed on the Pacific coast, where wages are relatively high; second, that forty per cent of the men in domestic service do not receive board and lodging in addition to wages in money, while only two per cent of women so employed, principally laundresses, do not receive board and lodging. But although these facts modify the discrepancy between the wages of men and women, they do not wholly remove it. Whether the difference is as great as in other occupations cannot be stated.

(5) A tendency is found towards an increase in wages paid by employers, as is seen in Table X on the following page.

An interesting historical illustration of the same fact is given in a summary of wages and prices in Massachusetts from 1752 to 1860. In 1815, the first time the work of women is mentioned specifically, domestic servants received with board $.50 per week, while at the same time women were able to earn as papermakers $6.50 a week.[208]

TABLE X
Comparison of Wages paid

(6) The wages received in domestic service are relatively and sometimes absolutely higher than the average wages received in other wage-earning occupations open to women.

A comparison may be made between the wages received by domestic employees and by two other classes—teachers in representative city schools and the wage-earning women included in the investigations made by the Commissioner of Labor. As illustrating the wages received in domestic service, the following tables are given, showing (1) the classified weekly and daily wages received and (2) the average weekly and daily wages with the percentages receiving more or less than the average. These facts are taken from the general schedules. Similar tables are given showing a somewhat higher rate of wages in all domestic occupations in the special city of Boston.

TABLE XI
Classified Daily and Weekly Wages by Occupations

TABLE XII[209]
Average Weekly and Daily Wages by Occupations

The following tables show the classified and average wages paid in the principal occupations as reported by a Boston employment bureau:

TABLE XIII
Classified Weekly Wages by Occupations

TABLE XIV
Average Weekly Wages by Occupations

It is seen from Table XII that the average weekly wages in domestic service are $3.23—a fair average in this case, since forty-eight per cent receive more than the average and fifty-two per cent the same or less than the average. The average domestic employee, therefore, is able to earn in money during the year $167.96—a fair estimate, since in seventy-five cases out of every hundred the vacation granted women employees during the year is given without loss of wages.[210] This forms, however, but a part of the annual earnings. To this sum must be added board and lodging, fuel and light. For the equivalent in quality and quantity to that furnished by the employer the employee would in general be obliged to pay for board, lodging, and other incidental expenses at a reasonable estimate five dollars per week, or $250 annually, deducting board for two weeks’ vacation. The total annual earnings of a domestic employee, therefore, amount to nearly $420. To this the negative facts must be added that there is no expense for laundry work, and that the work involves few personal expenses in the way of clothing, and that these necessary expenses are often partially met through gifts from the employer. Again, the position entails no expenditures for car fares in going to and from work, or other demands such as are made in a business way by other occupations, and it involves no outlay for appliances for work, as a sewing-machine, type-writer, text-books, etc. Moreover, no investment of capital is necessary in learning the principles of the work, since employers have thus far been willing to make of their own homes training-schools for employees. The domestic employee is therefore never obliged to pay back either the capital invested in preparing for her work or the interest on that amount. It thus seems possible for the average household employee to save annually nearly $150 in an occupation involving no outlay or investment of capital in any way, and few personal expenses.

TABLE XV
Classified Annual Salaries of Women Teachers

A comparison may be made between these wages and the annual salaries received in sixteen representative cities by the women teachers in the public schools. Tables XV and XVI show the annual classified and average salaries received.[211]

TABLE XVI
Average Annual Salaries of Women Teachers

The concentration of salaries is seen to be on those between $400 and $500, the average salary being $545. This sum represents the full amount of wages received. To ascertain the amount it is possible to save annually there must be deducted at least $260 for board and lodging, and $25 for laundry expenses, leaving a cash balance of $260. Out of this sum, however, must come other necessary expenses, as the outfit for work,—books, stationery, etc.,—travelling expenses, car fares, society fees, etc., and a large item for clothing. There should also be deducted the interest on the capital invested in securing the education demanded in preparation for the work. If all of these items are considered, and the greater social demands entailed by the position, it seems possible for the average domestic employee to save at least as much money as the average teacher in the city schools. This comparison is probably relatively higher in favor of the teacher than it should be, since in the average wages for domestic employees are included the wages received in agricultural districts, where wages are lower than in cities. It is also a comparison between skilled workers on the one hand, and on the other hand an occupation in some of the subdivisions of which the laborers are unskilled.

It has, unfortunately, not been possible to compare the wages received in the same city by teachers and domestic employees. A comparison, however, can be made between the wages received in Boston for domestic service and by the teachers in the public schools in the neighboring city of Cambridge.

The average wages received by a cook in a private family in Boston are, as has been seen by Table XIV, $4.45. This judgment is based on five hundred and seventy-four returns, and is an exact average, since fifty per cent receive more than that amount, and fifty per cent the same or less than that. She therefore earns annually $231.40 plus $275 for board, lodging, fuel, light, and laundry expenses, or $506.40.

Fifty-six per cent of the teachers in the city schools in Cambridge earn annually $620, or, deducting $285 for board, etc., for fifty-two weeks, $335 in money. This is $103 more than is received by the Boston cook, but out of this must come numerous expenses entailed by the position, from which the domestic employee is exempt. The cash annual savings in the two cases cannot vary materially.

It will also be seen by reference to Tables XV and XVI that the Boston cook earns absolutely more than does the average city teacher in Albany, Atlanta, Baltimore, New Orleans, Paterson, Rochester, and Syracuse.

A second comparison is suggested by the investigations conducted by the Department of Labor. Through these it was found that the annual cash earnings of the working-women in twenty-two typical cities are $272.45.[212] This average takes into consideration time lost—a factor which does not enter into domestic employments except in a casual way. The annual earnings, therefore, of the class of women represented by the Report are much less than those of the domestic employee. The same point is also illustrated by a comparison of the amounts saved in the two occupations. In eleven cities investigated by the Department of Labor the average amount saved was less than $50; in nine cities it was $50, but under $100, while in only two cities was it more than $100, the highest average amount being $111.[213] As has been suggested, the highest of these averages is small in comparison with the amount it is possible to save in domestic service.

No question in regard to earnings saved was asked on the schedule sent to employees, but many statements on this point were voluntarily made by employees.[214] The question as to comparative amounts saved has also been asked the cashiers of banks in small cities and towns where factories are found and the personnel of depositors is known by the officials of the banks. No records are of course kept, but the opinion has been several times expressed that the factory employees do not save as much, as a class, as do domestic employees. In one place, where about two thousand factory employees are found, it was stated that no woman employee had a sum to her credit as large as had been deposited by a domestic.

A corollary follows from this proposition. High wages alone are not sufficient to counterbalance the inducements offered in other occupations where wages are relatively or absolutely lower but whose special advantages are deemed more desirable.

(7) The wages paid in domestic service are on the average high, but the occupation offers few opportunities for advancement in this direction.

An examination of Table XI shows but one instance, with the exception of nurses, where the weekly cash wages reach $10.00 per week, and only nine others where they rise above $7.00. In the two occupations the wages in which have been compared with those in domestic service, while the general average wages are low, it is possible to reach through promotion a comparatively high point. The fact that the wage plane is a high one is one inducement for women of average ability to enter the occupation. On the other hand, the fact that the wage limit, high as it is, is soon reached must act as a barrier in the case of others.