Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/31

 Rh suitable servant work they look to the factory for employment. I have known of girls who quit their service because it was demanded of them to wear silly little caps on their heads such as no civilized person would put on. I have personally known a girl who left a splendid position as nurse of two little girls and took much harder and more disagreeable work because the mistress, who had very plutocratic notions, demanded that she should wear an apron on the street. She had never dressed that way and refused, insisting that her clothing was her own business, and so they parted. This girl was a refined, educated girl with the finest faculty for entertaining children. As a psychological study we took special pains to become acquainted with her successor and found her to be a coarse-grained, ignorant, foul-mouthed, slovenly girl, the mere association with whom would ruin any child. But she wore an apron and would have worn six to satisfy the mistress for whom she smirked and cringed to her face and roundly abused to her back.

Outside of the lackey and flunky, problems which remain for the rich to settle as best they can, the servant problem is being absorbed into the general industrial problem. The middle class home has very much a tendency to disappear, The apartment house and family hotel are taking its place. The "impudence" of the modern servant has much to do to hasten the course. That is proven again by the fact that this tendency is much less in evidence on the Pacific Coast where servile Japanese and Chinese servants can be had than in the East, where most the servants are Irish, German or Scandinavian girls who become much too quickly Americanized and will look for other work if the service does not suit.

Many of the old time servants' tasks have become real industrial pursuits. The cook, the waiter, the porter, the cab-man, the barber and even the bootblack are industrial proletarians. The "servant problem" therefore does not concern the Socialist. It will take care of itself in the happy course of social evolution.