Rebellion against the word ‘servant’ led to the adoption of a euphemism: help. 

(This did little to quell the stigma of service.) 

You must not forget that in accepting a servant’s place you accept a servant’s limitations, confessed one chambermaid. 

I hate the very words ‘service’ and ‘servant’, wrote another. 

How did this align with the Irish dream of coming to America? 

It didn’t. Lucy Maynard Salmon—a respected historian and activist who led the suffrage movement at Vassar at the turn of the last century—saw this as much more than an argument about language. 

There must be a revolution in domestic service, she urged, or the race specifically known as American must die out.