Maids Tidy Way Through 270 Years of University History

For 270 years, the University's maids have wandered in and out of the private lives of Harvard men. Patiently tidying what they knew would soon be a mess again, they have seen students in their most ramshackle state, and have become necessities in places where other women are taboo.

Their position in the inner sanctum of student life has made them a treasured. Whenever the maids are mentioned, there is a smile and a reflection of little incidents spaced through four years of College. Some tell of the sure-headed devil-may-care who drank his liquor and told him off for breeches of the sanitary code. Others look back on the motherly type, who darns socks, gives advice on problems of the heart, and adds a woman's touch to the mantle-piece display. Almost everyone, in fact, stereotypes his maid in terms of his own, when the truth is that they are as assertive and individualistic as the College itself.

Most students call them "biddies". But ever since the maids discovered that "biddy" means "keeper of pigs", they have despised the term--not because they consider it a reflection upon themselves, but on "their boys", as they call students.

Even when, as on a Monday morning, the maid is greeted by broken glasses, soggy cigarette butts, and popcorn crushed underfoot, students assume no swinish proportions in their eyes. They can toss their clothes into a corner and leave them there to rot, but they are still "my boys" to the maids.

And this unique personal relationship often obscures the maids' theoretical duty to enforce the Student Dormitory regulations. Maids are notoriously reluctant to tattle on any of "their boys" when students break fixtures or even a parietal rule.

Four Hour Day

The average maid is a bit over 45 years old, comes from Cambridge, Somerville, or Arlington, and has a family. She usually takes the four-hour a day job to augment her family income. Some maids have even sent sons through College on their making salary, and extra funds from taking in students' washing.

The Universities' first maid never had a chance to get home. When the Board of Overseers, in 1772, appointed the Widow Morse "to be the Sweeper of Hollis provided she be able to attend to the Duty without, drinking Spirits", the good Widow was given a room in the basement of the hall. For her end of the deal, she was promised that when she retired, she could bequeath the job to her daughter. The widow's daughter set a record of 41 years of service that has not since been equalled. Still in harness when she passed away, the Widow's daughter was honored in poetry by the class of 1835: "For forty weary years or more,

She trod these classic rooms;

A paragon of service true, a goddess with a broom.

Now she, who many a bed hath made

In years forever past

With decent rites at length is laid

To sleep upon her last."

Through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, it was the maids not the students who had grounds for complaint. They workeds even days a week, including vacations, under the harsh eye of the janitors. The rounds took six hours or more, starting at eight a.m., and they dared not stop for rest or food lest they be fired. Every Friday they lined up in front of Memorial Hall to wait for their pay, which even in the days of the 37-cent-an-hour minimum wage, never rose above 32 cents.

Chapter from Dickens

It was not the maids themselves who impressed their plight upon the Administration, but rather the probing eye of the Boston press. In 1930, the University fired 20 scrub women rather than give them a two-cent an hour raise. Coming on the same day as the University received a five million dollar unrestricted donation, the act gave the University some two solid months of the worst publicity it has ever received. The Boston world looked at these women scrubbing the marble floors of Widener on their hands and knees for starvation wages and called the picture like a chapter from Dickens. The Post pictured a bleated man with a Phi Beta Kappa key throwing pennies to an emaciated woman kneeling at his feet.

The stereotype of a grasping Administration scowling at the poor was established. The publicity came even harder when it was learned that Yale paid its maids four cents less per hour than Harvard.

The scrubwomen rumpus shocked the University out of its unenlightened attitude.

The maids got a locker room in the House basement, and saw their eight a.m. check in hour moved up to nine. Finally, in 1936, the University agreed to scrap the employer employee relationship that left every maid for herself, and recognize a union as the official intercessor.

Maids who were here in the dog bays of the thirties claim that it was the union that proved the key to their present satisfaction with their jobs. From 1940, to the present, the history of the Employees' Representative Union Showa a steady oroison of hours and increase in wages until now, at 20 hours and $.96 an hour, they are as well off as any other college maids in the country.

To the maids, the success of the HUERA is summed up in one person, Daniel G. Mulvihill. Called by the maids "the man in the office", Mulvihill has been their champion against periodic abuses by a large and impersonal University. Grievances, like a sudden increase in the work load, which used to die in the lower administrative echelons, now go directly to the top through Mulvihill. A vigorous and colorful man, Mulvihill enjoys his role as occupational father to the ladies he likes to call the students' "mothers away from home."

Routed Porters

But better wages and work conditions have not led the maids to become lazy in their newly-founded contentment. Their work still meets standards of inspection set 35 years ago. In terms of customer satisfaction, they routed their potential competitors, the student porters, last year in Dunster House in the very first skirmish.

If anything has changed through the years, it has not been the maids, but the students they serve. The old timers, who remember the Gold Coast days, agree that students were richer then than now, and that their rooms showed it. They also think the present crop of students are sloppier now than in the days of plush carpets and chaises-lounges. In their daily trip through the private lives of students they have been able to observe these changes, but they have not colored their attitudes toward the frowzy youth in the pajamas they see each morning. He may be the poorest and sloppiest man in College, but he's still "my boy."'