When did the uber rich stop having live in servants?

[Anonymous]

My grandmother grew up in NYC with 11 live-in servants, all European immigrants. Both their city and country houses were built with servants in mind -- 12 small bedrooms segregated from the family, a servants hall, etc. Some people may still live that way, but few of those fifth ave mansions remain in private hands for reasons.

- labor costs are so much higher
- being a "servant" -- or "in service" as the English used to say -- has lost whatever appeal it may once have had.
- who wants one constantly under foot?
- people have other options for food than having someone serve them three meals a day at home
- modern conveniences eliminate so much of the drudgery that used to be required to run a household

But in countries with cheaper labor -- India, China -- household staff is still common.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Live in help was commonplace for the UMC up through the 1940s. Cheap immigrant labor and cheap black labor made it possible, along with far fewer labor saving devices. Cooking wasn't as fun as it is today, for example. And when it's relatively cheap to have many servants, the very wealthy could create lifestyles and elaborate homes based on having full staff, their lives were really that much more formal.

After the war the pool of affordable labor dried up, though lasted another 20 years for inexpensive black labor, but by the late 60s it was rapidly fading out for the UMC (according to my mother, it went from 1940s live in to 1950s daily help who came in the morning and left once she got dinner ready to the 1960s several times a week to the 1970s once a week). Labor costs spared and now comes with all the social and Healthcare benefits if you have full time help.

There are still very wealthy with help but even that world has changed. It's far more private, people don't want to see help around so they're not waited upon at the table, but the help takes on different forms. You have personal assistants, personal stylists, personal chefs, house managers.

Something tells me that your definition of UMC is a lot different from mine.

Some circumstantial evidence: most of the larger pre-war apartments in NYC’s nicer buildings were built with maid quarters- a small room with en suite bathroom, located behind the kitchen. This is not just in fancy areas of Manhattan; the 6 story pre-war buildings in outer boroughs are built the same.

Central Park Tower, above the Nordstrom in Manhattan, has full floor apartments with a maid's suite with a separate entry. This is within the kitchen and laundry area. This is not pre-war as it was built around covid times.

Yes, built as a luxury building, and it's an exception. The vast majority of post-war builds in NYC do not have that feature. 15 CPW offered maids' suites that many original owners bought and then resold or rented out for exorbitant prices.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Rich stopped having servants after the World Wars. You should watch a movie like “The Remains of the Day” to understand why.

For the love of god it is a book. A book. Yes it was turned into a movie. But the book is phenomenal.

I haven’t read it or seen it. So what’s the reason, as presented in this?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We had a housekeeper from about 1965-1982. She did all of the cleaning and took care of three kids from 8-6 while my mom was at work. Most of the families on my street had the same set up and they were all Black women from the South.

Where did you grow up?

[Anonymous]

My great grandmother had a lot of live in help. She lived in Boston. When my grandmother (her daughter) started having babies in quick succession, my great grandmother SENT one of her housemaids to SC (where my grandparents had settled) to take care of the babies. I cannot imagine ordering another human being to move multiple states away to take care of children. This was in the late 1940s. The housemaid stayed several years and then went back to Boston. Wtf.

[Anonymous]

My friend married a billionaire. They both grew up UMC and her day to day is surprisingly normal. She picks up her kids from (private) school, she hosts play dates, she cooks dinner. Shes actually extremely normal except for the fact that she has no idea how much anything costs and she really doesn’t know how to do anything beyond cook basic meals for her family and shop.

No live in help at their main house nor at their 2 vacation homes. They have a personal assistant who does all the bills, scheduling, appointments, etc. But their yacht, which is typically docked in the Bahamas, is fully staffed at all times. I guess maintaining the yacht requires full time attention. It’s very nice - when we go, the crew cook all the meals, do our laundry, clean the rooms and basically cater to your every need. The crew are typically not US. They are typically young and from places like South Africa. They usually stay 2-ish years and then new ones cycle in.

They also have a pilot on standby at all times for their private plane (the husband - ie the billionaire - is also a pilot but his plane is big enough they like to have 2 pilots for every trip).

[Anonymous]

I know several people with live in help, but most of them actually aren't rich. One is a family with a live in au-pair from another country. The other families I know with live-in help are people from the Middle East or India (or at least one of the couple has parents from there). Culturally, they are way more used to having live-in servants.

Personally, I wouldn't want someone in my space all the time and I don't want anyone touching my underwear! But I'm that person who avoids being home while my housecleaners come because I find it awkward, and I also heavily pre-clean (not just declutter, but I'm talking scrubbing the stove, vacuuming, wiping up dust and hair in the corners of the bathroom...) before they come every 2 weeks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most in home housekeepers and staff have their own place and come to the jobsite to work just like you and I.

Ok, but when did this change?

After World War Two

Get ready to see this come back

People are going to have no where to work they will want to be housed and they will be servants treated like crap and paid pennies They can all thank the cult of stupidity

Trumps supporters who are rich peers of mine are already discussing this. Women should be particularly worried. But hey you know nothing to worry about piggy’s got it under control.

Maga has no idea what they have done to their children’s lives

No, it started to change in the roaring 20s. Just watch Downton Abbey - it was a phenomenon across Europe too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My rich Asian mom always says it's a hard and sad life in America that we have to live without helpers as we did overseas; she's shocked that I have to cook, clean, and do my own laundry.

I was also annoyed by this but i married an american spouse they seem to think i am entitled.

However, I bet once you experience the lifestyle of the asian upper class, you don't want to live in the US.

Then why the heck to they keep coming here!

