problem was still further
complicated by immigration.

For years we have been overrun by thousands of untrained girls who are
probably to be heads of American homes and mothers of American
citizens. Most of them are of good, healthy, honest, industrious
stock, but they are ignorant of our ways and ideas. The natural place
for these girls to get their initiation into American democracy is in
the American household. The duty of American women toward these
foreign girls is plainly to help them understand our ideals. The
difficulty of this is apparent; but the failure to accomplish it has
been due less to its difficulty than to the fact that not one woman in
a thousand has recognized that she has an obligation to make a fit
citizen of the girl who comes into her home.

Generally speaking, the foreign servant girl has been exploited in
this country almost if not quite as ruthlessly and unintelligently as
the foreign factory girl and the foreign steel mill worker. Domestic
service, which ought to be the best school for the newcomer, has
become the worst; exploited, she learns to exploit; suspected, she
learns to suspect. The result has been that the girl has soon
acquired a confused and grotesque notion of her place. She soon
becomes insolent and dissatisfied, grows more and more indifferent to
the quality of her work and to the cultivation of right relations.

What we have lost in our treatment of the immigrant women can never be
regained. We forget that almost invariably these girls have the habit
of thrift. They have never known anything else. Thrift as a principle
is ingrained in them. But the American household is notoriously
thriftless. As a rule it destroys the quality in the untrained
immigrant girl. It is American not to care for expense--and she
accepts the method--as far as her mistress' goods are concerned--if
not her own.

The general stupid assumption that because the immigrant girl does not
know our ways she knows nothing, has deprived us of much that she
might have contributed to our domestic arts and sciences. It is with
her as it is with any newcomer in a strange land of strange
tongue--she is shy, dreads ridicule. Instead of encouraging her to
preserve and develop that which she has learned at home, we drive her
to abandon it by our ignorant assumption that she knows nothing worth
our learning. The case of peasant handicraft is in point. It is only
recently that we have begun to realize that most wome