The apron handed me on my second day was so soiled that I asked the woman in charge how often she had them washed.
“Wash these things,” she cried, laughing, as she held up another apron in a worse condition than the one she had given me, “they ain’t never washed sence I been here. When they gets so sticky and stuck up that they spoil your clothes they take ’em away and give me some more. I guess they burn ’em. They ain’t fitten for nothing else.”
“If customers knew that, perhaps they wouldn’t pay such high prices for your candies,” I suggested.
“What folks don’t know don’t hurt ’em none,” she retorted.
That night I had a severe bilious attack, and when morning came I was too sick to think of going to work. Had it been the biscuit factory or any other position in which I had worked, excepting the department store, I would have gotten Alice to telephone and give my reason for not reporting.
Two days in that candy factory were enough for me. Even the money due me—at the rate of eight dollars a week—was not sufficient to draw me back. Now when I see the name of that firm on a candy-box I very gladly allow other people to consume it. Yet I am fond of candy.
Fortunately, on Friday morning the postman brought me a letter from the housekeeper at Sutton House enclosing a railroad ticket. When I told Alice that I had engaged to go as head chambermaid she rose in wrath. A domestic servant in a hotel was bad enough, she protested, but going in a private family was a disgrace for which she could not find a name.
“Yet when you are at home you make beds, sweep the floors, and do other so-called menial work,” I reminded her.
“I’m a college woman,” she haughtily informed me.
“If a lack of education in the worker renders the work disgraceful,” I replied, trying to argue with her, “then surely my degree together with my attainments as a writer should remove the stigma.”
But she would not argue. It was disgraceful of me to go as a domestic servant. Nobody would ever have any respect for me, and that was all there was to it. It was the one subject to which there was but one side. Domestic service was disgraceful.
This in the country that my ancestors had struggled to found—that all under its flag might be free and equal.