Blog Mirror: A Hundred Years Ago. 1921 Thanksgiving Menus

From the always excellent A Hundred Years Ago:

1921 Thanksgiving Menus

Note, the small servantless  house.  

I commented on that entry with this:

I’m struck by the “servantless” house comment. I wonder what percentage of homes actually had servants? Surely a small minority, but still its an interesting comment as the author expects that some of the readers will have them.

We don't have servants, rather obviously, and I don't know anyone who does.  I do know some people who have "cleaning ladies", which are women who will clean houses, but not a daily basis.

I know that my father's family didn't have domestics of any kind.  No doubt my grandmother had the laboring oar there, and likely my father's two sisters a bit after a certain age. But my mother's family did have them up until some point in the 1930s, when the Great Depression halted that and the female members of the household took over.  I also know that they were what my mother called "French", meaning Quebecois, which is interesting in that my mother was "Irish Canadian", which in her case really meant that she was mostly Irish, but also a little French (probably 1/4, if I recall correctly).  Irish Canadians mostly lived in the cities, as she did, and their position in Quebec's economic system, which was highly agrarian at the time, was different from that of the full Quebecois.  Having said that, almost all Quebecois near the cities were also somewhat Irish, as Irish orphans had been taken in right off the docks at one time through direct adoptions by the Catholic population.

The maids didn't live there, they came in, and I don't know how frequently.  They also didn't cook, that was my grandmother's job, and like my mother, she reportedly was not particularly good at it.

She wouldn't have cooked anything like this, of course.  American Thanksgiving is an American deal.