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Quality of service in America is horrible across the board - domestic help, at stores, at work, at school, on calls. Many are illiterate and/or ESOL- more lost in translations (voluntary or involuntary!).

Think of how many times you find mistakes in orders, sizes, your instructions, the final product? Now multiply that for someone you give the keys to your house and your kids to.

Other countries people have more pride in their work- like Japan. No need to double check anything.

Other countries domestic service industry is more professional- se Asia, Mideast, Eastern Europe. No matter, they get here, act entitled, assume everyone is a multi millionaire, and quality of service declines— especially if you’re weak at managing people and tasks.

So many do-the-bare-minimum workers here. Such a PITA. Thus when and if you find someone who cares you pay more. But do not pay more for imposters.

Um, no.

We're expats. I've had live-in help in multiple countries, including Russia, India, Singapore, and China. It isn't what you think. It isn't good for anybody, even the fortunate employers of the live-in help. In India, especially, you have to deaden part of your soul in order to share space with someone so very unfortunate, with so limited a future and so miserable a life, to have this, and EVERY lower to upper middle class to upper class person there has a maid. The maids are regularly taken out of school and put into live-in servant (slave) situations, and beating, rapes, and mistreatment of the help is, from what I saw, the norm. It warps something in the culture that embraces such a system.

That’s an exaggeration.

- multiple times expat and FSO

That's my post you responded to, and it absolutely is not an exaggeration.

We're in Singapore now, and I wouldn't say the "helpers", as live-in maids are called here, are treated well, but they are treated SO MUCH better than the house maids in India.

It's very much against egalitarian American culture to desire that kind of personal waiting on and as another PP said, it's seen as lazy, weak and a liability to not care for your own basics no matter how wealthy you are.

Anyone who feels so small inside (looking at you trump) who feels like this is a good system and they can lord it over people have something very wrong with them. People who brag about how it is in other countries are being very unself-aware and extremely out of touch.

There is a long history of servants and help in the US. The idea that Americans are uncomfortable with home help is always more fiction than reality, given that Americans had no problems having help in the past. My 1930s UMC colonial was built with a live in maid's room and bathroom and my own American ancestors had cooks and maids and housekeepers and they were solidly UMC people, not Vanderbilts. Most of their help were immigrants. Live in help died out due to costs and lack of interest from people who'd have been help in the past. But even today there's not much to differentiate cleaning services dominated by recent immigrants or the waves of Irish or German or Scandinavian girls who served a few years as maids in the 19th and early 20th century before finding a better job.

Incidentally, that is what Trump's mother did when she first came over from Scotland. She worked as a maid for a year or two before she met and married Trump's father.

It's not fiction. Plenty of people who can afford the help simply don't want that level of enmeshment and dependency in their own home for the reasons mentioned. What other reason would there be for not using this help you have the room and funds for? Americans are just different.

Sure, theres always those who pretend to have some kind of self imposed and invented moral guilt. If servants were as inexpensive here as in many other countries, far more people would have live in help. It is just a step up from nannies that many people go through with for a few years. Or a combination of nanny and cleaners. Live in help faded away because it just got too expensive and impractical, but we still have millions of cleaners and Uber eats as substitutes for having cooks and maids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My rich Asian mom always says it's a hard and sad life in America that we have to live without helpers as we did overseas; she's shocked that I have to cook, clean, and do my own laundry.

I was also annoyed by this but i married an american spouse they seem to think i am entitled.

However, I bet once you experience the lifestyle of the asian upper class, you don't want to live in the US.

Then why the heck to they keep coming here!

The Asian upper class typically do not move here full-time. I have a relative who is part of this set and this relative lives in Singapore most of the time but has a place in NYC, which is pretty typical among their circle. They went to boarding school and college and business school in the USA, and will probably send their kids to school in the USA.

[Anonymous]

I still want to know how Mike Brady afforded Alice on an architects salary.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Rich stopped having servants after the World Wars. You should watch a movie like “The Remains of the Day” to understand why.

For the love of god it is a book. A book. Yes it was turned into a movie. But the book is phenomenal.

I haven’t read it or seen it. So what’s the reason, as presented in this?

It's written from the point of view of the butler who is wholly committed to his role and questions nothing about the system. Through his eyes, we see the politics of the gentrt of the time--WWII. It is a fascinating character study. It's also a really good film with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

[Anonymous]

We had a maid when I was growing who we got to know well. This was in the 1960s and she was an older woman at the time. She had come to the US from the Philippines as a teenager to work at a house in San Francisco. They had upstairs and downstairs maids and women who just did laundry, one just did ironing, etc. She lived there but not sure about all of them. A large staff and an opulent home. She talked about how sad and lonely she was and the woman of the house comforting her--she'd probably seen it before. It was probably in the 1910s or 20s.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I know several people with live in help, but most of them actually aren't rich. One is a family with a live in au-pair from another country. The other families I know with live-in help are people from the Middle East or India (or at least one of the couple has parents from there). Culturally, they are way more used to having live-in servants.

Personally, I wouldn't want someone in my space all the time and I don't want anyone touching my underwear! But I'm that person who avoids being home while my housecleaners come because I find it awkward, and I also heavily pre-clean (not just declutter, but I'm talking scrubbing the stove, vacuuming, wiping up dust and hair in the corners of the bathroom...) before they come every 2 weeks.

We Americans have awkwardness around class boundaries. That's why we prefer our servants anonymous. Cleaning lady who you avoid seeing, Uber driver who doesn't make conversation, delivery guys who bring things unobtrusively and get paid on the app, nail salon lady who doesn't speak English...
A sibling married into an Indian family and they are the complete opposite. They love lording it over the help.