Finding Time: Whatever Happened To Servants?

What ever happened to servants?  I watch old movies and everyone had servants.  Even bachelors had a man who did all the cooking and cleaning.  The Bradys had Alice.  On Bonanza they had Hop Sing the Chinaman (that's what people called them then).  In black and white movies there was always some woman (often a negro woman) dressed in a crisply starched uniform who brought in the cocktails at the end of a long day.  Rich people had butlers, even if they did end up being the one who killed the guy.  Back in Gone With The Wind days they had slaves, which were servants you adopted like a pet. On Leave It To Beaver, Mrs. Cleaver was the servant.  Remember when moms stayed home and baked cookies for afternoon snacks and wore those cute little dresses so they would be pretty when their man came home?  Remember those days?

Can we please have those days back again?  OK, while I was writing that I began to realize the answer to my own question.  There seems to have been an issue with human dignity in the whole servant issue.  Chinamen and negros weren't really human, were they?  Certainly slaves weren't.  Eventually, as we became a more enlightened world, we began to wake up to the fact that all humans are first-class humans, and that no segment of the population should be made to serve another segment.  I think we may have gotten a little carried away with that.  Just saying.  I mean, no one could call a butler undignified, so what happened, really?

Before World War II (I'm going by movies here; I'm no historian), servants seem to have been more prevalent.  In the 1950s, we see the mom staying home and doing all the work herself so that her man would have a nice home and the kids would always have a beautiful, well-dressed mommy to come home to (and warm cookies).  Then, women got uppity and were no longer content to stay home and take care of the house.  They wanted to become doctors and lawyers and rocket scientists.  Instead, they became secretaries and waitresses, but at least they were earning their own money.  Eventually, most women entered the workforce, which left no one at home minding the oven.  Slowly, insidiously, we have reached the point where everyone has a job.  Everyone has to have a job.  It's the only way we can survive in this expensive world.

So now, no one is left at home to do the cooking and the cleaning.  And now, it is no longer politically correct to have servants.  And now, my house is a disaster on most days, with unwashed dishes and a dirty floor.  What kind of cruel trick is that?  The servant thing wasn't such a bad system, was it?  People who were born into lower classes could become servants and then get to spend their lives living in beautiful mansions they didn't pay for.  Is that so wrong?  When we were younger, my brother wanted to grow up to be a butler for just that reason.  I thought he was crazy, but now I'm beginning to realize he was on to something.

Back when I was a French major, I remember having this conversation with one of my colleagues.  We always spoke French when we were together, because that's how you learn a foreign language.  On that particular day I remember complaining about not having enough time to do all the housework, and I made the comment that I wished I had a wife who would take care of all that for me.  Only in French the word for wife is femme, the same word that means woman; and unfortunately for me, my colleague was a lesbian. So for a while I was very popular among the French Lesbian crowd, until they all realized it was just a bad translation.  But I digress.

There are only so many hours in a day, and we must spend those hours doing the most important things and letting the other things slide.  I've gotten very good at ignoring dirty dishes and unwashed floors, simply because it does no good to stress over them.  But not having food to eat after a long day at the pool store is where I'm beginning to draw the line.  Sure, I know how to use a crock pot.  But I think the world is ready for another shift.  Just as not every woman should have been forced to stay home to cook and clean, not every human in America should be forced to go out and get a job.  Someone should be encouraged to stay home and take care of the busy working people.  There are actually some people out there who would prefer to stay home and take care of the people. 

Maybe if more people started thinking this way, we'd see ads on Craig's List for live-in homemakers that weren't code for "I want someone to be my bitch."  Maybe we could have some sort of communal living arrangement where everyone gets to contribute what they do best:  some would be wage earners and some would be support personnel, staying home to bake the cookies.  Maybe we could do away with money entirely so that no one would have to work and we could ALL stay home and bake cookies. (Oh, no!  My friend Lee is right -- I AM a communist!)  

Given a choice, I will always be the one who goes out to work.  When I was a kid playing house with my brother, I used to make him stay home and watch the babies while I went off to work with the briefcase.  He hated that game, because I would spend the time shuffling papers around and calling it work, while he sat in the stairwell with our "family."  When he tried to walk away from all the dolls because he was bored out of his mind, I would yell at him, "Get back there and take care of those babies!"  I was kind of bossy. 

The point of all this socio-political rambling is that I need help.  I am fortunate to be doing work that I enjoy, but I work from 5:30 every morning until about 8:00 every night, most of it spent away from home.  I can't find a way to manufacture more time, or to clone myself; but I am no longer willing to live in a dirty house.  I am no longer willing to live on fast food.  I want real meals and a clean kitchen.  I want a clean floor and a bed that stays made, with lavender-scented pillows.  I want a mom, a wife, a servant, a butler.  Whatever.  I want help!  I want someone who will take care of me so that when my work day is done there's a hot meal waiting for me.  And maybe some cookies.  Is that really so wrong?