The Old-New Servant Problem And (Maybe) Its Solution!

 Djuna Barnes (American, 1892–1982), Sketch of a woman with hat, looking right, for "The Terrorists," New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine, September 30, 1917. Ink on paper, 12 3/4 x 8 1/2 in. (32.4 x 21.6 cm). Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries

Ah-ha!  Caught you!  You just read this headline and were rightly horrified. But this subject matter makes sense to you, Park Sloper, living as you unfortunately do among the ever-expanding universe of millionaire brownstoners in BK, and their apparently endless need for nannies and maids.

Well relax, FIPster, ‘cause this headline didn’t come from our pens, but from gifted and edgy reporter Djuna Barnes, who in 1913 wrote an article for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle about the lives of our borough's nannies way back when. The piece is about the bullshit that “the girls” (as they were called by the head of their employment agency) endured in Brooklyn households at the time, which totally proves that domestic employers were demanding assholes way back then, too!

You can enjoy this precursor of FIPS-like muckraking and ranting at the Brooklyn Museum’s current exhibit: Newspaper Fiction: The New York Journalism of Djuna Barnes, 1913–1919.  The show is an exploration of the early journalistic career of American writer and women’s rights advocate Djuna Barnes (1892–1982).  Here are a few more gems that shed light on the relationships between employers and employees of the housecleaning business:

“ ‘Too much to do,’ one girl said. ‘Only one day off every other week.’”  

“The wash, the wash; I could stand anything, but the wash; there was enough of it in my place to cover the entire front porch.  Linen in bulk line, that is very very discouraging.”

An unnamed head of the employment agency was even quoted as saying:

“The mistress of the house is greatly to blame for the discontent of the domestics.  They don’t allow the girls enough freedom.  A girl wants Sundays and evenings off, everyone does.  Working in a factory she gets it, working in a home, she does not.  The factory is a freedom with five dollars tied to it, but it looks a lot better than ten dollars bound on a chain of evenings in and Sundays down upon her knees or mending stockings.”

Back then there were no Swiffers, babe.  You got on your goddamned knees to scrub the floor. 

Many of these young women were imports from Scandinavian countries.   As the agency head said, “American girls don’t like to work.”  How true.  And yet even the Danes and Finns had their fill pretty quickly.  As the sub-headline read:

“Why One Cannot Stay Over Six Months With One Family, Monotony of One Place Affects Her Nerves, She Says.”

In other words, she was FUCKED IN PARK SLOPE.

[Newspaper Fiction: The New York Journalism of Djuna Barnes, 1913–1919 will be on display at the Brooklyn Museum through August 0f 2012]