"Isn't it a wonder that there isn't a training school for house
servants?" Sandy had inquired, youthful interest in her eye.

"There's no such thing," her mother assured her positively, "as
getting one who knows her business! And why? Why, because all the
smart girls prefer to go into factories, and slave away for three or
four dollars a week, instead of coming into good homes! Do Pearsall
and Thompson ever have any difficulty in getting girls for the glove
factory? Never! There's a line of them waiting, a block long, every
time they advertise. But you may make up your mind to it, dear, if
you get a good cook, she's wasteful or she's lazy, or she's
irritable, or dirty, or she won't wait on table, or she slips out at
night, and laughs under street lamps with some man or other! She's
always on your mind, and she's always an irritation."

"It just shows what a hopelessly stupid class you have to deal with,
Mother," the younger Sandy had said. But at eighteen, she was not so
sure.

Alexandra frankly hated housework, and she did not know how to cook.
She did not think it strange that it was hard to find a clever and
well-trained young woman who would gladly spend all her time in
housework and cooking for something less than three hundred dollars
a year. Her eyes were beginning to be opened to the immense moral
and social questions that lie behind the simple preference of
American girls to work for men rather than for women. Household work
was women's sphere, Sandy reasoned, and they had made it a sphere
insufferable to other women. Something was wrong.