Abstract

"Hotels Killed Household Servitude and No One Noticed"

Daniel Levinson Wilk, SUNY-Fashion Institute of Technology (danlw@fitnyc.edu)

Sometimes it takes a while to figure out what an invention is for. More than a decade to see that movie film is good for cutting and splicing. Two decades to realize that elevators help build upwards. It takes a lot of people working together, building on each others’ innovations, to reach that moment of understanding.

Sometimes, even after an invention has found its purpose, it takes people another long time to realize it. Two centuries ago, the antebellum hotel built a new infrastructure for bourgeois life without live-in servants. Other service industries grew up around hotels, carving out smaller specializations: restaurants, bars, clubs, coffeehouses, boarding houses, apartment houses, barbershops, beauty salons, certain occupations in transportation industries, etc. These industries were capable of fully replacing household servitude, but it took a century in the U.S. and Europe for this to happen, and it still hasn’t happened in other parts of the world. Almost another century later, no one even notices that it happened. We don’t see that service workers still save us every day from slavery and servitude by providing a better product.

In a largely unconscious process of co-creation, many helped end mass servitude. Appliance salesmen hawked new technologies that sped housework and decreased labor. Editors of popular magazines reset women’s expectations as husbands deskilled them from household managers to household workers. Politicians won votes on promises to close the borders and end cheap immigrant labor. Whether or not they knew it, they were shrinking the amount of work for servants to do and the availability of servants to do it.
Hotels and other service firms also helped end servitude, but not by shrinking the work and the labor supply or shifting it to wives. They replaced servitude with wage labor and split the master into two distinct roles—the manager and the customer. Eventually, workers didn’t have to live with the boss or the customer, and there were lots of customers and sometimes multiple managers, so offending one or two people wasn’t always catastrophic the way it could be if you were a servant.