I'd appreciate it if you could help me
When we hear the word "maid" in Japan today, we think of a female employee who works in a coffee shop and says "Welcome home," but the original meaning of the word was "domestic servant" or "housekeeper.
It was at the end of the 19th century that the ancient profession of maids experienced a rapid increase. The number of maids grew to nearly 1.5 million, making them the most populous occupational group in England at that time. The reason was the rising standard of living of a middle class that had grown with industrialization.
In the late Victorian era, roughly one in three women aged 15~20 worked as a maid. In those days, the presence or absence of a maid in a family was a visible indicator of social status. Having a maid show upper class.
S. Rountree, who conducted a survey of poverty in the English city of York at the end of the 19th century, distinguished between the working class and the upper class based on whether or not a household employed a maid. At that time, it was common practice for upper class families to hire maids and for women to spend their spare time doing nothing in particular and to depend on men's earnings.
And in families of the lowest middle class, who wanted to make themselves look as good as possible by imitating the upper class, many of them hired maids despite the fact that they were struggling to make ends meet, and the wives did not work.
The above picture is a caricature from around 1870. The original title is "Dinner Locust. Locust refers to the man standing to the right who has come to ask for a meal. Both the man and the owner seated in the back of the room are probably lower-middle-class citizens who are not wealthy. The owner sitting in the back of the room looks as if he is trying to hide his true intention of "I'm struggling too, so don't come and rob me!". They made a painful effort to keep a maid, even if the carpets were worn and the furniture shabby.
