{"id":26004,"date":"2014-05-28T07:36:55","date_gmt":"2014-05-28T12:36:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=26004"},"modified":"2014-05-28T07:38:51","modified_gmt":"2014-05-28T12:38:51","slug":"the-servant-problem-of-post-victorian-england","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/05\/28\/the-servant-problem-of-post-victorian-england\/","title":{"rendered":"The \u201cservant problem\u201d of post-Victorian England"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before the widespread availability of electricity, no middle class household in England could get by without at least one servant. Even as modern labour-saving appliances (along with proper plumbing) started to take their place in the home, servants were still deemed an essential part of being middle- or upper-class. It may account for some of the fascination with TV shows like Downton Abbey<\/em> or the earlier Upstairs, Downstairs<\/em> to modern audiences — they give at least a bit of a glimpse into a very different domestic world. At Bookforum<\/em>, Daphne Merkin<\/a> reviews a books that look at the “servant problem”:<\/p>\n

Servants<\/em> is chockablock with incredulous-making details about the exploitative conditions in which household help lived and worked (these included cramped, chilly, and spartan sleeping quarters, endless hours, and the overriding assumption of inferiority), as well as anecdotes of supreme helplessness on the part of the coddled rich, such as the following: \u201cLord Curzon, whose intellect was regarded as one of the glories of the Empire, was so baffled by the challenge of opening a window in the bedroom of the country house in which he was staying (no servants being available so late at night), that he simply picked up a log from the grate and smashed the glass.\u201d Even after World War II, when homes had begun to be wired for electricity despite the gentry\u2019s insistence on the vulgarity of such improvements and the ideal of the 1950s self-contained (and servantless) housewife was hoving into view, so otherwise gifted a chap as Winston Churchill was unable, according to his valet John Gibson, to dress himself without assistance: \u201cHe was social gentry … He sat there like a dummy and you dressed him.\u201d As easy as it is to snicker at such colossal ineptitude on the part of the cultural elite, it is also intriguing to consider how this kind of infantilizing treatment might have facilitated their performance in demanding grown-up roles \u2014 like someone playing with rubber ducks in the bath before going out to lead men in a military campaign.<\/p>\n

Servants<\/em> takes the reader from the days of Welbeck Abbey, the home of the eccentric and reclusive Duke of Portland, where upper servants had their own underservants to wait on them, to the gradual erosion of the older forms of domestic service and on up through the new world of do-it-yourself home comforts as devised by technology and a greater show of equality between employer and servant. This world, ushered in with the 1950s, shunned the \u201cbadge of servitude\u201d that was conveyed by uniforms, surreal daily routines (whether it meant Ladyships who couldn\u2019t sleep with creases on a pillowcase or Ladyships who insisted on cutting their boiled eggs with a letter opener), and a feudal attitude that took no more cognizance of domestics than it did of the furniture. \u201cIt was in the best houses considered quite unnecessary (in fact poor form),\u201d Lethbridge notes, \u201cfor servants to knock before entering a room. This was partly because they lived in such everyday familiarity with the family that there was nothing to hide from them and partly because … their presence made no difference whatsoever to whatever was being said or going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

There\u2019s much to think about in both these books \u2014 not least the particularly British style of treating domestics, both less casually sadistic and less casually amorous than, say, white Americans\u2019 attitude toward black slaves. Indeed, I suspect that one of the reasons American audiences delight in the travails and triumphs of the gaggle of domestics on Downton Abbey<\/em> is out of a sense of superiority that the \u201cservant problem\u201d in such acute, institutionalized form isn\u2019t ours. Much as we may envy them all that pampering, we also like to look down our noses at it as going against the democratic and independent Yankee ethos. To this point it\u2019s worth noting that Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique<\/em> referred precisely to \u201cthe servant problem\u201d as one of the besetting woes of the upper-middle-class housewives she was looking to liberate, and that our habit of befriending those who clean our kitchens and bathrooms and look after our children can\u2019t disguise the fact that we value their hourly labor less than we value a twenty-minute haircut and that we live largely in ignorance of their thoughts and feelings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before the widespread availability of electricity, no middle class household in England could get by without at least one servant. Even as modern labour-saving appliances (along with proper plumbing) started to take their place in the home, servants were still deemed an essential part of being middle- or upper-class. It may account for some of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,4,7,28],"tags":[570,95,907,315,864],"class_list":["post-26004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-britain","category-history","category-media","tag-england","tag-jobs","tag-snobbery","tag-wealth","tag-winstonchurchill"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6Lq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26004"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26007,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26004\/revisions\/26007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}