My grandmother was daughter of a British colonial attorney in the early 1900s and had a full-time maid, cook and various other household staff. My mother was borin in the early 40s in the UK with a part-time nanny and cook - until just after WWII when wealth distribution drastically changed. When I was a kid in the UK in the late 1960s my parents paid one of my immigrant Caribbean cousins to nanny me while my mother went out and worked, which ceased when my sister came along. My children will have nothing.
No daycare?
One of the shifts has been which work was done in the house vs outside. Laundry has, in many countries, moved to the house - at the very least, in any developed country it has moved to being done indoors and by a machine (with some specific exceptions); childcare and training/schooling has moved to collective options, performed outside the house. When I started 1st grade, not a single public school in my home town offered preschool; the three private schools offered two grades of it. Nowadays every single school offers those two years and several (both public and private) offer three.
For what it is worth, mu mother-in-law was hired out to a neighboring family as a "hired girl"as a teen-age in the late 1920s - early 1930s. This was in rural NW Missouri and appears to have been fairly common. She lived with her employers, went to school and returned after school to do housework. I think her folks got her pay.
Servants seem to have been fairly common in the Old Army. I have a recollection of a Black live-in maid at Fort Sam Huston in 1944-1945. Her name was Cora and she and her common-law husband lived in a little three room cottage in the back yard–until one dark night Cora took it upon herself to shoot the guy. I remember the turmoil but I have no idea what set it off. My father was a mere Captain so Cora could not have been too expensive.
Our Army quarters in the United States and in Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s had servants’ quarters as part of the deal. They made great storage rooms.
Well, in the days before washing machines pretty much nobody middle-class or higher did their own laundry. Soiled items were collected, washed, pressed and returned by your laundry service, with an accompanying written record to specify which items were yours (hence the expression “laundry list” to describe a long catalogue of miscellaneous items).
The wealthy had laundry workers who made house calls to clean and iron their textiles on-site, or possibly even a resident laundress who was permanently in charge of the household washing.
Non-wealthy middle-class women were more likely than their male peers to hand-wash small or delicate items themselves, but they sent most of the washing to the laundry.
That’s kind of like the old-fashioned laundry model: an independent business with multiple clients works on your tasks for part of the time and on other people’s the rest of the time. I agree that those people in conventional usage would not be called your “servants”.
Which is a valid point, but you significantly overstated the amount of household help such a man was considered to need:
Emphasis added. No, that wasn’t the “minimum” level of household help considered necessary in those circumstances, nor anything like it. In fact, that kind of in-house dedicated staff for a single man living alone would have been considered an absurdly and uselessly extravagant super-maximum even for a wealthy quasi-aristocrat like Bertie Wooster, unless he maintained a fairly significant house rather than a bachelor flat.
You’re welcome, it was no trouble.
Yes - even if a household doesn’t have any traditional servants, they can hire out all the work that was done by servants in the past. I can send my laundry out, hire someone to do my yardwork, use a day care center for childcare, hire a housecleaner for a few hours a week , and avoid cooking my meals through some combination of frozen foods , take out and those private chef services that prepare and deliver a weeks worth of meals. The main difference between now and then is that the workers perform a single function (the laundry, cooking, cleaning and childcare are done by different people) and do ***not ***work for a single household. Someone working full-time for a single household (doing the cooking, cleaning, child care, laundry ) is dependent on that household in a way that the housecleaner with 25 clients isn’t dependent on any single one of them.
In L.P. Hartley’s “The Go-Between”, set in 1900, the one character is a former soldier and tenant farmer. The men of the manor are speculating whether he “…has a woman”; the narrator, young and naive, pipes up “he told me he does, she come in on Mondays.” The older fellows laugh at his misunderstanding. So even a single tenant farmer took advantage of the independent business model of servant (and also of the daughter of the manor).
The servant model solves a major economic problem; food and lodging are a lot cheaper than paying cash for the person to be able to purchase those services themselves. the only real extra expense is the extra food. (My father had an amusing anecdote about his Uncle, “Cherry Red”, so named because of his face colour. They were visiting his farm, and there were a few boys from the families plus the young hired hand at the breakfast table. Red says “anyone want some more?” and the hired hand pipes up “yes please.” He replies “Wot? Can’t hear you.” The fellow again says “yes, please.” Cherry again says “Wot? Can’t hear you!” and the hired hand catches on and says “no thanks.” I doubt many servants ate too well, depending on the generosity of the employer.)
Also, trying to remember the movie I saw recently where the older servant was getting well past her prime and the others were covering for her because they were afraid the cranky lord or lady would toss a 75-year-old lady out on her ear when she could no longer perform. That was another benefit of servanthood, it was a way for older ladies (who would outlast their husband if they survived childbirth) to have a room and meals in their old age.
