ncreased wages. A girl over sixteen seldom works in a factory for
less than four dollars a week, and always cherishes the hope of at last
being a forewoman with a permanent salary of from fifteen to twenty-five
dollars a week. Whether she attains this or not, she runs a fair chance
of earning ten dollars a week as a skilled worker. A girl finds it
easier to be content with three dollars a week, when she pays for board,
in a scale of wages rising toward ten dollars, than to be content with
four dollars a week and pay no board, in a scale of wages rising toward
six dollars; and the girl well knows that there are scores of forewomen
at sixty dollars a month for one forty-dollar cook or fifty-dollar
housekeeper. In many cases this position is well taken economically,
for, although the opportunity for saving may be better for the employees
in the household than in the factory, her family saves more when she
works in a factory and lives with them. The rent is no more when she is
at home. The two dollars and a half a week which she pays into the
family fund more than covers the cost of her actual food, and at night
she can often contribute toward the family labor by helping her mother
wash and sew.

The fourth point has already been considered, and if the premise in
regard to the isolation of the household employee is well taken, and if
the position can be sustained that this isolation proves the determining
factor in the situation, then certainly an effort should be made to
remedy this, at least in its domestic and social aspects. To allow
household employees to live with their own families and among their own
friends, as factory employees now do, would be to relegate more
production to industrial centres administered on the factory system, and
to secure shorter hours for that which remains to be done in the
household.

In those cases in which the household employees have no family ties,
doubtless a remedy against social isolation would be the formation of
residence clubs, at least in the suburbs, where the isolation is most
keenly felt. Indeed, the beginnings of these clubs are already seen in
the servants' quarters at the summer hotels. In these residence clubs,
the household employee could have the independent life which only one's
own abiding place can afford. This, of course, presupposes a higher
grade of ability than household employees at present possess; on the
other hand, it is only by offering such possibilities th