The failure to dignify and professionalize household labor is particularly hard on the unskilled girl of little education who respects herself, has pretty clear ideas of her “rights” under our system of government, and who expects to make something of herself.  There are tens of thousands of such in the country; very many of them realize clearly the many advantages of household labor.  They know that it ought to be more healthful, is better paid, is more interesting because more varied.  They see its logical relation to the future to which they look forward.

But such a girl feels keenly the cost to herself of undertaking what she instinctively feels ought to be for her the better task.  She knows the standards and conditions are a matter of chance; that, while she may receive considerate treatment in one place, in another there will be no apparent consciousness that she is a human being.  She knows and dreads the loneliness of the average “place.”  “It’s breaking my heart I was,” sobbed an intelligent Irish girl, serving a term for drunkenness begun in the kitchen, “alone all day long with never a one to pass a good word.”  She finds herself cut off from most of the benefits which are provided for other wage-earning girls.  She finds girls’ clubhouses generally are closed to her.  She is the pariah among workers.

What is there for this girl but the factory or the shop?  Yet her presence there is a disaster for the whole labor system, for she is a cheap laborer—­cheap not because she is a poor laborer—­she is not; generally she is an admirable one—­quick to learn, faithful to discharge.  Her weakness in trade is that she is a transient who takes no interest in fitting herself for an advanced position.  The demonstration of this statement is found in a town like Fall River, where the admirable textile school has only a rare woman student, although boys and men tax its capacity.  There is no object for the average girl to take the training.  She looks forward to a different life.  The working girl has still to be convinced of the “aristocracy of celibacy”!

No more difficult or important undertaking awaits the American woman than to accept the challenge to democratize her own special field of labor.  It is in doing this that she is going to make her chief contribution to solving the problem of woman in industry.  It is in doing this that she is going to learn the meaning of democracy.  It is an undertaking in which every woman has a direct individual part—­just as every man has a direct part in the democratization of public life.

Individual effort aside, though it is the most fundamental, she has various special channels of power through which she can work—­her clubs, for instance.  If the vast machinery of the Federation of Woman’s Clubs could be turned to this problem of the democratization of domestic service, what an awakening might we not hope for!  Yet it is doubtful if it will be through the trained woman’s organizations that the needed revolution will come.  It will come, as always, from the ranks of the workers.