Domestic Service: An Enquiry by the Women's Industrial Council (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

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Excerpt from Domestic Service: An Enquiry by the Women's Industrial Council

This enquiry was concluded, and the report on it was almost completed, before the war. Various causes have since delayed its publication; the subject matter, however, has not been much affected. A considerable number of the servant-keeping classes have in the last eighteen months. done strenuous manual work in hospitals and canteens; they may have revised their previous views as to domestic service. During the first two months of the war many servants were dismissed, and there was a temporary over-supply of under-housemaids and lady's maids. Munition work and other new occupations for women have absorbed all this over-supply, except in the case of a few upper servants, and have made the shortage of servants more acute even than before.

This may be some justification for offering an analysis, such as follows, of a number of comparatively small personal difficulties. "And common was the commonplace." The troubles and pleasures of one industrial section, which, through no fault of its own, offers no direct contribution to "war work," seem wholly out of keeping with present problems and anxieties. And yet the conditions of women's labour, in which domestic service still probably represents the largest single section, is not the least of the problems which have developed since August, 1914, and which will come back to us with greater weight after the war.

The method of the enquiry was as follows: Two schedules were drawn up by a committee of the Women's Industrial Council, one in the form of a series of leading statements to be discussed on paper by employers, one consisting of a series of brief questions with spaces for replies and suggestions by servants. Specimens of these arc given in Appendix viii.

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