Does anyone know of a good source on American households and servants in the 20th century?
I ask because last year, I saw Bill Maher on stage expressing bewilderment at how middle-class families so often hire cleaners, gardeners, nannies and so on - as if they couldn't do the work themselves. Apparently, that wasn't at all common in his NJ neighborhood when he was a child - in the 1960s. And those people aren't even necessarily full-time help, today.
But...and this didn't surprise me much, though it might surprise him - in 1903, according to one source I found, 18% of American households had at least one full-time domestic servant. (That would certainly explain the humorist James Thurber's attitude; he sometimes made it sound as though, as a teen boy in the pre-WWI era, he hardly knew anyone who DIDN'T have servants.) And that was back when middle-class women typically became stay-at-home mothers. Granted, there were no automatic household appliances back then, so having a servant would likely have been very welcome.
So again, does anyone know of a book or a timeline that shows how common it was for middle-class households to have outside help on a regular basis, full-time or not?
Thanks.