Anyone have a maid when growing up?

[V.C. Brunswick]

Though nowadays we have too many people who can't cook, sew, type, etc, who DIDN'T have a maid. :doh:

 

[jamespowers]

Though nowadays we have people who can't cook, sew, type, etc, who DIDN'T have a maid. :doh:

My thoughts exactly. Useless no matter what you do with them.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

My grandparents on my dad's side worked as house servants for an Army doctor (in fact he delivered both my dad and uncle). Years later he became a general and would often visit my grandparents when he was in town. You'd see this Army staff car pull up to my grandparents house.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My thoughts exactly. Useless no matter what you do with them.

If it's any consolation, my friend feels great shame at her unearned class privilege, and has become even more of a pinko than I am. She still can't sew a button, but I'm working on getting her into the remedial class I run for the kids.

 

[1mach1]

We were never privalaged enough to have a maid. We called Mom the maid.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Well, we were definitely a working class family and, like I said, we had a maid that came in two days per week. Now this was in the 1960s and '70s, and my parents didn't pay her a great deal. About $30 per week, cash, as I recall. Adjusted for inflation that's about like $150 today. I believe she worked for other families the rest of the week too, so assuming they paid her about the same, she probably earned the equivalent of around $375 per week in today's money.

I don't know what you call working class. I believe I was raised in a working class household. My father was an electrician which made him one of the highest paid hourly employees in the factory where he worked. In 1960 his take home pay was $120 a week. Assembly line workers in the same factory got about $75. Guys who worked in stores and gas stations got $50 or $60.

There is no way anyone in our set would have thought of hiring a maid. That was something rich people did in the movies.

My grandfather was disabled by miner's consumption (silicosis) from sandblasting bathtubs for Crane Plumbing Fixtures and my grandmother worked as a domestic at an exclusive boys' school.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Same here.

Apropos this discussion, I was talking recently with a friend who had an upbringing the opposite of mine in just about every possible way -- she was raised the upper-middle-class daughter of a well-off professional-oriented family, had maids and nannies and such, went to private schools, etc, etc, etc. I was watching her type and commented on how, here she was with a PhD, and she was two-finger-pecking her way across the keyboard. "You don't understand," she said. "We were taught that learning how to type, learning how to cook or sew or clean or any of that stuff was unnecessary. There would always be people to do those things for us."

I cannot begin to fathom what it must've been like to grow up like that. And I can't help but feel sorry for anyone who did.

"Sorry" isn't the first word to come to mind, at least not in the sense you mean. "Disgust" or "revulsion" would come close.

Maybe because people like me were the ones who were always doing her work and picking up after her.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Social class has less to do with income than it does with the whole social environment one is raised in and the expectations that one is raised with. You can be a millionaire and still be working-class down to your very soles, and you can be dead broke and still be upper-class. It all depends on how you were raised to look at the world.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Sorry" isn't the first word to come to mind, at least not in the sense you mean. "Disgust" or "revulsion" would come close.

Maybe because people like me were the ones who were always doing her work and picking up after her.

I have to admit I was nonplussed when she came out and said that -- I'd never heard it put quite so baldly. But since she's a friend, I offered to let her hide under my bed when the revolution comes.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I was raised to believe there is only one thing a well bred person always has, that an ill bred person never has, and that is good manners.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I also find it interesting that she has a good education and good job in spite of her obvious incompetence. How could anyone "earn" a PhD and hold down a white collar job without knowing how to type?

 

[LizzieMaine]

With great difficulty, apparently. She told me she did her whole dissertation two fingers at a time. No wonder it takes so long to get a PhD these days.

 

[Big J]

I also find it interesting that she has a good education and good job in spite of her obvious incompetence. How could anyone "earn" a PhD and hold down a white collar job without knowing how to type?

Not to be a trouble-maker, but when I did mine, I had a research assistant who did all my typing. She much preferred it to working in MacD's at minimum wage.

 

[Matt Crunk]

Social class has less to do with income than it does with the whole social environment one is raised in and the expectations that one is raised with. You can be a millionaire and still be working-class down to your very soles, and you can be dead broke and still be upper-class. It all depends on how you were raised to look at the world.

Very well put, and very true.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I also find it interesting that she has a good education and good job in spite of her obvious incompetence. How could anyone "earn" a PhD and hold down a white collar job without knowing how to type?

People did for many, many years. I know of few who did until we got personal computers in the late 90s.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Not to be a trouble-maker, but when I did mine, I had a research assistant who did all my typing. She much preferred it to working in MacD's at minimum wage.

I paid my sister to type for me. I don't think it cheapened my academic accomplishments in any way.

 

[jamespowers]

If it's any consolation, my friend feels great shame at her unearned class privilege, and has become even more of a pinko than I am. She still can't sew a button, but I'm working on getting her into the remedial class I run for the kids.

Those are the ones who always are.....

 

[sheeplady]

Thinking about it, my family has had a maid. When I was going through cancer treatment, I had a lady volunteer her cleaning service to help us. When this lady was a teenager her mother had been diagnosed with cancer and so she wanted to help when she heard about me. They cleaned for two hours (3 ladies) and did everything from laundry to scrubbing, from changing the crib sheets to picking up toys. Since I had just switched to the second part of my chemo regimen (the worst drug I was on and the first cycle is always the hardest of any chemo drug) it was a godsend. At that point I was barely able to make my daughter a bottle or get dinner on the table I was so sick, so we would have lived in filth for months if not for her and her crew.



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On a separate note, I have a colleague who had the shock of her life about 6 months ago. While this lady and her husband are both well educated (she's a Ph.D.; he's an M.D.) and came from well educated parents (her's are both M.D.s; his are a dentist and an M.D.); they were both first generation born in this country. So while they grew up well off and relatively well-to-do, they both came from an immigrant background.

Both still had grandparents in the "old country" that they visited as children and while their parents had come to the U.S. well educated, they had come with relatively little and built their wealth here. So while my friend and her husband were and are privileged they knew what poverty was from their visits to their grandparents and they came from more of a first-generation immigrant mindset.

My friend was stunned when her daughter dumped her plate on the floor and said, "I don't need to pick it up, the cleaning maid will!"

My friend I think was shocked because while her and husband had the first-generation immigrant mindset, her child hadn't absorbed that. She was totally embarrassed and didn't know quite how to handle it because even though she had all this privilege, she never totally absorbed the privileged mindset being the child of immigrants. But her daughter had and it wasn't something she was prepared for.

 

[Big J]

I paid my sister to type for me. I don't think it cheapened my academic accomplishments in any way.

I agree with you 100%. Everything she typed, I first had to voice record.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I don't know if we "had a maid," but at our last home we did hire a housekeeper to come in every 2 weeks to clean the place up.

When my son was about two, he got upset because some of his toys had been put away where he couldn't find them.

"Just fire her !!" was his solution....