keeper--indeed, the tendency is
rather to unfit than to fit her for a home.

But why is the American woman not stirred by these facts? Why does she
not recognize their meaning and grapple with her labor problem? It is
certain that at the beginning of the republic she did have a pretty
clear idea of the kind of household revolution the country needed. Our
great-grandmothers, that is, the serious ones among them, made a brave
dash at it. There is no family, at least of New England tradition, who
does not know the methods they adopted. They changed the nomenclature.
There were to be no more "servants"--we were to have helpers. There
were to be no divisions in the household. The helper was to sit at the
table, at the fireside. (They thought to change the nature of a
relation as old as the world by changing its name and form.) It was
like the French Revolutionists' attempt to make a patriot by taking
away his ruffles and shoe buckles and calling him "citizen"!

Of course it failed. The family meal, the fireside hour, are personal
and private institutions in a home. Much of the success of the family
in building up an intimate comradeship depends upon preserving them.
We admit friends to them as a proof of affection, strangers as a proof
of our regard. The notion that those who come into a household solely
to aid in its labor should be admitted into personal relations which
depend for their life upon privacy and affection, was always
fantastic. It could not endure, because it violated something as
important as the dignity of labor, and that was the sacredness of
personal privacy. Moreover, it was bound to fail because it made the
dignity of labor depend on artificial things--such as the name by
which one is called, the place where one sits.

The good sense of the country might very well have regulated whatever
was artificial in the attempt, if it had not been for the crushing
interference of slavery. In the South all service was performed by
slaves. In many parts of the North, at the founding of the republic,
in Connecticut, in New York, New Jersey, slaves were held. It was
practically impossible to work out a democratic system of domestic
service side by side with this institution.

Slavery passed, but we were impeded by the fact that, liberated, the
slave was still a slave in spirit and that his employer, North and
South, was still an aristocrat in her treatment of him. With this
situation to cope with, the woman's labor