DOMESTIC SCIENCE AS A PROFESSION FOR GENTLEWOMEN
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—May I add a further suggestion to those already given in your valuable paper on the subject of Domestic Service ? In recent years new and inviting occupations have been opened to women, and the consequent scarcity of domestic workers has become a cause of hardship. The employer meets with the following difficulties : 1. Maids arc not easy to obtain.. 2. When obtained, they seldom know the work they have undertaken to do. By the adoption of a cap and apron, and sometimes even without the cap, anyone may lay claim to being a Cook or a Housemaid. The wage she asks is supposed to indicate a maid's experience, but this is no safe guide. :3. The employer has thus often to train her maid whilst she pays her a wage for the work she is not able to do.
The troubles on the maid's side are : 1. No adequate train- ing is available. The short courses given in school are of little practical value. The fees required by our colleges are pro- hibitive. 2. Many young girls are expected, besides support- ing themselves, to assist the home finances. 3. The accommo- dation offered in some houses is not inviting. 4. The lack of free evenings is often put forward as a drawback to domestic service. I have never found it to be so. When a girl's " place " is also her " home," she generally gets the liberty she wants and fits herself into the domestic arrangements as do the other members of the household.
To overcome the difficulty of shortage of workers, one must appeal to a wider circle of women. Suitable training will not only attract a better type of woman, it will go far to raise the general status of the domestic worker, and better conditions,: based on greater confidence and trust,will speedilyensue. One brings a trained Nurse into one's household to attend an invalid in order to secure a higher skill, a greater knowledge than one possesses who has not trained in nursing. It is for this knowledge and this skill that one pays. The domestic helper should likewise be a woman trained in her profession, and should be able to fulfil the duties of her own department.
My suggestion is that each city should have its Domestic Training College. In most cities there are blocks of old- fashioned houses rendered obsolete as dwellings through lack of domestic workers. A block of such houses, suitably arranged, would provide a training institution with model kitchen, laundry, classrooms, &c. The remainder of the building would be converted into service flats and these flats would be. let to families with attendance. The attendance would be given by the pupils in training, under supervision of their: teachers. The teachers could be drawn from the many. excellent Colleges of Domestic Science throughout the country.
Courses of instruction would be given in cookery, house- work, table and laundry work, &c., and in each course there would be granted a diploma for efficiency. Running expenses would be covered by the rents charged for the flats and if funds permitted, a bonus could be paid to the pupils at the. end of each term, Girls thus trained would feel themselves
possessed of a thorough practical knowledge of the working of a house. The diploma would entitle them to ask adequate remuneration. They would become responsible helpers, respected and trusted by their employers, and theirs would be the satisfaction of knowing that they were helping to foster and to preserve to posterity our home life, which has been from time immemorial the foundation of our glorious British Empire. —I am, Sir, &c.,
MARGARET MACEWEN.
3 Wood,sirk Crescent, Charing Cross, Glasgow.
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