Cincinnati’s Domestic Servants Endured Long Hours and Harassment for a Pittance

From Cincinnati Post 29 December 1909, Image extracted from microfilm by Greg Hand

W ith the dawn of the new century in 1901, Cincinnati housemaids attempted to organize a union. That collective bargaining initiative didn’t last the year but offered some insight into the lives of domestic servants at that time.

According to Jesse Partlon, pioneering woman reporter for the Cincinnati Post [26 March 1901], the president of the nascent union was Maria “Maggie” Schuler, who was employed by the family of confectioner Samuel E. Elliott at their home on Gilbert Avenue. Nora Murphy, who boarded on Hackberry Street, was vice president. Mollie Dougherty, the treasurer, “did for” Matilda Besuden, wife of tobacconist Henry J. Besuden out on Duck Creek Road.

The union organizers were hardly inflammatory radicals. Their demands involved being treated with respect, reasonable sleeping accommodations, a fair wage ($2.50 weekly!) and permission to meet suitors indoors:

“Rule 6. Members must have an agreement with their employers about receiving company. Every girl is entitled to a beau, else she will never get married, and she owes it to her self-respect not to meet him at the corner.”

According to reporter Partlon, there were about 30 members of the Housemaids Union, a minuscule sample of the women employed locally as domestic servants in 1901. The United States Census recorded more than 8,000 domestic servants in Cincinnati in 1900, about evenly split between housemaids and cooks and almost exclusively female. A weekly salary of $2.50 was typical, with room and board included. The hours were grueling, from 5:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. at night. Partlon went undercover and got herself hired at a middle-class home. On reporting for duty, the household cook outlined her duties:

“The first thing you do in the morning is fill up the furnace and take out the ashes; then you take the snow shovel and clean the walks around the house and the front pavement; then you blacken the shoes, there are two men in this house, and then brush their coats and the Missus’ skirts – you’ll find them outside their doors. After that you dust the halls. About that time I have breakfast ready and you must wait on the tables.”

You heard right – all of that was before breakfast! After breakfast was a round of sweeping, making the beds, dusting and polishing, laundry, mending, picking up after the children and pampering the pets. Despite this backbreaking agenda, the “Missus” rarely trusted the help. According to Partlon:

“My employer insisted on following me all over the house the first day I was there, and never let me out of her sight for a moment. She locked every drawer and closet in the house right before my eyes, putting the keys in her pocket. ‘You see, I don’t know a thing about you,’ she said, in answer to my look of astonishment. ‘One can’t be too careful.’”

It is no wonder that so many young women departed domestic service at the soonest opportunity. Partlon interviewed a couple of housemaids who confessed that they would prefer to work in a factory or a store, primarily because they would have evenings off. They were reluctant to leave domestic service, however, because factory pay wasn’t much better and room and board wasn’t covered.

Partlon’s exposé touched some nerves in Cincinnati. One “Missus,” writing pseudonymously as “Nanette Napoleon,” chastised the Post for printing a series of articles supporting the grievances of housemaids who were unlikely to return the favor by buying a subscription.

“In hundreds of homes incompetent girls are taken in at HIGH wages, have to be taught how to work, are trained by careful housewives whose patience never ceases, who think all the while that for their labor they will finally have a good servant, only to find that they are met with impertinence and that they have trained them for someone else, for as soon as the girl thinks she knows it all, off she goes without a moment’s warning.”

In contrast, a housemaid congratulated the Post on the articles and complained about the tricks used by employers to undercut attempts by their servants to locate better positions.

“When one woman telephones to another about a girl who has applied for employment, this is the reference that is often heard: ‘She is all right, except for something I cannot tell just at present.’ That is worse than slander, and sends many a loyal woman to ruin or an early grave.”

In general, the housemaids told the Post, women employed by Cincinnati’s wealthier families were treated fairly well. It was the parvenus who earned the ire of servants.

“Girls in middle-class families who do general housework are subjected to treatment that makes them long for other employment. Often they have to sleep in cold rooms in the bitterest weather. Often – far more often than you would believe – they are stinted in their food.”

By 1909, changes in household management and improvements in factory conditions encouraged so many young women to find work other than domestic service that Cincinnati society women complained “no one wants to work anymore.” Carrie B. Haworth, who ran an employment agency on Ninth Street, told the Post [9 July 1909]:

“The average American girl doesn’t want positions as house servant. She has too many beaus, and, besides, she doesn’t like the work.”

Still, there were enough servants employed in Cincinnati in 1909 that new apartment houses were designed with servants’ quarters on the top floor. That arrangement led to its own unique complaints, according to the Post [29 December 1909]:

“This system was considered most ideal when started, but it is now considered the most diabolical agency for gossip ever invented, say the flat-dwellers who own servants. The result is that every family in the house knows what’s going on in every other family, via the servants, who get the news from each other when they go to their own apartments in the evening.”

Among the apartment buildings cited as the worst gossip mills was the Navarre Flats, still located today on Gilbert Avenue in Walnut Hills.

According to the U.S. Census, Cincinnati’s servant population declined from 8,000 in 1900 to 3,000 in 1920 and to just over 1,000 in 1950.

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