1905-02-25tt

It was an expose that filled most of a page in the Saturday edition of the Hamilton Spectator of February 27, 1905.

Attributed only to “A Servant’” the article lengthy sub-headline captured in great detail what had prompted that woman to write the article:

“She Charges That the Average Housekeeper Expects Her Handmaiden to Work to the Limit of Endurance, to Live on Crusts, to take Uncalled-For Rebuffs and Wrongs Meekly, to Submit to Being Locked Up as a Thief , and to Let Her Employer Regulate Her Private Life.”¹

¹“The Servant’s Side of the Problem : One of Them Tells It”

Hamilton Spectator.          February 27, 1905.

          There had been a time, not that many years earlier, when employment opportunities for women were so limited that those hired to work as domestics had few alternatives.

          However, that situation was changing rapidly by 1905, and those in domestic service were becoming less and less inclined to be abused.

          One lady who was well and truly fed up with how she and her fellow servants were being treated laid out her complaints in vivid detail .

Her article is printed, in full below:

“Last Thursday was my day out – I get every other Thursday out – so I thought I’d go round to my friends and ask her to go shopping with me as I’d just saved up enough money to buy a new silk dress and hat with. So I hurried through with the house dishes and started early so as to be sure to get to Jennie’s before she’d gone out; but when I got there, there was no Jennie in the kitchen – only Mrs. Hotchkiss who was Jennie’s mistress.

“ ‘Good afternoon,’ I say to Mrs. Hotchkiss, knowing her from having gone round to see Jennie several times – ‘good afternoon, Mrs. Hotchkiss; has Jennie gone?’ I says.

“ ‘Yes,’ snapped Mrs. Hotchkiss, turning on me, ‘Jennie’s gone out and gone for good.’

“ ‘Wasn’t it rather sudden like?’ I says, somewhat stunned, thinking Jennie had a steady place, and a nice one.

“ ‘Rather sudden!’ says Mrs. Hotchkiss. ‘Well, I should say it was. Here I walks out into the kitchen this morning, and I finds Jennie eating some of my best jelly that we’d had for breakfast, and I never allow my maid to touch that jelly, it’s too expensive, and that’s why Jennie is gone for good, because I warned her that she must not eat any of that jelly when she came to me – never!’

“I goes down to Jennie’s mother’s house and there I finds Jennie.

“ ‘The mean old thing,’ says Jennie, ‘and why do you think she told me to leave?. Just because I ate some of her old jelly that she got as red as a lobster making over the gas stove last July. But I’m glad I’m not there a day longer,’ she says. ‘Why, she tried to starve me, and wouldn’t let me eat a lot of the things that the family had for meals.

“ ‘Well, all I want to say is that when you come to run down a servant, just remember that there’s a whole lot of folks like Mrs. Hotchkiss, who’d sooner have starve you than buy an extra chop for dinner, and it’s not all the servant’s fault because there’s trouble in the kitchen.

Once I was in a place that was a boarding house. There were three other servant’s there – a man to open the front door and put on a big front for when people came round asking for board, and a cook and myself and another  who were chambermaids between meals and waitresses during them. The first night I was there we all sat down to eat dinner, when I reached for the butter jar, and helps myself to a bit of butter.

“At that the cook – she was next to me – looked as astonished that I says, “What’s the matter?’

“ ‘Why,’ she says, ‘you mustn’t to that.’

“ ‘ Do what?’ I says.

“ ‘Eat any butter,’ she says.

“ ‘Why,’ I says.

“ ‘Because,’ she says, ‘the mistress don’t allow it, and she always comes in to see what we’re eating before we’re very far started, and if she sees you eating butter, she’d tell you to leave.’

In about five minutes in comes the mistress, and sure enough, she looked around to see what was being eaten, and she saw butter on my plate.

“ ‘I don’t allow that in my house,’ she says, severe-like.

“ ‘What’s that, ma’am?’ I asks polite-like.

“ ‘My servant’s are not allowed to eat butter,’ she says. ‘I can’t afford to buy butter for anybody but my boarders,’ she says, her voice freezing cold.

“ ‘Very well, ma’am,’ says I, ‘if that is the case, I can’t afford to work in a place where you’re expected to live on bread and water,’ and with that I went upstairs and packed my trunk and left that self-same night.

