-But still, I'm just wondering about the servant thing, especially with -respect to places like Los Angeles. I got the impression when I lived there -that the well-to-do middle classes could easily afford au pair "girls" and -maids (who also cook). I rather thought I was seeing the shape of things to -come, and predicted to a friend that in twenty years, being middle-class -all over the country would be more like what it was for the Victorians.
I think we have to understand the rise of servants or rather, specifically personal services, as somewhat different from the Victorian period. While some of it is no doubt the product of inequality between the new rich and the immigrant poor, a large portion for more middle class folks is the substitution of paid servant labor for previously unpaid labor by married women as the latter have entered the workforce.
This parallels the rise of more fast food consumption substituting for cooking by the wife, more laundry services instead of home laundering, and more day care and so on. With married women doing less work in the home (even if not dropping to the level of the men), it would be almost shocking if there was not some revival of home-based personal services to take up the slack.
Theoretically (if wages were not slipping), the extra income of the working wife should make the exchange of paid service labor for unpaid home-based services a reasonable economic transaction without positing some great increase of income. Hiring a cleaning woman to spend five or even ten hours per week makes a lot of sense in a two-career family. It even makes sense if the cleaning woman makes the same wage as the couple hiring the cleaning woman, since with more skill and possibly more professional tools, the cleaning woman can substitute for more unpaid labor foregone by the working couple.
Home-based services, whether day care, cleaning women or yard work is not necessarily an objectionable thing or even necessarily a harbringer of Victorianism, but a welcome sign of the success of feminism in reordering priorities and responsibilities within the home.
What is needed to assure that this is merely a rational, egalitarian extension of division of labor into home-based labor is a commitment to strong labor unions among such workers to protect their wages and working conditions.
In a number of states, serious unionization has occurred among the home-health workers serving the disabled population. These models of unionization have generally created regional authorities negotiating on behalf of all workers in the industry in the area (made easier with home health care since the funder is usually the government). While this model is a lot trickier in largely private employment, the answer is either to socialize the economic costs through guaranteed child care for example, or through hiring hall regulations to assist and encourage unionization.
The point is that it is easy to condemn the hiring of such personal service labor as ostentatious, but there is a serious danger that doing so is just a reinforcement of what Arlie Hothschild has called the "Second Shift" women have to do on housework. I would say the proper left response is to celebrate home labor finding receiving wages and turn the examination to whether the wages are enough. The wrong question whether paying such wages is something improper - almost implying the wife is being indolent - in substituting other labor for previously unpaid labor by the wife.
--Nathan Newman