Congressman Thinks Immigrant Hired Girls Can Save American Family, Dec. 26, 1925

Congressman Thinks Hired Girls Save the Home

By Charles P. Stewart

Washington, Dec. 26—As something entirely out of the ordinary in a legislative way, Representative Sol Bloom’s bill to amend the immigration law, so as to let foreign “hired girls” into the country on a non-quota basis, has recently been the subject of a good deal of discussion in Congress. People not so very old can remember when nearly every even moderately prosperous American family had its hired girl.

Her pay averaged around $3 a week.

As we all know, this epoch is past.

Sol Bloom says so and it’s true. A domestic servant costs so much that a family has to verge on being actually rich to keep one. In the vast majority of American households the missis does her own work.

Housework is hard work, as Sol again truthfully says. He doesn’t blame the American woman for disliking it, as evidently she does, he takes notice, for she shows an alarmingly increasing tendency toward getting something else to do, or, if that’s unnecessary, toward hotel or restaurant life.

Thus, in Sol’s opinion, the American home is in danger—a danger which ore hired girls would avert, so Sol thinks.

Of course the immigrants would have to be genuine hired girls. Sol provides for that. He requires of them at least a year’s foreign experience in domestic service and a minimum of three years of it here.

Right at this point the bill’s critics raise an objection.

The girls virtually would be bound servants for those three years, they argue. Prevent a girl for three years from rising in life, if capable of it? “Wholly un-American! Impossible!” exclaim the critics.

Nor do the bill’s opponents believe a mere reduction in wages, even assuming its desirability, would solve the servant girl problem.

The skeptics have an idea that the cost of housing a hired girl and keeping her in edibles would be prohibitive, except to the comparatively wealthy, regardless of her wages.

From the front page of the Elizabeth City Daily Advance, Saturday evening, Dec. 26, 1925

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