I used to feel befuddled that I seem unable to balance working full-time and maintaining a clean, well-run household. Then I stumbled across Ester Bloom’s article, “Maids in America: The Decline of Domestic Help,” in the Atlantic.
The article highlights the reason why so many of today’s middle-class families, especially women, feel pushed for time. “For centuries, a woman’s social status was clear-cut: Either she had a maid, or she was one.”
Bloom points out that ‘[o]nly a generation before middle-class housewives entered the workforce en masse, they enjoyed the assistance of nannies, cooks, and cleaners.”
“Today’s arrangement is a historical anomaly. Consider the genteel poverty of protagonists in novels by chroniclers of class such as Edith Wharton, Louisa May Alcott, and Jane Austen. Regardless of their reduced circumstances, these characters would have been shocked by the idea that they should be responsible for sweeping, let alone mopping, their own floors. In perhaps literature’s most extreme example, even the eternally optimistic but penniless Micawber family from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield can’t imagine giving up its servant.”
So, it’s not me. I just need some help.
