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
independent relation of employer and employed, but the hazy and
constantly changing one of mistress to servant.

The latter relation is changing under pressure from various directions.
In our increasing democracy the notion of personal service is constantly
becoming more distasteful, conflicting, as it does, with the more
modern notion of personal dignity. Personal ministration to the needs
of childhood, illness, and old age seem to us reasonable, and the
democratic adjustment in regard to them is being made. The first two are
constantly raised nearer to the level of a profession, and there is
little doubt that the third will soon follow. But personal ministrations
to a normal, healthy adult, consuming the time and energy of another
adult, we find more difficult to reconcile to our theories of democracy.

A factory employer parts with his men at the factory gates at the end of
a day's work; they go to their homes as he goes to his, in the
assumption that they both do what they want and spend their money as
they please; but this solace of equality outside of working hours is
denied the bewildered employer of household labor.

She is obliged to live constantly in the same house with her employee,
and because of certain equalities in food and shelter she is brought
more sharply face to face with the mental and social inequalities.

The difficulty becomes more apparent as the character of the work
performed by the so-called servant is less absolutely useful and may be
merely time consuming. A kind-hearted woman who will complacently take
an afternoon drive, leaving her cook to prepare the five courses of a
"little dinner for only te