Living: 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¢ to 40¢. 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."