But why is the American woman not stirred by these facts?  Why does she not recognize their meaning and grapple with her labor problem?  It is certain that at the beginning of the republic she did have a pretty clear idea of the kind of household revolution the country needed.  Our great-grandmothers, that is, the serious ones among them, made a brave dash at it.  There is no family, at least of New England tradition, who does not know the methods they adopted.  They changed the nomenclature.  There were to be no more “servants”—­we were to have helpers.  There were to be no divisions in the household.  The helper was to sit at the table, at the fireside. (They thought to change the nature of a relation as old as the world by changing its name and form.) It was like the French Revolutionists’ attempt to make a patriot by taking away his ruffles and shoe buckles and calling him “citizen”!

Of course it failed.  The family meal, the fireside hour, are personal and private institutions in a home.  Much of the success of the family in building up an intimate comradeship depends upon preserving them.  We admit friends to them as a proof of affection, strangers as a proof of our regard.  The notion that those who come into a household solely to aid in its labor should be admitted into personal relations which depend for their life upon privacy and affection, was always fantastic.  It could not endure, because it violated something as important as the dignity of labor, and that was the sacredness of personal privacy.  Moreover, it was bound to fail because it made the dignity of labor depend on artificial things—­such as the name by which one is called, the place where one sits.

The good sense of the country might very well have regulated whatever was artificial in the attempt, if it had not been for the crushing interference of slavery.  In the South all service was performed by slaves.  In many parts of the North, at the founding of the republic, in Connecticut, in New York, New Jersey, slaves were held.  It was practically impossible to work out a democratic system of domestic service side by side with this institution.

Slavery passed, but we were impeded by the fact that, liberated, the slave was still a slave in spirit and that his employer, North and South, was still an aristocrat in her treatment of him.  With this situation to cope with, the woman’s labor problem was still further complicated by immigration.

For years we have been overrun by thousands of untrained girls who are probably to be heads of American homes and mothers of American citizens.  Most of them are of good, healthy, honest, industrious stock, but they are ignorant of our ways and ideas.  The natural place for these girls to get their initiation into American democracy is in the American household.  The duty of American women toward these foreign girls is plainly to help them understand our ideals.  The difficulty of this is apparent; but the failure to accomplish it has been due less to its difficulty than to the fact that not one woman in a thousand has recognized that she has an obligation to make a fit citizen of the girl who comes into her home.