A Post WWI Servant and Class Problem

Here's a drawing by John Argens that is sure to please the democratic side of the reader - and as certain to displease his aristocratic side. It shows the servants of the 20th century all giving notice at once, all marching out of thousands of kitchens and back doors and heading for the factory and the office. It shows the master and the mistress in despair; it shows the maid, the butler and the cook holding their heads high and ignoring the loud lamentations; and it shows the spirit of the times a wise gentleman who sits in the employment office of the factory with a cigar in his mouth calmly guiding the servants away from domestic service and into other work that pleases them more. Many will be sad when the servants go. On their shoulders has rested a great weight of disagreeable work, on them has weighed the magnificence of great dinners, magnificent balls and lavish hospitality. But now the simple statistics from the departments and bureaus of labor are showing that the servants are getting out from under. Soon there will be no more servants to be had. They are going rapidly right now. And what's going to happen then?

WHEN ALL SERVANT'S QUIT - WHAT THEN?

THE writer of this article has an uncle who lives in China- with his wife and half a dozen children. He has lived there for twenty years and has returned to the United States only three times in that period. And on every occasion that he and the family have come to their home country they have been extremely glad to go back to China. The wife has always been particularly glad- to leave her native land, her friends, her family and all her girlhood associations and cross the thousands of miles of ocean to live her life in an alien land. But why? Well, the answer is one that many women will understand. It concerns the very simple, very difficult matter of servants.

In China she has many servants, well trained, self-effacing, obedient and grateful. There is a boy for the door, a boy for her husband, a cook, a maid, a laundress, a nurse, a gardener, an errand boy. They demand a small wage, and they stay a long time; and even when they do leave her service it is a very simple matter to secure others to take their places. 

China swarms with possible servants. And when this American woman comes to visit the United States with her six children and her husband - she finds the contrast exceedingly painful. She finds that American life, after that ease, is difficult, distracting, exhausting. She used to be a good democrat, doing things for herself and demanding no assistance. But now she is spoiled. She thinks she must have servants. She can't get them in America, she CAN get them in China, so she prefers to live in the Far East.

HOW different in the United States, so hard to get, so extremely difficult to keep! There was a time in the history of this American republic when there was a great plenty of servants. It was easy to get a good maid, a good manservant, a good cook, easy to turn them off if they did not suit, easy to get others- just as it is in China today.

But it is so no longer. The change began a generation or two ago - just when the great American fortunes were beginning, when the age of manufacture was starting in this country, and when the number of people who wanted servants was immensely on the increase. And just at this point, when the demand for servants became the greatest, the supply of servants became the smallest. 

Consider the statistics published by the New York State Department of Labor, reprinted in a recent issue of the New Republic. In 1910 in that state there were 322,969 women in domestic service. By 1920 that number had fallen to 263,463. Which means that 59,506 women had left the kitchen and the servants’ quarters to earn their living elsewhere. For the figures do not mean that fewer women are working. More women are working than ever before. One out of every five women in the United States is at work, outside the home - a total number of 8,549,399.

What irony is this! The people of the United States lived a quiet life, without very much ostentation, hiring few servants because they had no large fortunes. Along came inventions and machines and manufactures, increasing fortunes and putting luxury within the reach of the people. The newly rich wanted servants. But they found that women preferred to work in factories instead of in kitchens; and though the wealthy folk received their money and their desire for servants from factories, these same factories took away the servants and made them unwilling to do personal or domestic service. So the new rich not only could get no servants for themselves, but their factories took the servants away from the old rich.

BUT what about society? What about the great country homes with their small armies of footmen, maids, valets, chauffeurs and cooks? And what about the small household of the fairly prosperous businessman and his wife who want just a housekeeper or cook - but can't get her, couldn't pay her enough, and never could keep her longer than two or three months? If the rich weren't uneasy these days, why should such a passage as the following appear in a big blue book on “Etiquette,” written by Emily Post and printed recently by Funk & Wagnalls? 

