Re: The S&A Films


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Posted by Peter Ceresole on September 04, 2006 at 08:23:15 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.

In Reply to: Re: The S&A Films posted by Pam Adams on September 03, 2006 at 23:37:09:

in my US middle-class family in the 1960's and 70's, both of my parents worked at professional careers. Despite two paychecks, live-in servants and boarding schools weren't affordable options for us.

Before the first world war these things would have been considered 'normal' in a reasonably well off family, and up to the second world war they would still have been 'normal' although slightly harder to afford. Domestic service was a major source of employment, maybe the major source for women. All that changed with WW2 and full employment.

I'm not sure now much a boarding school would have cost, but fifty pounds in 1930, possibly the cost per term, would be the equivalent of 2100 pounds now. So it appears that old and new costs of boarding school, in real terms, haven't changed that much. And there are plenty of people who spend that amount of money now on private education.

It seems to me from reading the books that AR made the Amazons upper middle class, not from any details he provided (apart from the size of Beckfoot and the presence of Cook) but simply in the way he wrote Nancy, Peggy and their mother. The style of their speech and the lives they lived simply say 'middle class'. It's not sociology, it's AR's art.



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