At present there is much to indicate that the servant’s substitute, in the form of various labor-saving devices, will eventually fill the place of the already vanishing domestic worker.  Whether this proves to be the case will rest largely with these girls whom we are educating to-day.  The pendulum is swinging rather wildly now, but by their day of deciding things it may have settled down to a steady motion so that their push will send it definitely in one direction or the other.

There is no inherent reason why making cake should be a less honorable occupation than making underwear or shoes; why a well-kept kitchen should be a less desirable workroom than a crowded, noisy factory.  But under existing conditions the comparison from the point of view of the worker is largely in favor of the factory.  Among the facts to be faced by the homemaker who wishes to intercept the flight of the housemaid and the cook are these: 

  1.  Hours for the domestic worker must be definite, as they are in
     shop or factory work.

  2.  The working day must be shortened.

  3.  Time outside of working hours must be absolutely the worker’s
     own.

  4.  The worker must either live outside the home in which she
     works, or must have privacy, convenience, comfort, and the
     opportunity to receive her friends, as she would at home.

In short, the houseworker must have definite work, definite hours, and outside these must be free to live her own life, in her own way, and among her own friends, as the factory girl lives hers when her day’s work is done.

That women are already awaking to these responsibilities is shown by the increasing number who choose the labor-saving devices in place of the flesh-and-blood machine.  Many of these women will tell you that they make this choice to avoid the personal responsibility involved in having a resident worker in the house.  There is comfort in not having to consider “whether or not the vacuum cleaner likes to live in the country,” or the bread mixer “has a backache,” or the electric flatiron desires “an afternoon off to visit its aunt.”  It is the same satisfaction we feel in urging the automobile to greater speed regardless of the melting heat, the pouring rain, or the number of miles it has already traveled to-day.  Perhaps the future will see machines for household work so improved and multiplied that we can escape altogether this perplexing personal problem of “the woman who works for us.”

Whether or not we escape this problem when we patronize the laundry, the bakeshop, the underwear factory, is a matter for further thought.  To many it seems a simpler matter to face the problem of one cook, one laundress, than to investigate conditions in factory, bakery, and laundry, to agitate, to “use our influence,” to urge legislation, to follow up inspectors and their reports, to boycott the bakery, to be driven into the establishment of a cooeperative