Where does the average American woman come out in applying this test?  Take her attitude toward labor,—­where does it place her?  Labor according to democracy is a badge of respectability.  You cannot poach or sponge in a democracy; if you do, you violate the fundamental right of the other man.  You cannot ask him to help support you by indirect or concealed devices; if you do, you are hampering the free opportunity the scheme promises him.

Moreover, the kind of work you do must not demean you.  Nothing useful is menial.  It is in the quality of the work and the spirit you give it that the test lies.  Poor work brings disrespect and so hurts not only you but the whole mass.  Contempt for a task violates the principle because it is contempt for a thing which the system recognizes as useful.  Classification based on tasks falls down in a democracy.  A poor lawyer falls below a good clerk, a poor teacher below a good housemaid, since one renders a sound and the other an unsound service.

Now this ideal of labor it was for the woman to work out in the household.  To do this she must reconstruct the ideas to which she and all her society had been trained.  In the nature of the task there could be no rules for it.  It could be accomplished only by creating in the household a genuine democratic spirit.  This meant that she must bring herself to look upon domestic service as a dignified employment in no way demeaning the person who performed it.  Quite as difficult, she must infuse into those who performed the labor of the household respect and pride in their service.

What has happened?  Has the woman democratized the department of labor she controls?  If we are to measure her understanding of the system under which she lives by what she has done with her own particular labor problem, we must set her down as a poor enough democrat.  This great department of national activity is generally (though by no means universally) in a poorer estate to-day than ever before in the history of the country; that is, tested by the ideals of labor toward which we are supposed to be working, it shows less progress.

Instead of being dignified, it has been demeaned.  No other honest work in the country so belittles a woman socially as housework performed for money.  It is the only field of labor which has scarcely felt the touch of the modern labor movement; the only one where the hours, conditions, and wages are not being attacked generally; the only one in which there is no organization or standardization, no training, no regular road of progress.  It is the only field of labor in which there seems to be a general tendency to abandon the democratic notion and return frankly to the standards of the aristocratic regime.  The multiplication of livery, the tipping system, the terms of address, all show an increasing imitation of the old world’s methods.  Unhappily enough, they are used with little or none of the old world’s ease.  Being imitations and not natural growths, they, of course, cannot be.