When did the uber rich stop having live in servants?

[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.

[Anonymous]

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

Especially after Beebe Gallini canceled the contract of her perfume factory!

[Anonymous]

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch was a rural public defender and he had a live in maid and cook.

That wasn't unusual in the South before the war. There weren't many job options for black women. But then with WWII, men went away and the US ramped up production of many things to support the war effort, so better-paying factory and shipyard jobs, some of which were unionized, opened up and these women often left domestic work to take these jobs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In Asia live in help is still quite common. They are usually foreign workers who are paid very poorly for house cleaning, child care, and cooking. The homes aren’t necessarily large, but they have special small beds that fit in the small rooms available or the helper will sleep on the floor of the children’s room.

My friend had a Philippino maid for 7 years. She is single so the workload was light - cook for one person and clean a 2 bedroom apartment. The lady saved enough to buy a single family house back at home and retired.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My mother and MIL grew up with a full house staff in large homes. In my family, the housemaids lived in the top floor garret. The governess lived next to the girls' bedrooms on the third floor. My grandparents lived on the second floor, that also had guest rooms. My great-grandparents has a wing of the first floor. Rest of first floor was salons and dining room. Kitchen was in the basement.

Now they're in much smaller places: my mother hates having anyone come in and even refuses a cleaning lady, and my MIL has a rotation of aides that cook and clean for her, but they don't live in her house. The night nurse stays overnight, but doesn't "live" in the house.

I would love a daily maid, but I'm also a private person and would prefer she live in a separate building.

Are you a Vanderbilt?

She’s a liar or from India.

[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.

If you read literature of the prewar Era basically every household headed by a white-collar man has a housekeeper. Even if he's in his 20s working as a clerk. Would they have written this if it didn't ring true?

Every white collar worker also had an assigned secretary at work to do things like take dictation and messages, even if they weren't in a very high up position, and that's dwindling.

+1
Darn those post-war women who wanted equality rather than to be free labor!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

If you read literature of the prewar Era basically every household headed by a white-collar man has a housekeeper. Even if he's in his 20s working as a clerk. Would they have written this if it didn't ring true?

Every white collar worker also had an assigned secretary at work to do things like take dictation and messages, even if they weren't in a very high up position, and that's dwindling.

At my law firm in the 2010s, I had a secretary as a first year associate. She took notes during meetings, sent ticklers, and other admin stuff. She also picked up my dry cleaning, arranged the town car for me, planned my trips, etc.

In my F100 company in the early 2000s I sat in a cube on a floor with everyone else - no admin, no secretary, we booked our own trips and town car through the corporate web interface. My starting salary was $110k +bonus. Management had the same set up. Now I’m management and we have a fancier portal but still do everything for ourselves - salary ~$400k +much larger bonus. Last time I had an office with a door was in grad school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My mother and MIL grew up with a full house staff in large homes. In my family, the housemaids lived in the top floor garret. The governess lived next to the girls' bedrooms on the third floor. My grandparents lived on the second floor, that also had guest rooms. My great-grandparents has a wing of the first floor. Rest of first floor was salons and dining room. Kitchen was in the basement.

Now they're in much smaller places: my mother hates having anyone come in and even refuses a cleaning lady, and my MIL has a rotation of aides that cook and clean for her, but they don't live in her house. The night nurse stays overnight, but doesn't "live" in the house.

I would love a daily maid, but I'm also a private person and would prefer she live in a separate building.

Are you a Vanderbilt?

No, European aristocracy. Castles, etc.

Ah, to mean liar who reads old fashioned books - now it makes sense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

If you read literature of the prewar Era basically every household headed by a white-collar man has a housekeeper. Even if he's in his 20s working as a clerk. Would they have written this if it didn't ring true?

Every white collar worker also had an assigned secretary at work to do things like take dictation and messages, even if they weren't in a very high up position, and that's dwindling.

At my law firm in the 2010s, I had a secretary as a first year associate. She took notes during meetings, sent ticklers, and other admin stuff. She also picked up my dry cleaning, arranged the town car for me, planned my trips, etc.

In my F100 company in the early 2000s I sat in a cube on a floor with everyone else - no admin, no secretary, we booked our own trips and town car through the corporate web interface. My starting salary was $110k +bonus. Management had the same set up. Now I’m management and we have a fancier portal but still do everything for ourselves - salary ~$400k +much larger bonus. Last time I had an office with a door was in grad school.

Yeah, that isn't comparable. At all. It is a much lower paying career in which you didn't even have an office. Of course you didn't have a secretary.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Live-in help is not great unless you have a separate guest house. We hated having a live-in nanny, for example, and after a brief experiment with it, we found we were happy to pay a higher rate for a live-out nanny.

This. My SIL said I would get used to it but I never did. Live-out help is the way for people that value their privacy.

I didn't even like having a live-out nanny. I've always found the relationships my friends' families have with their nannies to be strange with kind of blurry boundaries, plus I'd hear stories about things like salary negotiations with an existing nanny where you are negotiating with someone that you think of as kind of an extension of your family and it just made me feel icky. We didn't do a nanny for this reason. I prefer the professionalism of a childcare center where the staff is more like the teachers at a preschool -- we had warm relationships with them, my kid really loved them, but the childcare was happening in a facility designed for that purpose and they weren't in my home and we weren't in each other's lives in such an intimate way. I think it makes things blurry in a way I do not like.

You are not who OP is talking about. Your MC roots are so bright, your post is blinding. OP is talking about very rich people with options and means. No one would choose a sterile center over quality private individualized care for a child, unless they didn’t didn’t love their children. Go ahead and display your roots again by justifying your way of doing things - so MC.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Maybe some, but I work with many upper class Asians. One even told me that Brahmins in the US only marry Brahmins. I also have a Chinese colleague who is still on Mommy&Daddy’s payroll, despite making $300k/yr. They (Asians) keep coming in droves because it’s literally a better life - if it wasn’t, as you suggest, they wouldn’t come.

Plus, what you didn’t mention is the quality of life sucks in Asian countries because it is so f-ing crowded, traffic is oppressive, and it’s DIRTY DIRTY DIRTY (except Singapore; Singapore is very clean but at the expense of personal freedom).