SCARCITY OF SERVANT GIRLS.
Women Prefer Regular Hours of the
Store and Factory.
If you have a good house servant -- or an indifferent house servant for that tatter -- you will do well to retain her in your employ at almost any sacrifice. Just now there is an almost unprecedented dearth of competent domestics in Kansas City, and housekeepers are besieging the offices of the employment agencies in their efforts to get them.
"It has passed the comic paper joke stage," declared an official at the state free employment bureau's office yesterday afternoon. "It was bad enough in the winter, but now that so many more working chances for women had opened up with the spring, it is positively appalling. The women are all going to the factories and restaurants for employment, and most of them refuse to consider any kind of housekeeping positions."
"Those who come in here say they can not afford to do domestic work when they can get other employment with regular hours. All of them complain that housekeepers overwork them, without allowing them any kind of privileges. Wages for servant girls are better now than they have ever been, but that does not seem to make any difference.
"It looks as if housekeepers were going to have to do their own work, unless the situation improves," it was stated. "I know one woman with a small family who can not keep a domestic because she entertains so much. Every woman we have furnished her with says the company makes her more extra work than she can stand, so she quits. But that's a time when servants are most needed. What we are going to do about it I'm sure I don't know."
