Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/556

544, is also isolated socially. It is well to remember that the household employés, for the better quarters of the city and suburbs, are largely drawn from the poorer quarters, which are nothing if not gregarious. The girl is born and reared in a tenement house full of children. She goes to school with them, and there she learns to march, to read and write in companionship with forty others. When she is old enough to go to parties, those she attends are usually held in a public hall and are crowded with dancers. If she works in a factory, she walks home with many other girls, in much the same spirit as she formerly walked in school with them. She mingles with the young men she knows, in frank economic and social equality. Until she marries she remains at home with no special break or change in her family and social life.

If she is employed in a household, this is not true. Suddenly all the conditions of her life are changed. This change may be wholesome for her, but it is not easy, and the thought of the savings bank does not cheer one much, when one is twenty. She is isolated from the people with whom she has been reared, with whom she has gone to school, and among whom she expects to live when she marries. She is naturally lonely and constrained away from them, and the "new girl" often seems "queer" to her employer's family. She does not care to mingle socially with the people in whose house she is employed, as the girl in the country when she "works for" a country neighbor often does, and she suffers horribly from loneliness. This wholesome instinctive dread of social isolation is so strong that, as every city intelligence office can testify, the filling of situations is easier or more difficult just in proportion as the place offers more or less companionship. Thus, the easy situation to fill is always the city house with five or six employés, shading off into the more difficult suburban home with two, and the utterly impossible lonely country house.

There are suburban employers of household labor who make heroic efforts to supply domestic and social life to their employés, who take the domestic employé to drive, arrange to have her