and the confinement of domestic service affected nerves adjusted to a
legal fifty-eight-hour week.

But the girls' real objection to housework was its loneliness. Hardly a
single house in Boston, or the surrounding suburbs, where the girls
found places, was provided with a servants' sitting room. There was
absolutely no provision made for callers. For a servant is supposed not
to have friends except on her days out. On those occasions she is
assumed to meet her friends on the street.

In England people recognize the fact that they have a servant class.
Every house of any pretentions provides a servants' hall.

In the United States a sitting room for servants, even in millionaires'
homes, is a rarity.

More than this, in many city households, especially in apartment
households, the servants are prohibited from receiving their friends
even in the kitchen. "Are we allowed to receive men visitors in the
house?" chorused a group of girls, questioned in a fashionable
employment agency. "Mostly our friends are not allowed to step inside
the areaway while we are putting on our hats to go out."

There is no escaping the conclusion that a large part of the social
evil, or that branch of it recruited every year from domestic service,
is traceable to American methods of dealing with servants. The domestic,
belonging, as a rule, to a weak and inefficient class, is literally
driven into paths where only strength and efficiency could possibly
protect her from evil.