Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/550

538. But, even in households comparatively humble, there is still one alien, one who is neither loved nor loving. The modern family has dropped the man who made its shoes, the woman who spun its clothes, and to a large extent the woman who washes them, but it stoutly refuses to drop the woman who cooks its food; it strangely insists that to do that would be to destroy family life. The cook is uncomfortable, the family is uncomfortable; but it will not drop her as all her fellow-workers have been dropped, although the cook herself insists upon it. So far has this insistance gone that every possible concession is made to retain her. I know an employer in one of the suburbs who built a bay at the back of her house so that her cook might have a pleasant room in which to sleep, and one in which to receive her friends. This employer naturally felt aggrieved when the cook refused to stay in her bay. Viewed in an historic light, this employer might just as well have added a bay to her house for her shoemaker, and then deemed him ungrateful because he declined to live in it. The employer misunderstood the situation. She did not realize that the desire to live with one's kinsfolk is stronger in most of us than the desire for the comforts to be found in a bay.

The household employe has no regular opportunity for meeting other workers of her trade, and of attaining with them the dignity of a corporate body. The industrial isolation of the household employé results, as isolation in a trade must always result, in a lack of progress in the methods and products of that trade and a lack of aspiration and education in the workman. Whether we recognize this isolation as a cause or not, I think we are all ready to acknowledge that household labor has been in some way belated; that the improvements there have not kept up with the improvement in other occupations. It is said that the last revolution in the processes of cooking was brought about by Count Rumford, who died a hundred years ago. This is largely due to lack of esprit de corps among the employés, which keeps them collectively from fresh achievements, as the absence of education in the individual keeps her from improving her implements.