> 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.
Are you sitting down, Nathan?
personal service (as a % of total nonfarm employment) 1960 1.5 1970 1.3 1980 .9 1990 1.0 1998 .9
I think what this points to is that servants have a lot more to do with status than with substitution for unpaid domestic labor. I agree with you that the liberation of women from the idiocies of domestic life is a very good thing (it might even be one of those progressive aspects of capitalism that are sometimes alleged not to exist) but that doesn't happen through hiring cooks and cleaning women.
I also doubt that very many people could be persuaded to do this kind of work in the absence of massive income inequality. Tom Geoghegan has a great story about an older friend of his, a New Deal-era politico, who said that the real reason the rich hated Roosevelt had nothing to do with taxes or anything like that: it was because he'd made it impossible to hire help.
As to who can afford servants: When I was at In These Times, there was a brief hope that Hamilton Fish III, ex publisher of the Nation, might come take the thing over. He said he'd need a minimum of $120,000 because of the costs of raising a family: private schools, the au pair. (I asked him how much the au pair was setting him back, but he declined to say.) Since this is one question I consider Fish to be an expert on, perhaps that should be considered a floor.
Josh