The saying I’ve heard about the difference in white attitudes toward black people in the South vs. the North was that down south, they don’t care how close you get, as long as you don’t rise too high, while up north, they don’t care how high you rise, as long as you don’t get too close.
I once owned a home that was a ‘Denver Square’. It had a bricked over stairway for the servants.
In the days when running a household was at least one, possibly two, people’s work, there were a lot more household servants about than you’d think. It’s just that sometimes they were also known as “Our Millie, the eldest”
The neighbors, with three under five, who employed “Our Millie’s little sister Sally” to help with the babies might then be counted as part of the servant-employing class, rather than the servant-providing class. But it would change back again in four or five years, when the neighbor’s eldest was big enough to wring out the clothes in a mangle.
I’ve seen 1880 census records for my mother’s great-grandparents, a middle-class family living in Hackney, not a fancy part of London. The husband was a teacher (not a well-paid profession), and they had 3 young children and a servant, age 67.
Kimstu’s point is that Bertie Wooster was wealthy and privileged. He was not at all average, and most “single men living alone” in his era didn’t have servants and were not expected to.
Also, Jeeves was not a butler, he was a valet. A valet was/is a “gentleman’s personal gentleman” while a butler was the boss of a large household’s servant population. They’re quite different jobs, though Jeeves did prove he could also “butle” in one of the stories, when he had to fill in for a missing butler.
It still is kinda true in many developing countries (if you squint and interpret the question in just the right way).
In many developing countries’ cities, the kind of salaries you can earn as a professional, and the cost of renting apartments in the city itself, make the hourly rate of a cleaner, cook, nanny etc seem negligable. So just about every professional working in the city will pay for such services.
But is your cook / cleaner etc your “servant”? What about someone tutoring your children?
Yep, a similar thing to their feelings about women…
Absolutely correct.
Actually, the minimum staff requirement for a butler was to have at least one footman serving under him.
I have had a cleaning lady and a gardener for years (they work for me a few hours each week.)
I don’t think of them as “servants” - but you’re welcome to give your own definition for them.
Also I’ve taught chess to kids of friends - I define myself as a professional, not a servant.
On the other hand, they also weren’t expected to cook and clean. That was wimmin’s work.
Single poorer (than Wooster) men would have employed a variety of means to ensure that - eg, living with their parents, living in a lodging house, living as a paid lodger in a family home. But I doubt many of them would have done their own laundry.
Agreed…it was a rhetorical question.
I’m just saying if we were to define servant in a modern and non-pejorative sense, then they are still common in many countries. But of course the word servant isn’t modern and non-pejorative.
Along with what was mentioned above, dont forget the telephone and the typewriter as womens emancipators.
With the telephone you needed operators and at one time 1 in 4 working women were telephone operators.
Then the typewriter and with those you needed secretaries so even more jobs for women.
As for houseservants yes almost every middle class American family had one.
We are not middle class (I don’t think so anyway - define middle class?) but we employ a lady, a few hours a week to clean and do ironing. Is she a servant? She doesn’t think of herself that way and nor do we.
The idea of servants was so much a part of the US, that Herbert Hoover assumed that the Depression could be dealt with by people going into domestic service, and having to be told that people didn’t have servants anymore. When Hooverwas young, that was an potential option.
I know my grandparents had live-in help.
Most bachelors in the era either lived in their family home (in which case their mother and/or sisters did a lot of the domestic work) or in a boarding house (with the landlady serving as an ersatz-mother).
Is that the “Sherlock Holmes” dynamic?
bob++ Check this out to see if you are middle class. From Pew research
Your size-adjusted household income is the sole factor we use to determine your income tier. Middle-income households – those with an income that is two-thirds to double the U.S. median household income – had incomes ranging from $41,869 to $125,608 in 2014. Lower-income households had incomes less than $41,869 and upper-income households had incomes greater than $125,608 (all figures computed for three-person households and expressed in 2014 dollars)
There’s no need to preface that with the caveat ‘Not England’, as the pattern was much the same in England even in the early nineteenth century.
[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
It certainly isn’t true if you don’t count farmers as household servants. Before 1800 the proportion of people working in agriculture in both the U.K. and the U.S. (and most other countries) was easily a majority. Since then the proportion of people employed in agriculture has dropped to about 2%. Some of those people owned their own farms and some worked for other people, but they weren’t household servants.
[/QUOTE]
Except that it was nowhere near that simple. Lots of farmers employed servants. In the early modern period over a quarter of households in rural areas had them. So while it wasn’t most households, it wasn’t at all unusual even for relatively small-scale tenant farmers to employ them.
But what did they mean by a ‘servant’. That’s when it gets complicated. The duties of such servants on a farm would be many and would typically include work around the house and outside. The exact balance would partly depend on gender, as ‘men’s work’ tended to be more outdoors and ‘women’s work’ more indoors. However in households with only one or two servants, it would always have involved a mixture of both. A male servant might have been primarily an agricultural labourer but still be expected to wait at table, polish his master’s boots, run errands etc. One effect of this is that it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the word ‘servant’ becomes associated specifically with domestic service. What’s more, the word remained sufficiently ambiguous that it plays havoc with the attempts by historians to count servants in later census records.
One specific reason made the employment of servants even more common in pre-industrial England than one might expect. Boys and girls who we would think of as teenagers were almost always sent away from home. This was usually so that they could be employed as servants. Families with teenagers even preferred to send them to work in other people’s houses and then to employ other people’s teenagers as their own servants. Why? Because it made disciplining them so much easier. The result was that a significant proportion of the adult population had been in service at some point.
Yup, although his landlady only had the one tenant. Those boarding houses were still quite common in the 1950s; the short-term stay version is the BnB, many of which will be perfectly happy to accept long-term tenants with slightly different arrangements.
There’s a quotation from (I think) GK Chesterton - something along the lines of “A generation of young women arose and said to their fathers ‘I will not be dictated to’ - and went out to become stenographers”.
PS: My grandmother was a “cook-general” in her early adult life, in a doctor’s family around 1900: there’s a book by Monica Dickens, “One Pair of Hands” relating her experiences doing the same sort of job in the 1930s. If you ever saw the TV series Upstairs Downstairs, there’s one storyline later on when the downtrodden kitchenmaid Ruby goes off to get a job on her own as sole household servant to a real cow, and has to be rescued by Mrs Bridges. It was an interesting example of the hierarchies within hierarchies, where the aristocrat’s cook/housekeeper tears a strip off the middle-class slave-driver as someone not fit to employ servants.