HELP WANTED: Maybe Mary Poppins, Inc.

COULD there be a connection between history and the parlor maid, between civilization and nanny? It has been seriously suggested that Greece began to decline when it acquired too many servants. It was also suggested, long ago and no less earnestly, that the West is declining because it does not have enough servants. "Destroy the leisure class, and you destroy civilization," said J. P. Morgan, who defined the leisure class as those families who kept at least one "in help." J.P. will hardly be remembered as a dazzling social philosopher, a Spengler of Wall Street, but the question of leisure--what it is, who has it, and how to use it--haunts anyone who thinks about the nature of American life. The U.S. has created the world's first middle-class society, which enjoys (so it is widely held) not only spectacular luxury but unprecedented leisure. Yet the U.S. has also created what can logically be called the world's first servantless society.

Throughout most of history, no household of any substance woke, ate, played, lived or died without servants in attendance. Not so in the U.S. The fact is not just something for wives to natter about over the pink extension phone; most of them have stopped nattering about it long ago and accept it as a matter of course. Servantless living is so much a part of the American scene that a family with two cars in the garage, a kidney-shaped swimming pool, three TV sets, a $1,000 stereophonic unit, and a vacation cottage in the mountains may not notice that anything is missing. As long ago as 1922, Sociologist Paul W. Brown wrote: "Of all the new things given to the world by the U.S., the well-to-do servantless house holds perhaps the biggest significance."

Back to the Frontier

What caused the phenomenon is, of course, the invincible development of an industrial supereconomy, which created U.S. prosperity along with the tireless machines, the miracles of transport and communication, the manifold service industries that perform many of the functions once performed by servants. The same is happening in Western Europe; only backward countries are still without a "servant problem."

The transformation of the domestic servant into a blueor white-collar worker means a great increase in efficiency in some areas, from frozen foods to dry cleaning. This does not necessarily produce a better way of smoothly coping with existence or gaining greater leisure. As Historian John Niven puts it: "My wife is as chained to the washing machine as she would be to the scrubbing board." The helpless life can create a nagging drudgery, a constant, often semiconscious preoccupation with the details of living, with intractable objects, impersonal mechanisms and complex logistics required for the simplest acts.

No one can calculate the loss of time or energy this represents--at the very moment when more men and women are needed more urgently than ever to do creative brainwork. The computer culture that can perform the undreamed-of in milliseconds is in its domestic style drifting back to the frontier, with people eating in the kitchen (a kitchen often blended into the living room) and organizing the family to do the domestic chores. Taking note of this, Russell Lynes observed: "We have moved a long way mechanically; we are almost where we started humanly."

Some years ago, any such complaint might well have been regarded as capricious and reactionary in an economic sense, for expanding industry required all the menial workers it could get. With automation, this is no longer so. For the first time in more than a century, this makes a revival of domestic service possible--at least in theory. The U.S. Government and many individuals are exploring what, if anything, can be done about it in practice. Some levels of society are actually beginning to see some hope for help.

"A servantless society is unrealistic," says Psychologist Emerson Coyle. "In one sense all human beings are servants --of others, of institutions." All those literary paragons of fidelity or service--Plautus' Pseudolus, Shakespeare's Adam, Moliere's Sganarelle, Beaumarchais' Figaro, Passepartout in Around the World in 80 Days and, preeminently, Jeeves reflect the fact that the servant has been a constant presence in civilization. He has been his master's public-relations man in dealing with the world, often his companion, sometimes his conscience. If no man is a hero to his valet, many a valet has been a hero to his master. Well into the 17th century, writes French Historian Philippe Aries, the relationship was "something which went beyond respect or exploitation, an existential bond which resulted from an almost perpetual community of life."

Live-in Husbands

Servants could be a burden, too. Don Quixote, contemplating the snoring Sancho Panza mused: "The valet sleeps while the master sits up, wondering how to feed him." Sometimes there have just been too many of them -- a goldbricking embarrassment of riches. An 18th century English gentleman with the present-day equivalent of $35,000 a year was expected to have at least six female and five male servants, and the Countess of Northumberland had nine matched footmen to march before her sedan chair, drink her liquor, seduce her maids and steal her blind.

