THE GIRL QUESTION: Almost Impossible to Find Capable Girls for Housework,” declared a headline in the Bangor Daily Commercial a century ago. This pressing social problem was bothering Bangor as well as Boston. If the reader was still not convinced of the gravity of the situation, the next line of the four-tiered head on April 29, 1909, made things even clearer: “PROBLEM A SERIOUS ONE.”
Servant girls were getting harder to find. Just the year before someone had reported to the Maine Bureau of Industrial and Labor Statistics that Bangor could use “about 1,000 efficient house girls” to satisfy the demands of the well-off matrons of the Queen City who hired one or more girls to help with cleaning, washing, polishing, scrubbing, dusting, cooking, serving and other chores.
This was back in the days before modern electrical appliances took the work out of housework. Monday’s laundry was a back-breaking ordeal, while spring cleaning could take weeks. As the middle class got bigger, many more housewives thought they deserved hired help just as rich women had. Various estimates place the percentage of households employing at least one full-time servant back then at between 10 percent and 18 percent. Many more hired part-time help.
The Bangor Daily Commercial gave its up-to-date report on the girl situation based on an interview with an (unnamed) “employment agent who does more work in this line than anybody else in eastern Maine.” The problem was the worst it had been in 30 years. If the agent had 100 “good capable girls” he said he could place them all in Bangor or Brewer within a week.
“I have had an order for some time,” said the agent, “for a first and a second girl to go to a home in a Maine city, where the family is very small, the conditions and surroundings are ideal for any girl, and the pay good, $7 for the first girl, and $5 for the second, and yet these places are still open. It is almost impossible to fill such positions. I cannot understand why it should be.” That was $7 and $5 a week, not an hour. But given free room and board, this was more money than most jobs open to women offered.
A shortage of girls was not the main problem. Hotels, factories and offices were having little trouble hiring females. Young women were declaring their independence by rejecting domestic work for jobs where they had more independence. They were applying for jobs on production lines and at typewriters and cash registers, where, at the end of the day, their time was their own.
The employment agent continued: “In factories and in hotel work they think they have more regular hours, that there is a certain time for work and then a definite time that they can have to themselves. It is true, and more so all the time, that nine out of 10 girls who seek positions prefer to go to hotels or factories and many of them will not go anywhere else. … Last winter I had an order from the paper bag mill at Rumford Falls to supply 50 girls. I inserted a small advertisement to that effect, and immediately I was flooded with applications from all over eastern Maine. I could have sent 200 girls to that mill.”
Things were so bad that the agent guessed the day was coming when foreign help would have to be imported, “even though it be Chinese and Japanese.” In fact, a large percentage of Maine servants already were taken from the ranks of foreigners flooding into the country. In July 1910, the Maine Bureau of Industrial and Labor Statistics conducted a survey of employers of servants. While the results were less than scientific, it indicated about half of the sample of servants were foreigners. Most were from Canada, but many were from Ireland, Scandinavia and other West European countries. When the employers were asked what nationality they preferred, only about half said American. Irish, Canadians and Scandinavians, especially Swedes, were also held in high regard.
The bureau’s report clearly indicated why there was a girl problem. It concluded: “Some of the objections to housework are social ostracism, long and uncertain hours, snobbery, unreasonable exactions or lack of tact on the part of the mistress, the drudgery and seemingly endless chain of duties, and the supervision of relations with male acquaintances.”
Servant girls often were ostracized by their former friends, who worked in offices or mills or attended school. Their working hours often lasted from dawn to dusk six or seven days a week with only a few hours off here and there. Their comings and goings were scrutinized or limited. Often they were forced to entertain company in the kitchen or some other place with little privacy.
“It occurs to few housewives that while they are wrestling with a ‘servant’ problem, the girls … have a ‘mistress’ problem.” The absence of a contract or definite statement of hours and duties didn’t help the situation. “One mistress orders her helper to polish the tinware when she can find nothing else for her to do. No wonder there is a servant girl problem!” said the report.
Meanwhile, back in Bangor, the dour employment agent, who had no trouble finding a boy to cut down a tree or dig a ditch declared the girl question was “no joke.” He moaned, “Instead of brighter prospects the outlook is entirely gloomy. Nobody can tell where it will end.”
An illustrated collection of Wayne E. Reilly’s columns titled “Remembering Bangor: The Queen City Before the Great Fire” is available at bookstores. Comments about this column can be sent to him at wer@bangordailynews.net