cut off, more or less, from their natural social ties, excludes the best
working-people from her service.

A man of dignity and ability is quite willing to come into a house to
tune a piano. Another man of mechanical skill will come to put up window
shades. Another of less skill, but of perfect independence, will come to
clean and relay a carpet. These men would all resent the situation and
consider it quite impossible if it implied the giving up of their family
and social ties, and living under the roof of the household requiring
their services.

The isolation of the household employee is perhaps inevitable so long as
the employer holds her belated ethics; but the situation is made even
more difficult by the character and capacity of the girls who enter this
industry. In any great industrial change the workmen who are permanently
displaced are those who are too dull to seize upon changed conditions.
The workmen who have knowledge and insight, who are in touch with their
time, quickly reorganize.

The general statement may be made that the enterprising girls of the
community go into factories, and the less enterprising go into
households, although there are many exceptions. It is not a question of
skill, of energy, of conscientious work, which will make a girl rise
industrially while she is in the household; she is not in the rising
movement. She is belated in a class composed of the unprogressive
elements of the community, which is recruited constantly by those from
the ranks of the incompetent, by girls who are learning the language,
girls who are timid and slow, or girls who look at life solely from the
savings-bank point of view. The distracted housekeeper struggles with
these unprogressive girls, holding to them not even the well-defined and