Generally speaking, the foreign servant girl has been exploited in this country almost if not quite as ruthlessly and unintelligently as the foreign factory girl and the foreign steel mill worker.  Domestic service, which ought to be the best school for the newcomer, has become the worst; exploited, she learns to exploit; suspected, she learns to suspect.  The result has been that the girl has soon acquired a confused and grotesque notion of her place.  She soon becomes insolent and dissatisfied, grows more and more indifferent to the quality of her work and to the cultivation of right relations.

What we have lost in our treatment of the immigrant women can never be regained.  We forget that almost invariably these girls have the habit of thrift.  They have never known anything else.  Thrift as a principle is ingrained in them.  But the American household is notoriously thriftless.  As a rule it destroys the quality in the untrained immigrant girl.  It is American not to care for expense—­and she accepts the method—­as far as her mistress’ goods are concerned—­if not her own.

The general stupid assumption that because the immigrant girl does not know our ways she knows nothing, has deprived us of much that she might have contributed to our domestic arts and sciences.  It is with her as it is with any newcomer in a strange land of strange tongue—­she is shy, dreads ridicule.  Instead of encouraging her to preserve and develop that which she has learned at home, we drive her to abandon it by our ignorant assumption that she knows nothing worth our learning.  The case of peasant handicraft is in point.  It is only recently that we have begun to realize that most women immigrants know some kind of beautiful handicraft which they have entirely dropped for fear of being laughed at.

A very frequent excuse for the lack of pains that the average woman gives to the training of the raw girl is that she marries as soon as she becomes useful.  But is it not part of the woman’s business in this democracy to help the newcomer to an independent position?  Is it not part of her business to help settle her servants in matrimony?  Certainly any large and serious conception of her business must include this obligation.

It is the failure to recognize opportunities for public service of this kind that makes the woman say her life is narrow.  It is parallel to her failure to understand the relation of household economy to national economy.  She seems to lack the imagination to relate her problem to the whole problem.  She will read books and follow lecture courses on Labor and come home to resent the narrowness of her life, unconscious that she personally has the labor problem on her own hands and that her failure to see that fact is complicating daily the problems of the nation.  It is the old false idea that the interesting and important thing is somewhere else—­never at home—­while the truth is that the only interesting and important thing for any one of us is in mastering our own particular situation,—­moreover, the only real contribution we ever make comes in doing that.