Help!

Maud McGehee, who has worked as a domestic in Atlanta for more than 30 years, recently published a book of poems (with the help of a longtime employer).

One of the poems tells of the warm excitement of a girl on her way to answer an advertisement for domestic help: My big white apron is shining clean, And I love every baby I've ever seen.

I'll tell that lady, if she takes me on I'll love her baby like I'd love my own.

How sweeter than a Shakespearean sonnet, murmur millions of American women.

But they also know how lamentably untrue. In fact, they are ready to offer their own love for the maid's baby if only the maid will stay on. The story is told of a domestic whose three illegitimate children were adopted by her employer, whereupon she left the household because, she said, "I would never work for a woman with three children." The "servant problem" has long been a staple of female conversation among those who could afford the problem, but never, as today, have so many talked about so few. The huge increase in the number of working wives and of families affluent enough to afford domestic help has created a record demand for servants.

But domestic service has fallen so low on the U.S. status scale--it used to be considered a skilled career--that most girls would rather work in a dime store, even at a lower salary.

Everyone a Vice President. "When I was a girl.'' says a Kansas City matron, "most of my friends' families had servants. Today I know of only one family with servants who live in. It isn't the pay. It's simply a matter of being unable to get a maid or a cook to live in at any price." Many families live in smaller homes than they can afford just so that they will be able to get along without domestic help, trusting to modern appliances to make the housewife's work easier. Los Angeles Architect William Pereira, who earns more than $100.000 a year, designed his spectacularly efficient $250,000 home specifically so that he would not need a maid--then had to start hunting when his wife protested. "Nobody wants to be a maid anymore," said Pereira." Everybody wants to be a vice president.'' The maid shortage has been heightened by the fact that Negroes, who have long made up a large part of the U.S. servant population, have widened their horizons.

With a new sense of pride in their battle for recognition and civil rights, many now consider domestic work demeaning, particularly in the North, where so many other jobs are available. Harlem still has its large core of older domestics, for example, but fewer and fewer younger girls look to domestic work as any sort of career; many would prefer to work in factories or stores.

A Slave at Home. A housewife who finally succeeds by some magic in finding a helper, be she live-in maid or day worker, may be surprised to discover that what passes for a domestic has undergone a vast change. Most of today's domestics are as militant as union members in their demands, which may range from a TV set of their own (practically a necessity for live-ins) to use of the family car on their days off. Frequently, they rule out whole areas of household work. Moreover, those who are willing to be maids and general houseworkers tend more and more to be those who are not employable as anything else. Says Mrs. Merry Drury, owner of Atlanta's Merry Way Employment Services: "There are thousands of people walking the streets who don't know how to make up a bed, but they do know how to apply as domestics." Domestic pay has risen slowly compared with other work, but in most cities outside the South a maid can draw as much as $75 a week, a cook more than $90--both with room and board included if they want it--and a chauffeur about $80 to $100 a week. Day workers usually charge by the hour, rarely get less than the $1.25 minimum wage and often get up to $2.50. Whatever the pay--and many families are willing to pay much more than the average to get help--rapid turnover vastly complicates the servant problem. In fact, many household workers, like their employers, now like to stay North in the summer, then quit when winter approaches and take another job in Florida.

The other side of the coin is the servants' complaint that families often expect them to do too much for the money they get and the hours they put in. As they see it, the wealthy families of years past treated their household help with courtesy and respect, and frequently had more than one helper to do all the work now required of one. Many middle-class American women, whose husbands' careers have raised them a few rungs on the social ladder, can hardly wait to get someone to be a slave at home--at the lowest possible salary, of course. Such women often make unreasonable demands of servants, and totally lack the "one of the family" attitude that once knitted employer and employee together in mutual respect.

Sense of Worth. Immigration no longer supplies the scores of hopeful girls who got their New World start in domestic service (those same servants may be mothers of Cabinet members and college professors today). But the servant shortage has turned many employers' eyes back to Europe. Scandinavian, German, English and Irish girls have not yet lost a sense of worth and dignity in domestic service, and they have heard of the high pay in America. Many of them are interested in picking up some English, and even more in picking up a husband-- as did Anne-Marie Rasmussen. who came from a small Norwegian fishing village to be a housemaid for Governor Nelson Rockefeller and ended up as his daughter-in-law.

Though the red tape is often cumbersome and the sight-unseen aspect of the transaction frequently chancy, many agencies have been developed just to import domestics from abroad. The largest, Manhattan's Domestic Service. Inc., began importing some 1.200 domestics a year in 1950. but in the last few years has become more selective and cut back to about 700 a year. Though the agency could get all the European girls it wanted, it searched out more experienced domestics who would be more likely to stay beyond the usual one-year contract. The family pays the girl's passage and related expenses (plus a fee to the agency), is paid back over ten months in installments deducted from her salary, but almost always returns the original investment as a bonus at the end of the girl's stay.

Endless Staple. Some families prefer to do their own prospecting in Europe and import a cook or a maid without a written contract. This can lead to some poignant frustrations when the importee discovers what a seller's market domestic service is in the U.S. Cook stealing has long been a popular sport (even the Kennedys have tried it), but it has reached fantastic heights. Anna, a cook who came from Germany to Beverly Hills--where cook stealing is as popular as wife stealing--started at $250 a month. Within three weeks she had switched to another household at $400 a month. She changed jobs six times in six months and at her last place was getting $750 a month for a five-day week, had a color television set of her own and the use of the family Corvair on her days off.

No wonder servants are hard to find--or that the quest for them has all but replaced children as the staple of family talk. In Boston, they are telling about the two maids discussing a high-echelon dinner party at which one had just served. "Dean Rusk was there." says the first, "and President Pusey and Walter Lippmann." "What did they talk about?" asks the second. "Why, me, of course."

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