Domestic work in the South: The Help, updated

Not so black and white anymore

UNDER segregation, black women were so rigidly excluded from good jobs that 60% of those who were employed in 1940 worked as maids. With so few other choices, their wages were lousy ($139 in current dollars for a six-day week in 1935) and their white bosses could treat them abysmally. In Kathryn Stockett’s novel “The Help”, set in the early 1960s, a black maid is fired for using an indoor toilet rather than braving a tornado to use the outhouse; her revenge, involving a chocolate pie, is not for the squeamish.Times have changed. In 1935, six out of ten urban white families above the poverty line in the South had a full-time domestic servant, compared with under 20% in the North. Now hardly anyone does. People who want help with the housework typically hire cleaners (also called maids) for a few hours a week, not as live-in flunkeys with whom they pretend to have a warm relationship. A cleaner arrives, blitzes the house with a Hoover and various chemicals and drives to the next job. Employers are less likely to be paternalistic and more likely to be absent, since women now hold half the jobs in America....

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