Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea

[ailbhe]

Wait - all those maids and hired hands described as French are actually black, aren't they?

I think I preferred the books before I realised that.

Comments

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

I suppose that depends on your definition of "middle class". I'm from eastern European stock, so am proudly middle class at least five generations back, if you use the definition that was current in the pre-war period: professional, educated people with a certain degree of economic freedom and geographic mobility. My family tree is littered with doctors, teachers, professors and musicians, all of whose educated wives did their laundry by hand (up to and including my mother, in Seventies USSR), because money to hire servants wasn't something that automatically came with the class distinction back then.

If you use our modern definition of "people who own their own homes and have money for private schools and foreign holidays", though, then yeah - but then those moneyed moms should really be described us upper, not middle, class.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Eastern European Jewish stock, that should have been. Not a lot of farmers in that lineage.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

Tangential - I too come (partly) of Eastern European Jewish origin, but my branch of the family was the only embourgeoised one. The rest of the family continued as farmers in the shtetl, and I think even in 1939 a very large proportion of Eastern European Jews still led rural lives, particularly in Poland and Ukraine.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Interesting - in my family at least, there are no farming roots as far as I know. There are *rural* roots; e.g. my dad's paternal grandmother comes from a tiny village somewhere on the Ukraine-Poland border. But her father was the town apothecary. Likewise my mom's paternal great-grandfather was from a proper shtetl near Minsk, but he was a Hassidic scholar and so didn't have any occupation.

[biascut.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's a nationality thing? Upper-class really only refers to titled aristocracy in the UK. I wouldn't say being middle-classmeans affording private schools or having servants in modern day UK - if it does, only 7% of the population or so is middle-class, and I'm not, as the daughter of a university lecturer!

But in the thirties, my grandma was only just in the lower-middle-class (husband was a state primary school teacher, owned their own home, had lodgers sometimes), and she did her own housework with the help of a girl who came in and did. My mum and uncle, their children, were state-school educated all the way through. Nowhere near the class that would send their children to boarding school.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Naturally, different cultures are different - but Marxism is the same everywhere (especialy in the USSR!), so I think we're dealing more with definition drift than cultural disparities here.

Having a cleaner, even today, isn't really the same as having a servant, economically *or* socially. Doing one's own housework with the aid of another person who you pay and doing it with the aid of appliances that you pay for is of course very different ethicaly, but economically the two positions are roughly equivalent. It basically means that while you are not actually rich enough to treat cleaning as something that happens to other people, you are nevertheless able to offset some of your own time/effort with money.

Is it really only 7% of the population that sends their children to private schools? Not rhetorical - really surprised. I mean, what about the Diane Abbotts of this world and that - woul you consider her upper class? I think definition drift is at work here again, because not every private school (esp. faith ones) is an Eton or Rugby.

Plus of course let's not forget that yeah, the middle class *has* been steadily growing since the start of the Industrial Revolution, so if more people can afford the same things today (cars, schools) that only a few could afford in the interwar period, that's not actually that strange.