Quote:
Originally Posted by austlar1
Oh, Crawford, is your view of the world so constipated that it can only imagine the very, very wealthy having live-in domestic help as late as the 1950s? I grew up in a neighborhood that was built out 1920s through early 1950s. I guess it was an upper middle class neighborhood, but it adjoined neighborhoods of somewhat more modest homes built in the same period that quite often had the ubiquitous "servant's quarter" at the rear. Most of the houses in my neighborhood (Park Hill/ Fort Worth- behold my Gatsbyesque childhood home https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7192...2!8i6656?hl=en) had rear dwellings built over garages or as part of the garage. Garages were separate structures at the rear or the property. Most of these separate dwellings were considered to be "servant's quarters" and were usually referred to as such. Our servant's quarter was used for this purpose until around 1957 or 58. After that it sat empty, and I believe the current owners use it as a room for their teenage son. We did not have a pool back in the time I lived there. This was not a Gatsby-like lifestyle. Domestic labor was cheap and plentiful. A great many middle class and above households in Texas (and in many other parts of the US) during the 1950s had a maid or cook employed on a daily basis. Many of those domestics lived in the "servant's quarters" of these homes. |
I second this about Texas. In fact, my grandfather employed a team of a dozen or so UT students as live in and around the clock help for my grandmother from the late 80s through a scholarship endowed in his name at the school until they moved into a retirement facility in ~2015, and prior to that employed various household help, including a governess when my father was a child. Every house they ever built had accommodations integrated for those in household employ, and it was common throughout the south thru the 70s—often, until the
late 70s and the massive expansion of government bureaucracy and softening of racism allowing more options—women of color were often wrongly stopped from advancing past being domestic help, and because of the cheap labor supply, this provided the ability for middle class whites (rather than just the uppermost) to have a ready source of help. This practice only began to disappear when women of color began to have higher doors available for them to open, which is ~1976-78.
Understandably, a northerner would not fully be aware of this reality unless they’ve seen the film
The Help, which is set in ~1964.