New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1919-03-09
By Natalie McCloskey

The United States Employment Ser
vice, together with the Women's City
Club, the y. W C. A., Consumers
League and Teachers College, have
formed a Committee on Household
employment ana Education, which
aims to put domestic service on an
industrial basis
The Board of Education has given
the committee the use Of Washington
irving High School, where courses in
domestic service on the new 8-hour plan
VIII be taught to girls free of charge
Tour evenings week. Elements of
cooking, cleaning, laundry work. wait
ing on table, L5usewifery and buying
Will be shown the girls, and the COM
mttee will attempt to place graduates
IN positions where the working hours
will be forty-eight week. arranged on
the basis of an eight-hour day, or the
forty eight hours to be distributed
according to agreement of both en-
ployer and employee.
The Case of the Jones Family
And the reason for it is probably the
daily dialogue between Mr.. and Mrs.
Jones, which runs somewhat as fol-
lows:
"Well, can't understand, my dear,
why all this trouble! | can get plenty
OF people to run my Office, and why you
can't get some one to run your kitchen
is simply beyond my prehension."
with which cryptic remark John
Jones pulls his hat from the hall rack.
lunches himself into his overcoat and
absent mindedly forgetting to give
pretty little Mrs. Jones her customary
salutatlon, dasnes off to the Office
Now, Mrs. Jones always had a cook
Mrs. Jones was noted for an eXcellentlv
run menage the war. And Mrs
Jones had never troubled her husband
with irritating details of household
management, because there had never
been any irritating detals-before the
war. But when the call to munitions
came Mrs. Jones's Mranda-than whom
no better cook eXisted-was swept
across to Long Island City on pa
trlotlc gas mask wave. and took with
her Edith, Mrs. Jones's second maid.
And now, what am I going to do o.
walls Mrs. Jones. II ran across Mi
randa the other day, out of a job. Of
course, | thought she'd want TO come
back to me; but no. She'd tasted free
dom, she said, and wasn't going to be
nobody's slave with no time that she
could call her own If | wanted her to
come back, I'd have to manage to work
out schome for regular hours for
her, and eight hours in one day would
be about all she'd consider. What
could | do?'
She could go home and seriously
consider Miranda's proposition.
Girls Want Free Hours
The reason Mr.. Jones can declare
WITT masculine conviction that he can
get assistance is because he runs his
business on regular shift. When his
stenographers and file clerks unpin
their cuffs at the end of the day, thew
are through. and can run off to a
movle" with friends every night in
the week, if they SO desire, instead of
just one night week.
The girl Who has slippei from do
mestlc service into an eiEkthour job
is naturally unwilling to return to a
position which assures her none Of
the freedom she has heer ENJOYING.
Yet domestic service, If run as a bust
ness, is Infinitely preferable to work
factories where the conditions are
Foor and the work is wearing 1t is
also preferable to many branches of
clerical work and almos. Incompatible
for the woman who has little training
and home of her own which needs
attention, yet whose budget must be
supplemented by money from outside
work.
The answer, then. seems to lie with
the employer householder. Can
she plan her work as "a business man
plans his, and run her house on defin-
lite shifts of so many hours?
The Woman With One Maid
That she can has been proved by
the experience of several women in
the city, who anticipated the present
difficulty of obtaining domestic work