Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/551

Rh Under this isolation, not only must one set of utensils serve divers purposes, and as a consequence tend to a lessened volume, and lower quality of work, but inasmuch as the appliances are not made to perform the fullest work, there is an amount of capital invested disproportionate to the result when measured by the achievement in other branches of industry. More important than this is the result of the isolation upon the worker herself. There is nothing more devastating to the inventive faculty, nor fatal to a flow of mind and spirit, than the constant feeling of loneliness and the absence of that fellowship which makes our public opinion.

If an angry foreman reprimands a girl for breaking a machine, twenty other girls hear him, and the culprit knows perfectly well their opinion as to the justice or injustice of her situation. In either case she bears it better for knowing that, and for not thinking it over in solitude. If a household employé breaks a utensil or a piece of porcelain and is reprimanded by her employer, too often the invisible jury is the family of the latter, who naturally uphold her censorious position and intensify the feeling of loneliness in the employé.

The isolation of the household employe is perhaps inevitable so long as the employer holds her belated ethics; but the situation is made even more difficult by the character and capacity of the girls who enter this industry. In any great industrial change the workmen who are permanently displaced are those who are too dull to seize upon changed conditions. The workmen who have knowledge and insight, and who are in touch with their time, quickly reorganize. There are many noble exceptions, but it follows that on the whole the enterprising girls of the community go into factories, and the less enterprising go into households. It is not a question of skill, of energy, of conscientious work, which will enable a girl to rise industrially while she is in the household; she is not in the rising movement. She is belated in a class composed of the unprogressive elements of the community, and which is recruited constantly from the victims of misfortune and incompetence, by girls who are