The images of the opulent mansion sprawling lawns, highly polished silver and crystal,

and of course impeccably cared for fashions and exquisitely prepared French food

are some of the first images our minds conjure up when we think about the Gilded Age.

And all of that is accurate, but the story of the armies of servants, housekeepers,

butlers, footmen, ladies' maids, parlor maids, chambermaids, gardeners, valets, chefs, cooks, and scullery maids that were all required to keep it going, make it look flawless, and make sure their employers always put their highly polished right foot forward. Well, that's perhaps the most important story of all. Quite simply, without these workers whose hours were long and whose pay

was low, without them, despite how much money their employers had, without them, none of that

outward glamour of this world would have ever come to be.

Today, I am joined by author and speaker Esther Crane to take a deeper look into the world below stairs

and see what went on quite literally behind the gold.

Music literally behind the gold. Hello, I'm Carl Raymond, the host of the Gildaed Gentleman History podcast, where every two weeks,

I'll take you beneath the glitter and the gold for a closer look at America's

Gilded Age, Francis Bellepac, and England's late Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Today, we are focused on the Gilded Age of New York and the story of the women and the men

who formed the legions of domestic

help to make the upper middle class homes as well as the grand mansions of Fifth Avenue and

Newport run and to create the image that it all just ran by, well, magic. In 1890, a professor of history at Vassar College,

Lucy Maynard Salman wrote the very first deeply detailed work. It was a study of the world

of the domestic servant, and it opened up the realities of this world to the rest of the world.

Using questionnaires submitted by Vassar alumni,

she attempted to give accurate statistics and a clear portrait of life below stairs.

Her work remained the standard reference into this world until astonishingly the 1970s.

She ended her work with a plea, that those of domestic service not be

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