Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/555

Rh sisters and kinsfolk, and will sacrifice a good deal to accomplish this. This devotion is so universal that it is impossible to ignore it when we consider women as employés. Young unmarried women are not detached from family claims and requirement as young men are, and, so far as my observation goes, are more ready and steady in their response to the needs of the aged parents and helpless members of the family. But women performing labor in households find peculiar difficulties in the way of enjoying family life, and are more or less dependent upon their employers for possibilities to see their relatives and friends. Curiously enough the same devotion to family life and quick response to its claims on the part of the employer, operates against the girl in household labor and places her in a unique position of isolation. The employer of household labor, in her zeal to preserve her family life intact and free from intrusion, acts inconsistently and grants to her cook, for instance, but once or twice a week such opportunity for untrammelled association with her relatives as the employer's family claims constantly. This devotion to the narrow conception of family life the men of the family also share. The New York gentleman who lunches at Delmonico's eats food cooked by a chef with a salary of five thousand dollars a year, and prepared with all modern appliances. He comes home hungry and with a tantalizing memory of his lunch to a dinner cooked by a woman with a salary of forty dollars a month, with only those appliances possible in a small kitchen. The contrast between the lunch and dinner is great, but the aforesaid gentleman quiets his discontent by his reflection, that, in eating a dinner cooked under his own roof, he is in some occult manner contributing to the sanctity of family life; though his business mind knows full well that, in actual money, he is paying more for his badly cooked dinner than for his well-cooked lunch; that in submitting to such conditions he is failing to use the powers of organization and combination which have made his business so successful.

The household employé, in addition to her industrial