The volume is by “a woman whose authority on the subject is beyond dispute and whose reputation as a writer is of long standing.” She says: “There is an inexplicable tendency, in this country only, for working people in general to look upon domestic service as an unworthy, if not altogether degrading vocation.... So insistently has this obloquy of the word ‘servant’ spread that every one sensitive to the feelings of others avoids using it exactly as one avoids using the word ‘cripple’ when speaking to one who is slightly lame. Yet are not the best of us ‘servants’ in the church? And the highest of us ‘servants’ of the people and the state?”

The lady, to quote the poet, is “beating her wings in vain in the luminous void.” She is arguing with a landslide, reproving the leaves because they drop from the tree in the fall of the year. And she is not correct when she says that it is “in this country only” that the servants, including the cooks, are going. Read what Max Beerbohm, an acute observer, wrote about the scarcity of servants in England as long, at least, as four years ago, when, though their lot was better by far than it used to be, they were becoming fewer and fewer.

IN OTHER words, how is it that servants have so much less unpleasant a time than they were having half a century ago? I should like to think this melioration came through our sense of justice, but I cannot claim that it did. Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused; nor is it ever up and doing till those others have begun to make themselves thoroughly disagreeable, and not even then will it be up and doing more than is urgently required of it by our convenience of the moment. 

For the improvement in their lot, servants must, I am afraid, be allowed to thank themselves rather than their employers. The mere Spirit of Time, sneaking down the steps of areas, has worked wonders. There has been no servants’ campaign, no strategy, nothing but an infinite series of spontaneous and sporadic little risings in isolated households. Wonders have been worked, yes. But servants in the position of being a servant lacks CLASS. And class, even loosely defined, means many things. 

It means self-respect, it means a freedom from restraint after working hours, it means independence- even though that independence may mean loneliness in a great city. To have these three rich possessions is to be a human being, however far down in the scale of free society. Not to have them is to be less than a human being, however far one may be up in the scale of servant society. That's how they feel these ones who once were, or might have been, servants. Mrs. Post may put on her injured air, if she wishes. Deserted mistresses may complain that they have always treated their servants “like members of the family.” It will do no good. The servants are going or gone. What will bring them back? How will the housework be done? As Beerbohm asks: “What concessions by the governing classes, what bribes will be big enough hereafter to get that done?”

But the biggest loss of all is the loss of the cook. The mistress can do without her maid, the master can do without his manservant, but the cook - SHE wasn't like the rest of the servants. She was a mistress herself, an artist, a general, a dictator. SHE need feel no qualms of personal service. Here is a work that is much more creative, and ought to command more self-respect, than pulling gloves off of ladies’ plump hands or getting telephone numbers for querulous men. Never mind, the argument will do no good. The cook will not stay; she will not even come. There is more than one fine home down the peninsula these days that is for sale- because its owner cannot find a cook. There has ceased to be a Cook Problem, and there has developed what is frankly a Cookery Problem.

SOMETHING must be done, and, of course, something WILL be done. And since the great majority of people who want servants - the moderately prosperous, not the very rich, who will always have a few servants at least- must have their housework done and their meals prepared, they will do this work themselves. But, since they don't want to do housework, the housework will have to change. 

Many minds will be set to work simplifying the arrangements of the home. Mechanical appliances will increase, methods of food preparation will change. Perhaps all food will come from a central neighborhood kitchen and will be eaten on wooden plates. Sticklers for home cooking will not like this, but will have to bear it. The servant, by going away, will have transferred some of the inconvenience of her station to the shoulders of her former masters. But the masters will try to make their lives easier for themselves than they ever thought of making life for their servants.

Cooking for one household is a hot and wasteful job; it will not be done. Washing the dishes by hand is a dirty and disagreeable job; no hands will touch them in the future. As for those who live in the country - well there was a time when they lived far away, but the automobile changed that. That distance was solved; household work will be solved also. For, since 1900, this has been the servant’s century out; and while she has been out she has been looking for another and a better job - one with more “class,” that is more satisfying to her self-respect. –SPIRIT of the TIMES, 1922

🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia