Americans and their servants: Domestic service in the United States from 1800 to 1920

by Daniel E. Sutherland

hardcover

229 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1981

Reviews

[Michael Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Except for the very wealthy, the only picture most modern Americans have of live-in house servants comes from watching Downton Abbey. But up until the First World War, it was common for even modestly middle class families to have at least a full-time “maid of all work” -- a job that could use you up in a short time but which was frequently the lot of girls under the age of twenty. The “servant problem,” as Sutherland convincingly shows, was a constant subject of conversation and correspondence in all regions of the country and in every decade of the 19th century, although most complainants seemed to think things were better elsewhere or at an earlier time in our history. A great many servants came from among the crowds of newly arrived immigrants, who were considered inferior by Anglo Americans in any case, and who bolstered the need of the theoretically democratic to be superior to someone. And while having servants was partly a matter of status, it was mostly a practical necessity: No housewife, especially with children, had the time nor the strength to single-handedly cook, clean house, raise kids, and deal with merchants. The arrival of vacuum cleaners and other labor-saving inventions in the early 20th century took the pressure off, and the competitive rise in industrial wages meant additional economic options for the laboring classes. This is a fascinating, well-written, thoroughly documented study, especially for a converted doctoral thesis. It should be of interest to any student of American social history.

[Dawson Escott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty solid and comprehensive look through the history of servant work in the US. The author chooses to frame everything in the context of "the servant problem", the pervasive bemoaning of employers that it's impossible to find good help these days. I go back and forth on the utility of this choice-- on one hand, it's sort of fun to have a central concept like that and it helps to chart the history of labor reform for servants and the class conflicts which arose along the decades. On the other hand, this framing makes it so that the servants and employers are always viewed at odds with eachother in an almost naturalistic, deterministic, way, that could only be escaped through the technological and architectural advancements that eventually erased live-in servants as a profession. I'd like to think that perhaps (as servant relations varied so wildly from house to house) employer/employee relationships weren't so utterly antagonistic, and that this frame makes those tensions appear more inevitable than they truly were, but who am I to say for sure?

The information provided here is great, and really the book gets a whole extra star for its bibliographic essay at the end compiling all kinds of primary sources. The book as a whole makes a case for the wealth to be found in these primary sources, when previously I had kind of assumed the historic record regarding this neglected working class would be dead and dry. As a resource it's been indispensable in me writing my own historic house tour.

But the language itself can be a bit by-the-books and the whole book falls into a sometimes tedious pattern of topic sentence followed by series of historic anecdotes, rinse and repeat. That's not to besmirch the anecdotes, many of which are really interesting, but the vehicle which conveys all that info gets a little dull. There's lots of compelling themes and patterns which the research compiled hints at but is kind of ignored by the author. Even so as a reader you can connect some great dots.

ALL that being said, if anyone reading this review knows of some more contemporary secondary sources about servant lives and labor, please let me know what they are!! Surely the field has really advanced since 1981, but I haven't heard or found anything major in the following years.