Girls continued to enter domestic work, as they had always done, at a relatively early age. But there were complaints among employers that fewer and fewer young women wanted or were available for this kind of work. Charitable agencies were therefore formed to take unfortunate male and female children from the British Isles and help them migrate to Canada where they were placed in urban homes and on farms that needed extra hands. In general, however, in spite of the large number of girls that continued to enter domestic service as a temporary employment before marriage, this occupation seemed to become less and less valued. It was clearly less popular than new jobs that were increasingly available to girls in shops, offices and factories in the latter part of the century. Domestic service offered long hours, poor pay and constraints on one's activities after working hours. In households where the social barrier between family and servant was great, domestic servants were often lonely. In general, as student attendance, especially among older girls, increased during the nineteenth century, involvement in domestic labour seems to have declined. Photographed during the summer of 1905, these girls are scrubbing doorsteps in Toronto.
