years. Of course this system led to the worst abuses, and it frequently happened that young boys and girls were kidnapped and sold into servitude. Orphaned children and neglected children of profligate parents, too, were bound out—as they called it—to live and serve in some respectable home, boys until the age of twenty, girls until the age of eighteen or until marriage. This was another form of servitude very close to slavery. There were some indentured servants who willingly entered upon their temporary bondage, poor persons who agreed to serve for a fixed term in return for transportation to America, but they were not numerous. The third class of domestic servants were the free help, the only real wage-workers in this occupation, and it is they with whom we have to concern ourselves.
The domestic servants of the colonial period were very much in the same position as the housewives themselves. At a time when the home was considered the only proper place for a woman to be in, unattached women, who had no homes of their own, naturally sought the shelter of other people's homes, and if they had neither relatives nor close friends they sought the homes of strangers, where they could earn their bread in return for domestic service. But at that time domestic service, like housekeeping, meant much more than it does at present. The domestic servant had to be skilled at a number of domestic trades to make her employment profitable, and the manufacture of household commodities constituted a large portion of her work. If a housewife was in a position to engage help, she desired such help not only at the wash tub and the oven, but also, and often particularly, at the spinning-wheel and the loom. In the early newspapers there sometimes appeared advertisements for domestic servants, with the added qualification that they must be good spinners or skilled in weaving, and sometimes they were even required to be good tailoresses. Many domestice servants, particularly those who were widows, went out to work by the day, but the majority lived in the homes of their employers. In either case the wages of these early workers were very low. Old records show domestic servants to have received from fifty cents to one dollar per week and board, or board and lodging and from fifteen to thirty dollars per year. These
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