employers, yet few young girls, and still fewer women are content to
work in private families.

It is a deplorable state of affairs, and women seem to be gradually
losing their courage to battle with this increasingly difficult
question: How to obtain and retain one's domestic employees?

The peace of the family and the joy and comfort of one's home should be
a great enough incentive to awaken the housewife to the realization that
something must be wrong in her present methods. It is in vain that she
complains bitterly, on all occasions, of the scarcity of good servants,
asserting that it is beyond her comprehension why work in factories,
stores, and offices, should be preferred to the work she offers.

Is it beyond her comprehension? Or has she never considered in what way
the work she offers differs from the work so eagerly accepted? Does she
not realize that the present laws of labor adopted in business are very
different from those she still enforces in her own home? Why does she
not compare housework with all other work in which women are employed,
and find out why housework is disdained by nearly all self supporting
women?

Instead of doing this, she sometimes avoids the trouble of trying
to keep house with incompetent employees by living in hotels, or
non-housekeeping apartments; but for the housewife who does not possess
the financial means to indulge herself thus, or who still prefers home
life with all its trials to hotel life, the only alternative is to
submit to pay high wages for very poor work or to do a great part of the
housework herself. In both cases the result is bad, for in neither does
the family enjoy the full benefit of home, nor is the vexatious problem,