2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Fifties were a better time. We need to return to a better Democratic Party. [View all]snowy owl
(2,145 posts)I lived in a lower middle class neighborhood that included some wealthy and some very poor. No one had a maid. My best friend in 4th gr had a maid. Her dad was architect (one you'd know so I won't say but it is tempting...) and she had in 1958 a black maid that wore a black dress with a white apron and cap, That was a contiguous ultra-wealthy area due to the views. I was a top of the hill kid. In those days, the poor lived among us more often that not. As a previous poster said, almost everyone worked. White families of course. We had not maids and my family couldn't afford to hire a cleaner.
Regional differences - the south? Maybe. Also, as Waiting said, "middle class" constituted a large cross section of incomes. We had a real middle class then. The top and the bottom much thinner.
So, in reading the article(your excerpts) I didn't find any support or evidence for author's opinion. The excerpts seem a little biased. Perhaps I'd feel differently if I had context. Also, picture not from fifties. But the comments were pretty interesting and varied and you might be interested in these which range from appliances to higher pay for women working elsewhere to range of middle class to onset of fast food and its employment of the new domestic worker working for minimum wage. Nothing is simple. But it was not common to have servants in the fifties for many, many middle class families and none that I know of. The very last comment mimicks mine.
MintDragon 8 months ago
This is interesting from an economic and social perspective. To paraphrase, the unskilled worker we will always have with us. Today, they work fast food. Yesterday, they would have been someone's hired help. The question is, what happens tomorrow?
registered_with_discus MintDragon 8 months ago
Well, the question is, how would total robotization (which is coming fairly soon) will change the work loads. Robots are already taking over manufacturing (the US manufacturing is on the rise... the jobs aren't). Fast food would be simple to take over as well. Household maintenance - might be trickier, but definitely doable too.
Thomas registered_with_discus 8 months ago
Dishwashers, washing machines, Roombas? Machines may not pick up after us (yet) but they're already doing a ton of household chores, or at least making them simpler, easier and less time-consuming.
marketkarma MintDragon 8 months ago
also missing (noticably) from the article above -- but hinted at by this: "Foreign girls do not go into housework for this reason. They prefer the fixed hours of factory and shop work."
the biggest reason why domestic help dissapeared: the rise in wages. People had better paying alternatives, often with better hours.
the creation of household work saving appliances was a reaction to the high cost of domestic help --- not the cause of domestic help jobs going away.
Mark Jackson veerkg_23 8 months ago
In Hong Kong, even the lower middle class often has live in domestic helpers-- and it can do so because the helpers come from developing countries. In Hong Kong it's much easier to afford a domestic helper than it is to afford a place to put her-- which is why a lot of domestic helpers sleep in the kitchen or living room.
Atheissimo marketkarma 8 months ago
And the disappearance of the social stigma around women doing factory and shop work. Until the end of the first world war and acute manpower shortages, it was often the only work that it was socially acceptable for a woman to do.
Bizarrely, my great grandmother (who had a maid) was herself a maid at a bigger house (think Downton) and only left to have children.
ducky_1374 Frank 8 months ago
But remember that middle class stretches from $30,000 to $100,000. P
John Wellington Wells 8 months ago
"Only a generation before middle-class housewives entered the workforce en masse, they enjoyed the assistance of nannies, cooks, and cleaners."
So there was at least one underclass family for every middle-class family that employed them. Being middle-class was somewhat of an elite status.
The prevalence of domestic help has undoubtedly changed, but so has our definition of middle-class. People now view middle-class as average or typical - what working class would have been a couple generations ago. The doctors, lawyers, business owners, scientists and politicians that used to make up the middle-class would now be called upper class, or at least upper middle class (a term which had to be invented since the definition of middle class became so watered down).
west_coast_ange John Wellington Wells 8 months ago
The definition of middle class wasn't diluted, it changed. What it meant to be middle class (employment, homeownership, savings, etc.) no longer fit, thus we needed a new term (upper middle class) to describe folks who still met those standards.
cxt 8 months ago
Interesting read.
Not sure I fully agree with how widespread it was to have a maid etc. Might have been a more regional thing.
But interesting read.