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
to assert itself. One person, or a number of isolated persons, however
conscientious, cannot perform this office of public opinion. Certain
hospitals in London have contributed statistics showing that
seventy-eight per cent of illegitimate children born there are the
children of girls working in households. These girls are certainly not
less virtuous than factory girls, for they come from the same families
and have had the same training, but the girls who remain at home and
work in factories meet their lovers naturally and easily, their fathers
and brothers know the men, and unconsciously exercise a certain
supervision and a certain direction in their choice of companionship.
The household employees living in another part of the city, away from
their natural family and social ties, depend upon chance for the lovers
whom they meet. The lover may be the young man who delivers for the
butcher or grocer, or the solitary friend, who follows the girl from her
own part of town and pursues unfairly the advantage which her social
loneliness and isolation afford him. There is no available public
opinion nor any standard of convention which the girl can apply to her
own situation.

It would be easy to point out many inconve