A fuller social and domestic life among household employés would be the first step toward securing their entrance into the larger industrial organizations by which the needs of a community are most successfully administered. Many a girl who complains of loneliness, and who relinquishes her situation with that as her sole excuse, feebly tries to formulate her sense of restraint and social mal-adjustment. She sometimes says that she "feels so unnatural all the time."[1] And when she leaves her employer her reasons are often incoherent and totally incomprehensible to that good lady, who naturally concludes that she wishes to get away from the work and back to her dances and giddy life, content to stand many hours in an unsanitary factory, if she has these. The charge of the employer is only a half truth. These dances may be the only organized form of social life which the disheartened employé is able to mention; but she has felt the social trend of her times, and is trying to say what an old English poet said five centuries ago: "Forsooth, brothers, fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell; fellowship is life and lack of fellowship is death; and the deeds that ye do upon earth, it is for fellowship's sake that ye do them."
Two other contemporary industries are similar in condition and situation to that of domestic labor. The workers in these two industries are also isolated. The worker in the first is the woman who endeavors to support herself "by taking in sewing." She is the last unit of the sweating system—the home finisher. The majority of her sisters in all the other trades have gone into the factories, she alone remains at home and turns her already uncomfortable tenement into a workshop. Isolated as the sewing woman is, industrially she still has advantages over the household employé, in that she may remain in the same part of town with her kinsfolk and her natural social associations. In that respect she is nearer the conditions of
- ↑ The writer has known the voice of a girl to change so much during three weeks of "service" that she could not recognize it when the girl returned to the bureau. It alternated between the high falsetto in which a shy child "speaks a piece," and the husky gulp with which the globus hystericus is swallowed. The alertness and bonhomie of the voice of the tenement-house child had totally disappeared.
