DRAWBACKS OF DOMESTIC SERVICE

Press, Volume LIV, Issue 9668, 5 March 1897, Page 3

DRAWBACKS OF DOMESTIC SERVICE

TO THE EDITOR OP THE PRESS. Sir, —I should like to express my opinion on the drawbacks of domestic service. And that there are drawbacks, any girl that has had any insight into domestic service will tell you. How is it when the factory hands are paid off on account of slackness of work and the girls have to seek domestic service that they leave their situations and go back to the factories when work is plentiful ? . It is because they are looked upon as the household drudge and anything is thought good enough for them in the position they occupy. Because they have to put up with the impudence of unruly children, who leave their manners in the drawing-room and are barely civil to the poor slave in the kitchen. As long as the mothers of these children think it worth their while to discuss her servants at afternoon tea, before the children, they will think they are right in treating them as if they (the servants) were very inferior to them. So they may be, but in the majority of cases the servant is far before her mistress in her bringing up. Even if she is not, why not treat her with consideration? I will say this, that all mistresses are not alike. A real lady will have a little thought for her servants. It is those jumped-up, half-educated women that make domestic service what it is at the present time—a thing to be shunned, and* a last resource when everything else fails. No wonder that girls seek shop and factory work, where they have a given time for work, and a half-holiday once a week, where they are treated like rational beings instead of being mere machines that have to work on till they are of no more use. — Yours, &c, One that Pities Them. March 2nd, 1897.