Word: servantless
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...schedule also suits today's wayward servantless housewife, whose children return home from school at 4:30, thus destroying the old cinq a sept timetable. Another aid for delinquent dames: the wig.""It's a wonderful alibi," explained one Parisian housewife last week. "You tell your husband you must go to the hairdresser. Then, instead, you send your wig and stay home to receive your lover. You retrieve the wig later and appear properly coiffed for your husband. Neat." As for Novelist Sagan, who was in New York last week promoting her new book, the failure of Americans...
...thinks about the nature of American life. The U.S. has created the world's first middle-class society, which enjoys (so it is widely held) not only spectacular luxury but unprecedented leisure. Yet the U.S. has also created what can logically be called the world's first servantless society...
...woke, ate, played, lived or died without servants in attendance. Not so in the U.S. The fact is not just something for wives to natter about over the pink extension phone; most of them have stopped nattering about it long ago and accept it as a matter of course. Servantless living is so much a part of the American scene that a family with two cars in the garage, a kidney-shaped swimming pool, three TV sets, a $1,000 stereophonic unit, and a vacation cottage in the mountains may not notice that anything is missing. As long...
...money on education if, when people get through, they can't leave home?" Among "the greatest hazards" for female college graduates, she added, is the fact that they tend to abandon their intellectual talents "because they are swamped by the routines of bringing up children in a servantless world...
There are other sides to the argument. The absence of servants, it is said, ensures delightful privacy. Professor Clifford Kirkpatrick of Indiana University claims that "the servantless life results in shared work and play within the family group," and "makes for cooperation with relatives and friends"; besides, "if there were servants as in the old South, wives might get too lazy to go back to work after the children are grown." Some American wives accept such rationalizations and often insist on "doing everything" themselves; this may result in a serene sense of accomplishment, but just as often in a martyred...