The American middle class increased in number throughout the nineteenth century, but membership in that class was sometimes precarious. In an era of burgeoning capitalist expansion with few government restrictions on business, fortunes could be made and lost in rapid order. If feeling somewhat insecure about their social position in economic terms, many middle-class American women paid close attention to status markers that signaled their rank as ladies. Certainly, having servants was one such marker.

At the same time, a heritage linked to the egalitarian principles associated with living in a Republic made some American women uncomfortable with the idea and the practice of using servants for domestic labor. Particularly in New England, a tradition from the rural past held over in homes where servants were blended into the family structure. In such homes, domestic workers might have meals with the family in the kitchen, and one's hired "girl" might be viewed as learning the skills she would need to run her own household rather than laboring in a permanent position as "help." (How often such democratic arrangements actually prevailed—versus how often authors like Lydia Sigourney wrote about them—is impossible to know.)

In any event, such practices belied the very class distinctions that other middle-class members were particularly eager to emphasize—like limiting the parlor to visitors from the higher social classes while keeping the help in the kitchen. (See, for example, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's novel Live and Let Live and the "Hired Girls" section of Wila Cather's My Antonia.) One practical strategy for mediating these complex class relations was to work alongside one's servant, but to do a related rather than the same particular task. So, for example, while a seamstress was mending clothing (doing housework), her lady employer might be doing fancywork on a lace kerchief.

When race as well as social class came into play, relations could become even more complicated, in the north as well as the south. Middle-class northern women who were abolitionists before the war or supporters of freedmen's advancement afterwards felt a strong need to distinguish between Old World patterns of domestic service or slavery in the southern U.S., on the one hand, and the use of servants (some of whom were free blacks) in the north. Certainly Harriet Beecher Stowe was one writer particularly attuned to this point, as suggested in, "The Lady Who Does Her Own Work," a satirical essay written originally for The Atlantic Monthly series of sketches on middle-class home life which she published during the Civil War.