The thread on people having servants (and my finally starting to watch Downton Abbey) got me thinking last night: in situations where persons had a personal “body-servant” like a ladies’ maid or a valet, what sorts of grooming were the responsibility of the servant, and what of the private person on their own?
Hair-cutting I would see as being obviously part of servant’s tasks, as part of maintaining hairstyles.
Nail cutting? Maybe? I can see buffing, but somehow someone else cutting my nails seems horribly unsafe.
Shaving of body hair? (did they even do that at all? I bet they did in the 20s at least!)
Tooth and oral hygiene?
Bathing? Hair washing?
Makeup application (and yes, at least by the 19-teens, most women were wearing makeup)
What about weird personal medical things that aren’t quite medical enough to require a doctor: ingrown nails or hairs, zits or blemishes, styes, minor skin (staph) infections…?
A valet was expected to do things like draw his master’s bath, set out towels & anything else he’d need, & have robe or change of clothes set out, but not to actually bath him. Shaving his master ('s face) with a straight-edge was also part of the job. A ladies made would do the same for her mistress, in addition to helping her dress, and hairstyling (a big part a her job). Depending on the mistress’s age she’s also be in charge of making sure sanitary cloths were always at hand. She might also wash her mistress’s underwear (& sanitary cloths) herself rather than sending them to the laundry. They wouldn’t brush their employer’s teeth, but they’d set out the toothbrush & paste for them. They probably would clean dentures though.
I doubt that this is really true. What about the years he served in the British Navy – did he have a body servant assigned to him then? Seems unlikely.
He also has a man to change the TV channel, demands that a series of eggs are boiled every morning to be sure that the ones he gets are freshly done to perfection, and of course, he has someone to warm his loo seat.
What strikes me, a la Downton, is how little privacy they had, with servants all around.
I’ve never had one - I thought they just used those little sanding boards and buffed and painted them fancy for you, or put fake nails on after they shaped them. I didn’t think they did the grooming part; I thought keeping them roughly in shape was on the individual person.
As alphaboi noted, a ladies’ maid would help a lady dress or undress, especially when it involved elaborate evening wear that needed some help with fastening or adjusting.
Thoughtful employers would sometimes tell their ladies’ maids not to sit up for them if they were going to be out late, which meant that they would find their way out of their garments and hair arrangements and into their nightclothes themselves, and the maid could attend to them properly in the morning.
A valet generally didn’t actually help his employer dress, unless he was somewhat incapacitated by age or disability, but he’d be present to help with the dressing process, besides laying out and preparing the clothes. (The Wodehouse novels often used to illustrate points in these discussions depict the valet Jeeves supervising his employer Bertie’s dressing, e.g., telling him when his tie knot needs to be redone or his trousers have to be lifted half an inch higher by adjusting the braces (suspenders), to attain the perfect break over the instep. Jeeves of course has more personal authority than a typical valet, but it would be any valet’s job to help and advise his employer in the process of dressing to look good.)
For both valets and ladies’ maids, a big part of their job was looking after the employer’s clothes. They would spot-clean, mend, brush and press garments, and were in charge of sending soiled ones to the cleaners or washing them by hand if they were delicate. They also cleaned and polished shoes and recommended purchases of socks and underclothing as items wore out.
The point is that privacy is a very modern concept. When everyone lived in one in one-room huts there was no such thing. Even rich people in castles were surrounded. The elaborate hair and clothes of the late medieval, like many eras, were not something that could be put on by oneself. Household work before automation took massive amounts of time and effort. When construction was all manual and therefore expensive, space was at a premium; a private room was a luxury and only the rich had them. The marvelously decorated main banquet hall in Hampton Court, for example, doubled as a sleeping room for several dozen knights who simply bunked down on the floor. Literature is replete with stories of the rich person’s servant sleeping either on the floor at the foot of the bed, or just inside or outside the door. In the testimony that led to Henry VIII’s wife (the fifth) being beheaded, a rich relative took care of a large number of children for poorer branches of the family - the girls all lived in one dormer room (and “shared” one of the music teachers, apparently) and the boys lived in another attic dormer in the manor.
So no privacy? Of course not. It’s a modern conceit, fueled by the mobility of automobiles and mass transit and giant high-rises and dispersed suburbs, that you can live without your neighbours having a clue about you. Until now, every neighbourhood was a small town, people gossiped and walls were thin and everyone knew everyone else’s business. It’s just that servants and nobility were different classes, and did not socialize. So the lords and ladies did not care if the servants knew of their midnight comings and goings, or other personal details; and it was generally accepted that this sort of detail was unlikely to stay hidden anyway. many old stories involve the “bribed servant” as spy feeding all the juicy details of goings-on to the other side.
(There’s an indication of this in the movie Gosford Park; one of the ladies is happy to bang the American when she thinks he’s someone’s servant, but refuses to carry on after she finds out he’s really one of the guests. )
But then, only in North America (and more modern areas of Europe) do children tend to move out when they marry or before. Several generations and several couples and all the unmarried offspring under one roof is pretty much the norm in many societies. So even when there were no servants, privacy was at a minimum.
The Spanish ambassador to King James I, Count Gondemar, had trouble with an anal fistula. No doubt he would preferred to keep this painful, and embarrassing, condition to himself, but the servants talked, and soon it was all over the town.
Nope, it includes everything. They clean under the nails, cut them, push the peels at the bottom down, etc. etc. You can get the manicure without any polish or fake nails; most men who get manicures do that.
I remember reading somewhere (perhaps a previous thread) that the clothing required the assistance of a lady’s maid to wear (perhaps by having the hooks on the back, where the lady could not reach them), and that people of this era changed clothes several times each day.