ROUND THE WORLD AS A DOMESTIC

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 546, 26 December 1928, Page 7

ROUND THE WORLD AS A DOMESTIC

ENGLISH GIRL'S VENTURE KITCHENS OF EMPIRE The desire to discover for herself ■whether the conditions for domestic workers were as they are painted, prompted Miss Mary Luty, an English girl, to spend three and a-half years in the kitchens of the Empire —mainly those of Canada, New Zealand and Australia. In an interesting article in the Sydney “Sun,” Miss Luty tells of her experiences and conclusions. It was in January, 1925, that she started on her voyage of discovery, and in the three and a-half years of her stay in the Dominions, she sampled every branch of housework in the city and backblocks. In Montreal she worked as cook, but her duties also were intended to be those of housemaid, parlourmaid, lady’s maid, to be, in short, a cook-general. And Miss Luty humorously offers the conclusion that there is nothing under heaven so general as a cook-general. She stayed seven weeks in this job of maid-of-all-work. Followed a position during harvest time on the prairie; cooking and helping on the farm comprised her duties, and the Englishwoman found the days very long, if the weather was good. She cooked for a crew of 16 threshers, lived in a cook car, and did all her work in this cosy caravan. Five dollars a day was the wage. Auckland was the next destination of Miss Luty, and in the capacity of domestic worker she went through the two islands. Now she is in Australia. Miss Luty found that the domestic workers of Canada are, on the whole, better paid than in New Zealand or Australia. Her experiences showed her that the domestic, no matter how educated she might be, is looked down upon as inferior to the office girl, no matter how indifferent or careless a typist the latter might be. She advocated regulation of hours, training centres for girls, where they could qualify for certificates in any branch of housework, recognised uniform, and the abolition of the living-in system. The latter she describes as one of the slowly-dying remnants of feudalism. While a person lives in the place where he or she works, even if leisure time is granted, the atmosphere is the same. Miss Luty maintains that it is just as necessary for a domestic worker to get away from the scene of her duties at the end of the day, as it is for the office girl. The insistence of proper training, the passing of an efficiency test, with a recognised uniform to work in, would, she considers, help to put domestic workers on a status with other workers, and tend to abolish the terrible snobbery that exists, not only so far as mistress and maid are concerned, but among working girls themselves. What hurts the domestic emigrant from overseas is that snobbery exists in the colonies equal to anything they have ever met in real "blue-blooded” families of the Old Country. Miss Luty has found New Zealanders and Australians, on the whole, “very agreeable, hospitable, and I kindly.”