In strenuously democratic America, the servant situation was always a bit different. As early as 1827, Novelist Anthony Trollope's mother, who took a crack at housekeeping in Cincinnati, complained eloquently about her troubles getting "help" -- not servants, "for it is more than petty treason to the republic to call a free citizen a servant." She found that there was such aversion to this way of life, in fact, that "hundreds of half-naked girls work in the paper mills for less than half the wages they would receive in service."

In the U.S. today, the girls are considerably better dressed and paid-- and even more reluctant to enter domestic service. Of all working women, nearly 18% were household employees in 1940; now the percentage is only a little over 8% , or about 2,000,000, and more than half of them are in the South where the pay is still low. In Atlanta or Nashville, the going rate for a daily maid is $6 a day. Many Southern cities have "maids' buses," which grind out of town at 9:30 each morning loaded with Negro women and trek them back from the suburbs again in the afternoon.

Elsewhere, the situation is far different. In the Los Angeles area, live-in help commands $225-$350 a month, plus a private bath, a TV set, and usually the use of a car. A suburbanite of Chicago's North Shore, whose husband earns $30,000 to $40,000 a year, pays her live-in maid $60 a week for six days, plus room and board, for which she keeps the house clean and stays with the children when the parents go out. The mother makes the beds, cooks, does the dishes and much of the gardening, takes care of the children. Once a week an additional maid comes in to do heavy work, and another woman is needed to take care of the children when the mother has a luncheon or an afternoon appointment.

Other, richer employers set up trusts to provide retirement incomes for servants, write legacies into their wills, and hand out handsome Christmas bonuses. But most people have given up on full-time help. And the "daily" is all too often not as daily as she should be-- absent by reason of mysterious seizures, or late because of traffic jams. One of the real problems is the time and effort it takes to travel between the poor sections of the city, where the servants live, to the spreading suburbs, where the jobs are. In most areas, the only live-in helps are husbands.

Ironically, as the supply of servants is declining, the demand is increasing, not just because more people can afford them, but because more women are going to work, or want to. As Millicent Mclntosh, former president of Barnard College, put it: "The absence of domestic help sounds like a very mundane thing to consider, but what on earth is the use of spending tremendous amounts of money on education if, when people get through, they can't leave home?" Among "the greatest hazards" for female college graduates, she added, is the fact that they tend to abandon their intellectual talents "because they are swamped by the routines of bringing up children in a servantless world."

There are other sides to the argument. The absence of servants, it is said, ensures delightful privacy. Professor Clifford Kirkpatrick of Indiana University claims that "the servantless life results in shared work and play within the family group," and "makes for cooperation with relatives and friends"; besides, "if there were servants as in the old South, wives might get too lazy to go back to work after the children are grown." Some American wives accept such rationalizations and often insist on "doing everything" themselves; this may result in a serene sense of accomplishment, but just as often in a martyred claim on the family's sympathy, admiration and help.

Secretaries or Servants

The majority of American housewives know that servants can destroy privacy--but they also know that it is destroyed in the close-quarter living in small houses that are small partly because of the lack of servants. They know that leaving the raising of children entirely to hired nurses can be bad for the child--but that a mother's constant, overworked and irritable attendance can be just as bad. They know that cooking is fun--but also that having to jump up and down before and during dinner to rush kitchenward destroys what little is left of the game of conversation in the U.S. They know that waxing a floor or putting up curtains can be satisfying or at least therapeutic--but they also know that time spent reading a book or working on a hospital committee, quite apart from an office career, tends to make them more interesting and possibly even more cheerful. No one will ever know how many marriages could have been saved from divorce by the presence of competent servants.

Quite a few housewives more or less cheerfully give up the struggle. "The house isn't a burden because I haven't let it become so," says Mrs. Alden G. Pearce of Beverly Hills. "Housework is like whisky--it keeps." Adds one Van Nuys, Calif., housewife: "I would be completely ashamed if any of my friends caught me off guard with my house completely tidy and spotless. It would look as though I didn't have anything better to do than stay home and clean."