My wife and I both work. We have a young daughter not yet in school. We pay the wife of my mother-in-law’s coworker to come over during the day and watch our daughter. She has a child of her own about the same age and brings her as well. She sometimes straightens up but that’s out of politeness/boredom, not because we ask her or expect her to.
Is she a servant? She’s only there on weekdays when we’re both working. Her husband makes a pretty good income. She just earns extra cash doing what she’d normally be doing during the day, except she’s watching 2 kids instead of just 1, she’s at someone else’s house, and makes some extra money doing it. We just call her “the babysitter”. The arrangement doesn’t seem to match the circumstances of the old “servant” model but it might be the modern equivalent.
My wife and I, between us, would be high up in the “middle income” range.
I agree that she’s not a “servant” as the term is commonly understood. I’m not sure the word “servant” in the domestic sense was ever routinely applied to visiting part-time employees, except in a collective sense. (E.g., if your domestic staff consisted of a cook, a housemaid, and a charwoman who came in three times a week for heavy cleaning, you might call them “the servants” as a group for convenience.)
Calling people your “servants” when they are not actually part of your household would probably come across as pretentious and snobbish, as though you’re trying to make your establishment sound grander than it is.
And these days, at least in the US, even the people who actually employ full-time domestic servants seem to call them “household staff” or some such.
I think it depends on time and place and social structure. I think that the black housekeepers of the South who went home at night but were employed by a single family would have been considered servants by the people who employed them.
The person who used to clean my house twice a week was a housekeeper. Or my mother 
My great-grandmother was actually revolutionary in offering the first instead of the second, in Barcelona c. 1910. No laundry list, though, as she was illiterate (she later learned to read).
“The babysitter” was always a special case. Often young, always unmarried, educated, and therefore of middle-class not working-class background, the governess ate alone or with the children, not with the “servants”.
And I’ve seen a “Punch” cartoon where the employment agency is offering one who is a little bit older, ahd has small-pox scars, as an alternative to the pretty young thing the lady of the house might not choose to employ.
“Governess” == “private schoolteacher”
“Nanny” == “babysitter”
IMHO
So, yeah, I think that a hundred years ago someone who looked after your pre-school-aged children (and lived in) would have fitted in the ‘servant’ category.
(and in fact some wealthy households do still have live in nannies. I expect that both they and the nannies prefer the term “employee” to “servant” these days though)
Race has alot to do with it.
Years ago many people including my wifes family had a black housekeeper of some sort. Nowadays they are either hispanic or Asian like Filipinos.
And thing is being a family housekeeper sounds so much like “slave” or “servant” that few black people can get over that stereotype and thats too bad because many of them today are paid quite well and it can be a pretty good job. My mother worked as a nanny just 20 years ago and she was paid well plus the family took her with them on vacation.
I’d like to also point out that when it comes to pay for domestic help, some employers work it out (dont ask me how) so the person is actually an employee of whatever company they work for this way they also get health insurance and retirement benefits.
My first college apartment was similar. A three story duplex built in 1918 - first and second floors were separate units. Each had two BR, 1 BA, LR, DR & kitchen. Third floor had two small bedrooms, one with a sink and a sitting/work area for the domestic staff.
We fixed up unheated third floor(in Pittsburgh!) so we could split the rent 4 ways.
Think of Alice from the Brady Bunch.
Even moderately sized middle class homes from 1900 or so had servant rooms -typically the top floor attic space, dormer window, tiny room. The give-away of a more middle-class dwelling is the narrow second staircase into the kitchen / back so the hired help did not have to walk down the fancier front staircase in front of visitors.
The governess was a special case since she had to teach, she was expected to speak real English not that cockney, Irish, or back-country jabber; which would go along with being well-educated so as to learn the kids goodly. Presumably she would be from the poorer branch of an upscale family, and this would get her into society by the side door. But… once you’re getting into a range of specialized servants - gardener, chauffeur, maid(s), nanny / governess - you are getting into a much richer class of family.
There is still an option in Canada to import hired help on a special permit for live-in domestic use; typically this seems to be from disadvantaged countries like the Philippines. (Which is the usual reason why the hired help is from a minority - it’s the best work they can get with their qualifications and language skills) Typically this is for nanny duty or elder care.You can apparently deduct the equivalent cost of food and board, so the earnings are basically free cash for the servant. Allegedly the government keeps an eye out for abuses, they can’t be worked 24-7 or even close to that. OTOH, when there are two or three children, this arrangement may be as cheap and more convenient than a day care.
The usual name for that is an au pair:
Au pairs are supposed to be temporary, though. The people md2000 is talking about are immigrants.
Technically, they are not immigrants. They are admitted under a special visa as “temporary workers” with a host of restrictions and IIRC a time limit. Since they are tied to an employer and under threat of being shipped home if they are a “problem”, they are vulnerable to exploitation, ie. excessive work hours, underpayment for work and overcharging for board or their transport to Canada.