impossible to ignore it when we consider women as employees. Young
unmarried women are not detached from family claims and requirements as
young men are, and are more ready and steady in their response to the
needs of aged parents and the helpless members of the family. But women
performing labor in households have peculiar difficulties in responding
to their family claims, and are practically dependent upon their
employers for opportunities of even seeing their relatives and friends.

Curiously enough the same devotion to family life and quick response to
its claims, on the part of the employer, operates against the girl
employed in household labor, and still further contributes to her
isolation.

The employer of household labor, in her zeal to preserve her own family
life intact and free from intrusion, acts inconsistently and grants to
her cook, for instance, but once or twice a week, such opportunity for
untrammelled association with her relatives as the employer's family
claims constantly. This in itself is undemocratic, in that it makes a
distinction between the value of family life for one set of people as
over against another; or, rather, claims that one set of people are of
so much less importance than another, that a valuable side of life
pertaining to them should be sacrificed for the other.

This cannot be defended theoretically, and no doubt much of the talk
among the employers of household labor, that their employees are
carefully shielded and cared for, and that it is so much better for a
girl's health and morals to work in a household than to work in a
factory, comes from a certain uneasiness of conscience, and from a
desire to make up by individual scruple what would be done much more
freely and naturally by public opinion if it had an untrammelled chance