“Is this the way to treat a person, I want to know, who’s under your roof, even if she is a servant? And there’s a lot of them that do just the same way, only a little different. Why, there’s my friend, Mrs. Jackson. Before she went to Mrs. Hamilton, she worked for Mrs. Gunton, and often she’d come to me and say – I was at Mrs. Randolph’s then – she hadn’t tasted meat for three days, because Mrs. Gunton had meat just once a day, and that was for dinner, and she had a husband and daughter, and they didn’t have any kind of meat scarcely except chops, and only four of them at that – one for Mrs. Gunton, one for the daughter, and two for Mr. Gunton – and only when Mr. Gunton ate only one chop, which was very seldom the case, did she ever get a taste of meat.

“There there was my friend Sally Spencer. Sally worked two doors above me until she was that starved almost that she just had to quit work for self-protection, and go to her brother’s until she could get another place. It was this way. Sally worked for a lady who didn’t believe in eating more than one square meal a day, and her husband didn’t either; so all they had for breakfast was a cup of coffee and a bite of toast, and she had nothing for lunch, and saved up for dinner. That was alright for her, because she didn’t do nothing except lay around all day, but she wanted poor Sally to abide by the same, and do a hard day’s work with nothing at all in her stomach. And she watched the refrigerator and bread box so close that Sally couldn’t eat a bite on the sly. Then when she left, that woman called her an ungrateful wretch to leave her without someone in the kitchen, and carried on as if she had been Sally’s best friend, when all the while she’d been doing her level best to hurt the girl.

Give a servant plenty to eat, says I, and let it be good and what comes off the dining room table, and not so many women will be going around as there are today, saying it’s an awful state of affairs when ‘a lady can’t get a good servant,’ and they didn’t know what the country’s a-coming to, and they wished to gracious that their husbands would just try running a house for a week.

Well, all I got to say on that point is we’d be a heap better if the husbands was running the house. A man ain’t much about food, that’s one thing to be said in his favour; and he wouldn’t expect you to be doing forty-seven things at once, either.

There’s a whole lot of women who think a servant ain’t worth her salt if she can’t watch the potatoes, do the ironing, mind the baby, scrub the floors, answer the telephone, mind the front door, look after the brother’s boy, do the dusting, and come when she calls, all at the same time. I read somewhere  once, ‘Do one thing at a time, and do that well.’ I bet it was a man said that. Anyways, it was no woman telling her maid what she wanted done in the next two minutes.

“ ‘Now, Bridget,’ says the missus, to her new girl, before she’s got her bonnet off, or knows where the back stairs are, ‘you’re to rise at five o’clock, be down at ten minutes after five, light the kitchen fire – but don’t put kerosene on it – and shake out the furnace, and sweep and dust and dust the sitting rooms, and do the same in the dining room, and scrub off the front steps and sweep the porch and walk, and Mr. James and me’ll be down o breakfast at 6:30, and for breakfast, we always have fruit, oatmeal, hashed brown potatoes and steak, soft-boiled eggs, corn muffins and coffee.’

That’s the beginning of Bridget’s day’s work, and the rest of the day’s just like it, with never a chance to draw a full breath the whole day, and Sam Hill to pay if she makes a mistake because it’s her first day. Why I know several ladies – and I guess you do too – who have regular rules made up for their maid every day, and it’s do this at 10:30, and a further thing at 10:50, and so on. Never a chance for a girl to sit down and rest a bit, but a continual keep at it until you’re ready to drop around six o’clock with dinner to get staring you in the face.

I’ve had more than one place where I was expected to work like a slave from 6 in the morning until 9 at night, and the missus nagging at me all the time, as much as saying what an easy time I was having of it, and I didn’t appreciate the soft soap at all., and certainly was the ungratefullest  person she’d ever ad anything to do with.

These same women who are always expecting you to work yourself black and blue in the face, never want to give you more than a few hours out. Once I got into a wealthy family where I was supposed to have only two afternoons out a month, and to get back in time to do dinner. The missus had lunch at 1, and I was expected to turn up at 5 to get dinner! And such women wonder why they can’t keep servants, and say we’re a shiftless and impudent lot these nowadays. Maybe we are – and maybe we are; but I know one thing that we ain’t and won’t be, and no one ought to expect it of us – and that’s dray horses.

Then there’s the missus who’s always sticking her nose into our private affairs – and she wonders why in the name of goodness her girls pack up and leave her all of a sudden on a day’s notice! Well, all I’ve got to say is, how’d she like it if someone began prying into her private affairs and trying to regulate them? Some women think they ought to look after their maid’s morals when they’d be spending the time a heap sight better looking after their own.

Once a woman I was working for let me alone for a week or so, and I was beginning to say to myself, ‘Well, she’s a sensible woman and one of the first I’ve worked for who ain’t snooping into what don’t relate to her about me,’ when, lo and beheld she called me into a room where she was reading a book.