As for husbands, in an increasingly specialized, increasingly denatured culture it may be fine for a high-pressure businessman to do chores about the house on weekends. But on Monday, in the office, he would feel justly abused if there were no one to type his letters, place his long-distance calls, or in a hundred different ways be an agent and intermediary between him and the surrounding world. The secretary, in fact, is the only good--and socially acceptable--servant left in America.

Should busy housewives be entitled to the domestic equivalent of a secretary? Why not? One reason is simply the expense. But many women might prefer to do without other luxuries in exchange for the boon of competent help. The key word is competent; too many servants, even when they are available, are unwilling and untrained, and it may take more time supervising them than doing the work oneself. Often, however, this is the fault of the employer. American women are not good at handling servants, being either too bossy or too familiar, and failing to set down reasonable but precise demands.

Theoretically, there ought now to be a considerable supply of household help. While the overall unemployment in the U.S. is low, among nonwhite girls between the ages of 16 and 21, for example, it runs as high as 28%. There is also a growing number of retired people, one of whose familiar complaints is that they have nothing to do with the balance of their lives; certain kinds of household work might provide the answer.

The trouble is that being a servant is still regarded with as much loathing as in Mrs. Trollope's day; almost any kind of job, even the most numbing mechanical assembly-line chore, is preferred to the potentially rewarding task of helping to care for a home and children. The U.S. Department of Labor is aware of the problem, and sponsors dozens of training centers all over the U.S. intended to guide unskilled or unemployed people into domestic service. Some of the centers are doing well, particularly since they have dropped the term "domestic service" and have begun using such euphemisms as household assistants, home attendants, home care, working housekeepers. Author Caroline Bird of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., snared dozens of live-in applicants by running an ad for a woman to share her country house with her and act as "honorary aunt" for her small son.

Many agencies look for servants from abroad and, with patience and good will, the imported domestic works out--at least until she learns enough English to find out what the other girls on the block are earning. But importing servants is not the answer. If there is an answer at all, it must lie in reorganizing and rationalizing the whole field, recognizing that it is not a trivial luxury but often a necessity. At a time when service businesses have begun to employ more people than industry in the U.S., domestic help deserves at least as much ingenuity as other service enterprises. The newly formed National Committee on Household Employment is dedicated to this proposition, and Chairman Ethyln Christensen says: "There is growing recognition that domestic service needs to be overhauled, to raise training and employment standards. Not just anybody should be a servant. We need highly skilled people. And we need training among employers as well as employees."

The Impersonal Touch

Apart from image building and training, any real improvement in the situation will require: 1) better or at least standardized pay, normal hours, health coverage and other fringe benefits competitive with business; 2) imaginative private enterprise to provide transportation and placement service so that unused labor in one area can be moved where the demand is; 3) specialization, for the notion of the all-purpose servant may well be as obsolete as the notion of the all-purpose doctor.

Big U.S. cities already have firms that one calls for servants, as one calls the plumber or the electrician, to do a specific job, and leave. The job can be anything--waxing the floors, washing the windows, cleaning the rugs, usually at $2 an hour and up. A housewife can arrange for a dinner for 36 or for someone to give the children their lunch and take them swimming, by simply lifting the telephone, without worry about transportation, insurance, social security deductions, and--"we'll bill you later."

Service, as it were, untouched by human hands. Social Psychology Professor Fred Strodtbeck of the University of Chicago explains: "The people who go into domestic service dislike having to deal with the middle-class housewife as a person and being subject to her directions. They prefer to work not singly but in teams, to wear a uniform which helps define their on-the-job role, and to have an office through which the work is scheduled. Within the sphere of house cleaning, say, such a team would thus feel superior to the woman who hires them, no longer fearful of being put down by a housewife. And for her part the housewife is likely to prefer a professional operation in which she is expected not to guide the work but merely to approve the results."

This pattern may spread, may well be the shape of domestic service in an industrial democracy. And so, alas, exeunt Jeeves, Passepartout and Pseudolus, to become IBM cards in the files of an impersonal Mary Poppins, Inc. No "existentialist bond" perhaps, no love lost, no mutual dependence. But at least--and at best--a new, professional sense of service and a more civilized life.

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