A fuller social and domestic life among household employees would be steps 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.”  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 her home.  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.  When such a girl 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, if she has these, to stand many hours in an insanitary factory.  The charge of the employer is only half a truth.  These dances may be the only organized form of social life which the disheartened employee is able to mention, but the girl herself, in her discontent and her moving from place to place, is blindly striving to respond to a larger social life.  Her employer thinks that she should be able to consider only the interests and conveniences of her employer’s family, because the employer herself is holding to a family outlook, and refuses to allow her mind to take in the larger aspects of the situation.

Although this household industry survives in the midst of the factory system, it must, of course, constantly compete with it.  Women with little children, or those with invalids depending upon them, cannot enter either occupation, and they are practically confined to the sewing trades; but to all other untrained women seeking employment a choice is open between these two forms of labor.

There are few women so dull that they cannot paste labels on a box, or do some form of factory work; few so dull that some perplexed housekeeper will not receive them, at least for a trial, in her household.  Household labor, then, has to compete with factory labor, and women seeking employment, more or less consciously compare these two forms of labor in point of hours, in point of permanency of employment, in point of wages, and in point of the advantage they afford for family and social life.  Three points are easily disposed of.  First, in regard to hours, there is no doubt that the factory has the advantage.  The average factory hours are from seven in the morning to six in the evening, with the chance of working overtime in busy seasons.  This leaves most of the evenings and Sundays entirely free.  The average hours of household labor are from six in the morning