Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/552

540 the language, girls who are timid and slow, or girls who look at life solely from the savings bank point of view. The distracted housekeeper struggles with these unprogressive girls, holding to them not even the well-defined and independent relation of employer and employed, but the hazy and constantly changing one of mistress to servant. A listener attentive to a conversation between two employers of household labor, and we certainly all have opportunity to hear such conversations, would often discover a tone implying that the employer was abused and put upon; that she was struggling with it solely because she was thus serving her family and performing her social duties; that otherwise it would be a great relief to her to throw up the whole thing and "never have a servant in her house again." Did she follow this impulse she would simply yield to the trend of her times, and accept the system of factory production. She would be in line with the industrial organization of her age. Were she in line ethically, she would have to believe that the sacredness and beauty of family life do not consist in the processes of the separate preparation of food, but in sharing the corporate life of the community, and in making the family the unit of that life.

The selfishness of a modern mistress, who, in her narrow social ethics, insists that those who minister to the comforts of her family, shall minister to it alone, that they shall not only be celibate, but shall be cut off more or less from their natural social ties, excludes the best working people from her service. A man of dignity and ability is quite willing to come into a house to tune a piano. Another man of mechanical skill will come to put up window shades. Another of less skill, but perfect independence, will come to clean and lay a carpet. These men would all resent the situation and consider it quite impossible if it implied the giving up of their family and social ties, and living under the roof of the household requiring their services. Most of the cooking and serving and cleaning of a household could be done by women living outside and coming into a house as a skilled workmen does, having no "personal