At Home - Bill Bryson [58]
In America the servant situation was very different in almost every way. Americans, it is often written, didn’t have nearly as many servants as Europeans. That is true only up to a point, however, for Americans had slaves. Thomas Jefferson owned more than two hundred slaves, including twenty-five for his household alone. As one of his biographers has noted, “When Jefferson wrote that he planted olive trees and pomegranates, one must be reminded that he wielded no shovel, but simply directed his slaves.”
Slavery and race were not automatic in the early days. Some blacks were treated as indentured servants, and freed like anyone else when their time was up. A seventeenth-century black man in Virginia named Anthony Johnson acquired a 250-acre tobacco plantation and grew prosperous enough to be a slave owner himself. Nor was slavery a southern institution at first. Slavery was legal in New York until 1827. In Pennsylvania, William Penn owned slaves. When Benjamin Franklin moved to London in 1757, he brought with him two slaves, named King and Peter.
What America didn’t have a lot of were free servants. Even at the peak of service in America, fewer than half of U.S. households employed a servant, and many servants didn’t see themselves as servants at all. Most refused to wear livery, and many expected to sit down to meals with the family—to be treated, in short, as something much closer to equals.
As one historian has put it, rather than try to reform the servants, it was easier to reform the house, and so from an early period America became besotted with convenience and labor-saving devices, though nineteenth-century appliances often added nearly as much labor as they saved. In 1899, the Boston School of Housekeeping calculated that a coal stove required fifty-four minutes of heavy maintenance a day—emptying ash, replenishing coal, blacking and polishing the stove, and so on—before the harried homemaker so much as boiled a pot of water. The rise of gas actually made matters worse. A book called The Cost of Cleanness calculated that a typical eight-room house with gas fittings required fourteen hundred hours a year of special heavy cleaning, including ten hours a month of washing windows.
In any case, many of the new conveniences mostly eliminated work previously done by men—chopping wood, for instance—and so were of little benefit to women. In fact, lifestyle changes and technological improvements mostly just brought more work to women through bigger houses, more complicated meals, more copious and frequent laundry, and ever higher expectations of cleanliness.
But a potent and invisible presence was about to change all that for everyone, and for the story of that we need to proceed not to another room, but to a small box that hangs on the wall.
* The scullery (from escullier, an Old French word for dishes) was where dishes were washed and stacked, and it was here that you found a big, deep sink. Larder—referring to a place where meat was kept—isn’t, as one might suppose, directly related to lard; it is from the French lardon, for bacon. The terms are the ones used on the original plans for the Old Rectory, but the servants themselves might well have called the second room a pantry, from the Latin panna, or “bread room,” which by the mid-nineteenth century had come to signify a place of general food storage.
* Incidentally, our standard image of servants in black uniforms with frilly caps, starched aprons, and the like actually reflects a fairly