Upstairs, Downstairs Revisited

The dwindling ranks of domestics gain new respect

Soon after dawn, cleaning women used to stand in a row on Burnside Avenue in The Bronx, waiting for well-heeled Manhattan matrons to drive up and hire them for a day's work. "Often they'd ask to see your knees," recalls Geraldine Miller of those lineups in the '30s. "The women with the worst scarred knees were hired first because they looked like they worked the hardest." Their pay for an eight-hour day: 30-c- to 40-c-. Today their pay may be as much as $40 a day, and it is the employers who queue up to find good, reliable help.

Just as more women are returning to work and need assistance with the chores at" home, good help is harder than ever to find. According to the National Committee on Household Employment, the number of domestics has declined dramatically from some 2.5 million four years ago to 1.5 million today. The reasons: generally low pay, few benefits, transportation difficulties, low status and the easy alternative of going on welfare. "There is still a stigma attached to being a domestic," says Historian David M. Katzman, author of Seven Days a Week (Oxford University Press; $14.95), a new book about household help in the U.S. from 1870 to 1920. "Cleaning women," he adds, "suffer from isolation and an atomization of work. They have none of the camaraderie that women in offices share."

Nevertheless, in the past few years, domestics have begun to organize, and in 1974 the federal minimum-wage law was extended to household workers (it is now $2.65 an hour). The National Committee on Household Employment meets regularly to make recommendations for federal regulation of household working conditions. Their bargaining position, oddly enough, is strengthened by their dwindling numbers.

Today, a New Yorker looking for fulltime, live-in help must compete with as many as 70 other applicants for the same worker. Live-in housekeepers on Long Island frequently get a color TV in their private quarters, use of a car and country club privileges in addition to their pay. In many urban areas, homeowners resort to maid sharing, maid stealing and other unorthodox means of getting help. A Fort Lauderdale couple succeeded in finding a housekeeper only after the husband, an attorney, received a client's domestic as part of a bonus for handling his divorce case. "I never know whether she's going to show up or not," admits the wife. "Still, I'm lucky to have her. If I tell her she's not reliable, she'll just tell me that she can work some place else."

A Washington businessman turned down an all-expenses-paid trip to Egypt with his wife "because our maid insisted on going home to Ireland that month." A San Francisco mother who is working for her B.A. plans her classes around her housekeeper's schedule. While many people tend to tidy up before their cleaning women arrive, a New York communications manager goes that act one better: after he has a party, he hires a cleaning service to straighten up the apartment before his regular maid arrives. Liberal and feminist sentiments also make some employers feel guilty about hiring others to do their dirty work, and the problem has often been debated in women's groups. Says Pam Gray, a Los Angeles attorney: "I am so grateful that I am probably less demanding of my cleaning woman than I am of another type of agent, like an accountant or a travel agent."

However, the profile of the domestic worker as a poor, ill-educated woman is slowly changing, as students, artists, writers and housewives adopt household work as a flexible form of employment. Their families are not always pleased. "My aunt babbles on about my editing and my traveling, but she never mentions my cleaning," says one part-time editor. After quitting a managerial job at Joseph Magnin, Taryn Stenman, 22, worked as a maid for six months and found that she made so many connections as a result of cleaning homes that she started her own catering service. "People can use this type of job as a steppingstone," she says. "It's a fast way to make money and it's the type of job you can always find." Fred and Harriet Hoffman, who once employed servants of their own, turned to domestic work when Fred's antique business faltered. At $10 an hour, they make enough to afford a $50,000 Fort Lauderdale town-house--one very similar to those they clean.

The new breed of domestic sometimes works through an agency like Chicago's Broom Hilda service, which, according to Owner Lou Williams, looks for employees with stability, literacy and shared values with the clients. Although Broom Hilda charges customers $6 an hour and pays its workers only $3, it supplies all necessary equipment, handles Social Security forms and offers insurance benefits. Other services, like Mini Maid in Atlanta, send out crews of three or four women who for $25 to $28 can clean a two-bedroom house in 20 to 25 minutes.

"Cleaning services display a sense of professionalization that tends to upgrade the occupation of the domestic," says Katzman. "Traditionally the worker was hired to satisfy the employer's personal status needs; today that process is being depersonalized. The new services decide how they'll clean the house. As professionals, they don't have to listen to the housewife's way of doing things. It's more businesslike--they simply make a contract for a certain job to be done."

Of course, that new contractual relationship between employer and domestic flourishes at the cost of a certain special intimacy that once existed in many households. Katzman's wife, Sharyn, for instance, remembers the closeness between her mother and their day worker, Ksenia. "Ksenia had just come over from the Ukraine, and my mother taught her English and helped her pass the immigration tests. They spent a great deal of time together in the house and, whenever one of them had a private grief, they would share it with the other. There was a real caring there."

In a modern, industrial society, however, it is perhaps inevitable that obligations once based on tradition, class and personal loyalties will be replaced by more businesslike covenants. Ideally, as the old bonds of affection--and inequality--become obsolete, something new will evolve: a mutual respect. As Annie Love, a longtime domestic who is now head of Miami's Household Technicians, Inc., puts it: "Back not so long ago we worked just like slaves. They always made us use a separate plate and fork to eat from and a separate glass to drink out of. It was degrading. Now I tell our women they have a profession to be proud of. We provide an important, necessary service--no different from a secretary. We expect to be treated no different than any employer would treat any employee." That day has not yet arrived, according to one Atlanta black who has worked as a domestic for 30 years. "The big change in employers," she says succinctly, "is that they're having to pay more, and it's killing them."

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