Some intelligent inquiry has been made into surface conditions.  The Sociological Department of Vassar College, under Professor Lucy Maynard Salmon, during the years 1889 and 1890, made an exhaustive study of wages, hours of work, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages of domestic service.  Professor Salmon’s book, “Domestic Service,” giving the results of the inquiry, is a classic on the subject.  It deals, however, almost entirely with the ethical side of the problem, the social relation between mistress and maid.  The relation between the worker and the industry is hardly examined at all.

A later inquiry into the servant problem was conducted in 1903, in half a dozen cities, by organizations of women which associated themselves for the purpose, under the name of the Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research.

The Woman’s Municipal League of New York, the Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, the Housekeepers’ Alliance, and the Civic Club of Philadelphia were the moving elements in the investigation.  Co-operating with them were the College Settlements Association and the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, which together established a scholar ship for the research.  This research was most ably conducted by Miss Frances Kellor, a Vassar graduate, and nine assistant workers, all of whom were college women.  The report of the investigation was published a year later in the volume “Out of Work."[1]

This investigation by organizations of educated and expert women was the first survey ever made of domestic service as an industry, the first scientific study of domestic workers as an industrial group.  It was the first intelligent attempt to review housework as if it were a trade.

The most important conclusion of the investigators was that housework, domestic service, although carried on as a trade, is really no trade at all.  The domestic worker is no more a part of modern industry than the Italian woman who finishes “pants” in a tenement, or the child who stays from school to fasten hooks and eyes on paper cards.

Do not let us make a mistake concerning the underlying cause of the servant problem.  Let us face the truth that we have two institutions which are back numbers in twentieth century civilization:  two left-overs from a past-and-gone domestic system of industry.  One of these is the tenement sweat shop, where women combine, or try to combine, manufacturing and housekeeping.  The other is the private kitchen—­the home—­where the last stand of conservatism and tradition, the last lingering remnant of hand labor, continues to exist.

No woman who is free enough, strong enough, intelligent enough to seek work in a factory or shop, is ever found in a sweat shop or seen carrying bundles of coats to finish at home.

Exactly for the same reason the average American working woman shuns housework as a means of livelihood.  You will find in every community a few women of intelligence who are naturally so domestic in their tastes and inclinations that they shrink from any work outside the home.  Such women do adhere to domestic service, but, broadly speaking, you behold in the servant group merely the siftings of the real industrial class.