“ ‘Annie,’ she says right off, ‘I hope you’re a good, self-respecting girl.’

“ ‘Well’ says I, not being astonished at  anything a missus might say, having been a servant too long for that, ‘well, begging your pardon, I’m as good as Old Nick’ll let me be.’

“ ‘Annie,’ she says, ‘I don’t like your answer. It is not seemly. Do you ever go to church?’

“ ‘Begging your pardon, ma’am,’ says I, ‘I do when you don’t have any work for me to do, which is not too often.’,’ says I.

“ ‘Annie,’ she says, freezing like, ‘them who don’t want to do good, never find a chance. I trust that you do not keep company with any vulgar men?’

“ ‘Begging your pardon’ says I, ‘I don’t Both of them are decent, respecting and honest  gentlemen’ says I.

“ ‘Indeed ! Two of them!’ she says, and her eyebrows got lost in her pompadour.

“ ‘Yes’m,’ says I, in a humble, befitting manner, and not wishing to drag their names into a discussion in an unladylike way.

“Then she thinks a minute and gets up and says:

“ ‘I shall have to do some very deep thinking about your welfare, Annie, and you may now give this room a thorough cleaning.’

“She goes out. I pick up the book. And guess what she was reading – she was trying to regulate my morals? – a nasty French book that would make me go straight to the priest, and confess if I ever read a page of it.

“There was another lady I worked for who called me to her and began asking the same sort of questions. Whenever she’d ask a question, I’d say, ‘Have you, or do you,’ putting the same question right back at her. She was so flabbergasted at first that she didn’t know what to do, and when she did get her breath, she ordered me to leave the house at once. Five minutes later, she said I’d better stay and get dinner first and I did, feeling sort of sorry for being impudent. At dinner, I heard her telling her husband what she’d said to me and how I’d ‘insultingly flung back the words into her teeth’ – that’s what she called it. When she got all through and was sobbing softly on her beefsteak and potatoes, her husband spoke up. ‘I’ve always told you that you wasn’t cut out to run the universe,’ says he.

“ ‘Henry!’ she says, and there was silence clean through dessert.

“After dinner, the missus sneaks out into the kitchen. ‘Annie,’ she says, trying to look stern, ‘I’ve decided to overlook your impudence today, and you may stay if you care to.’

“I stayed two months, and in all that time she never said a word to me about my private affairs. A servant’s private affairs are her own, just like anybody else’s, and when the average woman who keeps a servant finds it out, the better off she’ll be, and there won’t be nearly so much to the servant problem, as she calls it, as there is now.

“And a missus ought not to go about accusing her girl of stealing the minute she finds something missing. I guess I*’ve had half a dozen ladies tell me to my face I was a thief, and everyone of them found later what she said I’d stolen. But not one said so much as ‘Please excuse me, Annie.’ Why, one woman I worked for lost a gold ring, with a diamond on it, and said I took it. I said I didn’t, and, on the sly, she went through my trunk, and when she couldn’t find it there, she called the police.

“ ‘Now, give up that ring,’ she said.

“ ‘I ain’t got that ring,’ I says.

“ ‘Well, tell us where the pawn ticket is then, and we’ll let you off,’ they said.

“ I never pawned that ring,’ says I, ‘ because I never took it.’

“With that they hauled me off to the station house, and kept me there three days, Finally when no one appeared against me, the magistrate let me loose, and I went back to the house to get my trunk. The cook let me in.

“ ‘Annie,’ she says, ‘the missus found the ring between the baseboard and carpet back of her bureau.’

“ ‘When?,’ says I.

“ ‘The night you was taken away,’ she says.

“Now, I ask, is that the right way to treat a person, getting her arrested and then when you find you’re wrong never stepping up to clear her name? It is my experience that there’s any number of women who wouldn’t turn their hands to right a wrong they’ve done to their servants.

“Talk about the wrongs servants do to their ladies – well, I guess servants don’t work them half to death, and they don’t wrongfully accuse them of stealing, and they don’t half starve them, and make them eat the scraps; and they don’t nearly freeze them in winter, giving them only a worn-out blanket for bed covering and not heating their room; and they don’t act as if they was nobody and beneath their notice; and they don’t wrong the women they work for in a hundred other ways that these very women wrong them.

“Yes’m. I’m sure there’s two sides to this servant question, and the next time your hear a lady running down the servant she’s got in particular, and all the rest in general, just you put it down that you’d like to hear her servant’s side of the story before you begin to sympathize with her to any great amount. And then, maybe, your sympathy’d be the other way. All women that keep servants ain’t angels any more than all servants are.”¹