WHY SHE WALKED OUT

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 July 1935, Page 11

WHY SHE WALKED OUT

ENGLISH DOMESTIC SERVANT

“The alarming disappearance of the domestic servant is not a joke, though you can make your hopeless adventures with haughty and inefficient chdr-la'dies a source of merriment for ydur friends,” states Margaret Lane .. in the “Daily Mail.” The absence of |! good domestic labour ' in England is-an F increasingly serious' problem* by no means to be solved by labour-saving gadgets of by saying the day will come when we shall all be equal and there will be no housework to do at all. “Other women earning their bread by routine jobs have not, en masse, walked out on them. Why has the domestic' servant walked out on hers? “That she has walked out on it cannot be denied: The ‘servant problem’ ' our-mothers gossiped about was nothing to the deadlock the young housewife faces to-day. Those English and I Scottish and Welsh and Irish girls who | used to think it no shame to earn their living in other people’s homes have taken themselves elsewhere —some to factories and offices, some to swell the ranks of female unemployed. “Wherever they are, domestic service knows them no more. The anxious inquiries of one’s friends nowadays are all the same—‘Do you know where I can get a good German, Swedish, Swiss, Austrian girl . . .?” A large percentage of the widest and most necessary branches of female labour in this country is passing, with the inefficient consent of our own domestic servants, into the willing and capable hands of immigrant foreigners. “Nor are these: smiling domestic German and Swedish and Czech girls the only ones who are usurping the lost cook-general’s place. Marines re- ■ tired from the Service in their thir- : ties, ex-soldiers with years of training 1 behind, them as officers’ servants, per- ’ sonable young men who have not found 1 it easy to get other work and who i have had the sense to snatch the op- 1 portunity their womenfolk have aban- i doncd, are finding a place in more and < ■more private homes. i “But there are not enough of these, : and there never will be, to fill all the r vacant places that are left. With the f benches of the female labour ex- t changes crowded with waiting women why should there be vacant places left at all?

‘’The sad truth is that few or none of the women queueing at the labour exchange could competently perform the good domestic work that is needed. To be a good cook, or even an efficient kitchen-maid, is not everybody’s job.

PRIDE IN “A GOOD PLACE “It requires intelligence, energy, and sense, a certain fastidiousness, and standard of living which not every woman possesses. The - girls who have it, who used to undertake ‘a good place’ with pride, have gone elsewhere, are doing or doggedly looking for work of a different nature. Perhaps in another twenty years some of them may realise that the scornful repudiation, of good domestic work was not altogether wise. “Those of Us who, after long searching and many disgusts and disillusions, have capitulated and employed a foreign maid, find no such snobbish repudiation in the young women of other countries. “They are well educated, well dressed, clever in their work, cheerful, and self-respecting, with a pleasant social life of their own that leaves no room for discontent or loneliness. “What is there lacking in our own young women that they are too stupid or too stiff-necked to do the same? Working with zest and intelligence, earning good •wages, spending their leisure cheerfully, these young women from other countries have already made smooth and peaceful running of some thousands of British homes. *

“It is, in nearly every case, the fairly small home that suffers in the doniestic servant famine. A lazy parlourmaid, an inefficient cook can disrupt the comfort of a large establishment. but cannot entirely ruin it. These comfortably modest homes that are small enough for an intelligent wife to run single-handed, aided and abetted by the monstrous regiment of char-ladies, cannot be wrecked even though the current one decides to desert in the middle of the morning. “It is the ordinary middle-class household, that small but by no means single-handed home of which there are thousands upon thousands, street upon street, through the whole length and breadth of the country, that can come to wreck in nerves, health, and happiness because that indispensable creature, the now almost extinct competent British cook-general, has -walked out on her job. “And it is not, nowadays, the kind of job to walk out of without thinking twice, or even three times. “Nobody pretends it is agreeable to be the underpaid drudge of another woman, but I seriously doubt if there are any of those underpaid drudges nowadays. Some good cook-generals chn command the same wages as some typists, girl clerks, or factory workers, and get her board and lodging into the bargain. Undoubtedly, we are paying, in this century, for all the injustices and inhumanities inflicted by dtirrgreat-graiidimothers on domestic servants in the past, but the fact regains that,,, with • every mistress who can afford it offering high wages and everj: ...possible inducement, the girls who used to be such good domestics continue to refuse the bait.

NO SHAME IN SKILLED WORK : that nibbles at. it is, unhappily, only too often the wrong one. The woman who makes a domestic worker worth having, worth paying high wages to, and treating as a valuable aud respected unit in the family, is not the untrained out-of-work who has turned to domestic service as a despised last resource. It is highly-trained work, uot a side-line for supercilious ‘daily women’ .who make it a point of pride to tell you they have never had to apply for this kind of wdrk before. . “There seems to be no end to the problem, so endlessly’ discussed in a million homes with daily diminishing hope, homes where the labour is wanted, where "the money is ready to be paid, and where no good labour applies. No end, unless . . . unless . “Would It be too much to hope tiiat domestic service mighi one day be officially reorganised, made the controlled and recognised sphere of a definite and united body of workers, that the gene: at ion of girls now larking through their last year al school might be brought to believe that there is no shame iu skilled and wholesome and necessary' work which ou the one hand is a-life's job lasting until the old-agel pension, aud on the other the best pos-i ‘‘lbie training for a happy marriage?" i