It would seem as if in the newer generations, the average housekeeper is not in the professional class at all.  Usually she lacks professional training.  If she was brought up in a well-to-do home where there were several servants, she knows literally nothing of cooking, or of any department of housekeeping.  Even when she has had some instruction in household tasks, she almost never connects cooking with chemistry, food with dietetics, cleanliness with sanitation, buying with bookkeeping.  She is an amateur.  And she takes into her household to do work she herself is incapable of doing, another amateur, a woman who might, in many cases, do well under a capable commander, but who is hopelessly at sea when expected to evolve a system of housekeeping all by herself.

This irregular state of affairs in what should be a carefully studied, well-organized industry is reflected in the conditions commonly meted out to domestics.  Take housing conditions, for example.  Some housekeepers provide their servants with good beds; of course, not quite as good as other members of the household enjoy, but good enough.  Some set aside pleasant, warm, well-furnished rooms for the servants.  But Miss Kellor’s investigators reported that it was common to find the only unheated room in a house or apartment set aside for the servant.  They found great numbers of servants’ rooms in basements, having no sunlight or heat.

At one home, where an investigator applied for a “place,” the housekeeper complained that her last maid was untidy.  Then she showed the applicant to the servant’s room.  This was a little den partitioned off from the coal bin!

In another place, the maid was required to sleep on an ironing board placed over the bathtub.  In still another, the maid spent her night of rest on a mattress laid over the wash tubs in a basement.  A bed for two servants, consisting of a thin mattress on the dining-room table, was also found.

Unventilated closets, rooms opening off from the kitchen, small and windowless, are very commonly provided in city flats.  Even in spacious country homes the servants’ rooms are considered matters of little importance.

“One woman,” writes Miss Kellor, “planned her new three-story house with the attic windows so high that no one could see out of them.  When the architect remonstrated she said:  ’Oh, those are for the maids; I don’t expect them to spend their time looking out.’”

I remember a young girl who waited on table at a woman’s hotel where I made my home.  One morning I sent this girl for more cream for my coffee.  She was gone some time and I spoke to her a little impatiently when she returned.  She was silent for a moment, then she said:  “Do you know that every time you send me to the pantry it means a walk of three and a half blocks?  This dining-room and the kitchens and pantries are a block apart, and are separated by three flights of stairs.  I have counted the distance there and back, and it is more than three blocks.”