many hours a day she must work, but when a woman is engaged to fill a
domestic position in a family, the number of hours she is expected to
give her employer is never specified. She is simply told that she must
be on duty early in the morning before the family arises, and that she
may consider herself off duty as soon as the family for whom she is
working has withdrawn for the night. Is it surprising that under such
conditions working women are not very enthusiastic over the domestic
proposition to-day?

A household employee ought to have her hours of work as clearly defined
as if she were a business employee, and there is no reason why the
eight-hour labor law could not be applied as successfully to housework
as to any other enterprise.

Work in business is generally divided into two periods. Yet this
division can not always be effected, and in railroad and steamship
positions, in post offices, upon trolley lines, in hotels, in hospitals,
and in other cases too numerous to mention, where work must follow a
continuous round, the working hours are divided into more than two
periods, according to the nature of the work and the interests of the
employer, not however exceeding a fixed number of hours per day or per
week.

It would be far better for the housewife as well as for her employees,
if the housework were limited in a similar way. But with the
introduction of the eight-hour law in the home, certain new conditions
would have to be rigidly enforced in order to ensure success.

Firstly, the employee should be made to understand that during the eight
hours of work agreed upon, she must be engaged in actual work for her