Essay: 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."