Toward A Theory of Racial Differences in Employment

Abstract

servant role, it is argued, is obsolete in modern society. Even when formally based on contract, it is in essence rooted in ascribed status, particularistic standards, and diffuse obligations. master's family greedily attempts to absorb the total personality of the servant, and ties him to the household in a totalistic manner. Such premodern relationships between superior and inferior can exist only as long as religious legitimations for it are accepted by the servant, and no alternative employment opportunities are available. When this is no longer the case, the role becomes obsolescent and only persons suffering from marked inferiorities and peculiar stigmas can be induced to enter it. Only a century ago, domestic service was among the most common occupational roles in all Western countries. British census of 1851, for example, revealed that 905,000 women and girls were employed as domestic servants, and there were in addition 128,000 farm servant-girls. This total was more than double the number of females employed in all the textile industries taken together (Pike, 1972:156). proportion of servants in the labor force has declined rapidly in the twen- tieth centuLry. ratio of servants to families in the United States fell a third between 1900 and 1940 (Stigler, 1946:20) and it has de- clined further since. Private household workers were 5.4 percent of the economically active persons in the United States in 1900; at the time of the 1960 census they had declined to 2.8 percent, a drop of almost half within sixty years (Gendell and Zetterberg, 1964:66). What accounts for this precipitous decline? In what follows, attention will mainly be focused on British data which seem typical for the West, even though there were, of course, regional and national variations. THE TRADITIONAL SERVANT ROLE master-servant relationship has been one of the primordial relationships in all of Western culture. It was the prototypical relationship between superior and inferior. Vilhelm Aubert (1970), to whose article I am deeply indebted, quotes from Blackstone's famous Commen- taries of the Laws of England, first published in 1765: The three great relations in private life are [those] of master and servant . . . hus- band and wife .. . parent and child. That is, even in the eighteenth century, when achieve- ment criteria had already widely replaced cri- teria of ascribed status, master-servant ties were still conceived as primordial status rela- tionships rather than as contractual arrange- ments. Although by the eighteenth century master and servant were formally united by contract, both parties to that contract, which in theory was limited and impersonal, were in This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Sun, 19 Jun 2016 06:23:14 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms