DOMESTIC AID. A Burning Question.

Free Lance, Volume I, Issue 4, 28 July 1900, Page 6

DOMESTIC AID. A Burning Question.

THE domestic-aid question is one of the crying needs of the hour. Take the advertising columns of the Post almost any evening for proof. Sometimes as many as eighteen or twenty servants are asked for by anxious housekeepers in one issue, and the nature of the inducements held out are eloquent testimony that Sarah Jane is hard to get and as difficult to hold. One despairing mistress the other day offered to allow the lucky one who should consent to become her hand-maiden every night out and four afternoons in the week ! An eight hours' day is nowhere after that. But numbers of married men will tell you that week after week they have had to light their own fires because no young lady would condescend to come to the aid of the household. Sarah J. answers the " ads," but is mistress of the situation* and commonly dictates her own terms. # m * In one case we heard of, she put the would-be mistress through a catechism as to the duties expected, the hours, the wages, the accommodation provided — the good lady complying out of sheer amusement — till she heard that she would be expected to give a couple of children an occasional afternoon's airing. This finished her. At once she put her nose in the air, and made for the door. " This place won't suit me ; I never take children out," were her last words as she vanished. In another household that we wot of, the young mistress denies herself the chance of ever going to church on Sunday evening, and lets her domestic " do the block " while she herself keeps house, rather than force the chance of another interregnum. # # # The same domestic-aid problem has been engaging the attention of the head of the Women's Branch of the Department of Labour. This officer gives it as her experience that domestic work every year grows more distasteful to working girls. They prefer factory work or laundry work — no matter how small the weekly pay is — to good domestic work where the pay is better and they are found in board and lodgings, not to speak of the benefits they derive from the knowledge obtained when they get homes of their own. She wishes she knew what to suggest to make domestic work more attractive to young girls, so as to induce them to take an intelligent interest in what so much concerns their own future welfare, but she is at a loss even to make a suggestion. # # * Much of the dislike to domestic service lies in the way the girls themselves are treated. Their work is never done. Nor is this the least of the domestic servant's troubles. In many families, the girl is treated as if she were made of inferior clay. It often happens, in the exigencies of colonial life, that the mistress has been a domestic servant herself in her time, and in her anxiety to draw the line between her superior caste and the inferior one of her servant, she makes the girl's life a misery. Too many domestic servants are veritable " slaveys," denied the pleasure of a friendly word of companionship from week's end to week's end, and condemned to ceaseless toil from dawn till close upon midnight. What wonder, under such circumstances, that the girl prefers factory life, with its lower pay and shorter hours, and the liberty to parade the streets after nightfall.