A good wife is one who serves her husband in the morning like a mother does, loves him in the day like a sister does and pleases him like a prostitute in the night.
The wife owes service and labor to her husband as much and as absolutely as the slave does to his master.
By liberating women from household work and helping to abolish professions such as domestic service, the washing machine and other household goods completely revolutionised the structure of society.
A good butler should save his employer's life at least once a day.
I wouldn't want to be reincarnated as a butler. I couldn't for the life of me do the job in real life.
When I come home and I'm tired from filming all day, I expect her to be there and make sure everything is cool for me. You know, like drawing my bath and helping me into bed.
Domestic work, is, after all, both tedious and repetitive, and it is not surprising that most women and all men avoid as much of it as possible.
I sighed. "And what am I to you, Al?" "My maid," he said brightly. "Shall we do this?
Every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel.
domestic work is the most elementary form of labor. It is suitable for those with the intelligence of rabbits. All it requires is cleanlines, tidiness and quickness - not moral or intellectual qualities at all, but merely the outward and visible signs of health.
We talk about social service, service to the people, service to humanity, service to others who are far away, helping to bring peace to the world - but often we forget that it is the very people around us that we must live for first of all. If you cannot serve your wife or husband or child or parent - how are you going to serve society? If you cannot make your own child happy, how do you expect to be able to make anyone else happy? If all our friends in the peace movement or of service communities of any kind do not love and help each other, whom can we love and help?
A very large part of English middle-class education is devoted to the training of servants...In so far as it is, by definition, the training of upper servants, it includes, of course, the instilling of that kind of confidence which will enable the upper servants to supervise and direct the lower servants.
For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish ora German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.
All the housemaid hopes is, happiness for 'em - but marriage is a lottery, and the more she thinks about it, the more she feels the independence and the safety of a single life.
My nan was a nursery maid. Most people weren't in big houses. They were maids of all work.
Someone has to take the garbage out, someone has to cook the food, and someone has to clean the dishes. I want to do all of that.
Abby: I could be a slave to your darkest desires. I can do things. Anything you want. Tommy: Well, that's terrific, because we have a lot of laundry piled up and the apartment is a wreck. Abby: Anything you desire, my lord. I can do laundry, clean, bring you small creatures to quench your thirst until I am worthy.
I think I'd take a human butler over a robot one.
I collect things called 'samplers' which are Victorian pieces of needlework usually done by children in a workhouse to show that they have a skill which can be used in service, stitching household linen or that kind of thing. I think they're very humble and very beautiful.
You know when you're thinking about what you want to be when you grow up, or how you want your life to pan out. I couldn't imagine anything better than living in a hotel so you'd never have to worry about washing up, making the bed, anything like that, and having a servant to come in and play all your favourite TV programmes.
I have someone that cooks for me... that's the best thing ever. I just want to show up and I want my house to be like a hotel... so I want to have a couple of options... I like to have a couple of options.
My parents were born in Norfolk and spent their early years working in the big houses of that rural English county, my mother as a cook and my father as a handyman and chauffeur.
Aren't maids the ultimate art critics?
It is also very important to observe, that menial servants are absolutely necessary to make the resources of the higher and middle classes of society efficient in the demand for material products.
If you were to hire household staff to cook, clean, drive, stoke the fire, and answer the door, can you imagine suggesting that they not talk to each other, not see what each other is doing, not coordinate their functions?
