The Word Menial

Edith Leete doesn't know the word.

In Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, written in 1888, a young woman of the year 2000 hears Julian West describe a waiter as occupying a "menial position" and simply doesn't understand. Her father has to explain it — the word applied to people who performed particularly disagreeable tasks for others, he says, and carried an implication of contempt. Julian confirms this. "Personal service, such as waiting on tables, was considered menial, and held in such contempt, in my day, that persons of culture and refinement would suffer hardship before condescending to it."

She thinks this is very strange. The man serving them is educated, her social equal in every respect. He doesn't look down on them; they don't look down on him. Why would anyone feel contempt?

The answer Bellamy gives through Dr. Leete is precise: the contempt was for the personal dependency, not the work itself. The nineteenth-century waiter served the diner. His livelihood depended on that specific person's satisfaction. He was economically subordinate in the transaction — his income came from pleasing people who were above him in the moment of service, and so the service itself became degraded by the relationship it expressed. The work didn't make you menial. Being economically subject to the person you served made you menial.

In the year 2000, the waiter serves the nation. The nation, not the diner, is his employer. He looks at the diner the same way a doctor looks at a patient — someone to be served, yes, but through no personal obligation that degrades either party. Dr. Leete notes that he himself spent months as a waiter in that same dining hall forty years prior. This doesn't strike anyone as notable.

What interests me is that the contempt was never really about the work.

In any given week of the nineteenth century, someone had to haul coal, someone had to empty bedpans, someone had to wait on wealthy people at dinner. These things were unpleasant. But Bellamy's point is that "menial" didn't track the unpleasantness — it tracked the power relationship. A surgeon cuts people open and handles their insides, which is unpleasant, but nobody called surgery menial. The difference was who employed you, who could fire you, and whether your livelihood required you to please a specific person with more resources than you had.

The word encodes a theory of dignity: that dignity is preserved or lost based on who has power over you, not what you actually do.

This is still mostly how it works. Content moderation — reviewing images of violence and abuse for hours a day — is not particularly well-paid or respected work, and the contempt for it isn't really about the content. It's about the fact that the people doing it are employed by large platforms, assigned tasks algorithmically, replaceable by the thousands, and have no meaningful power over the terms of their employment. The work itself, if done by a human rights researcher, would be considered serious and important. The difference is the structure of the employment.

What Bellamy's 2000 understood that his 1887 couldn't quite articulate: menial isn't a property of tasks. It's a property of relationships. The waiter became equal the moment his livelihood stopped depending on this particular diner's approval.

The twenty-first century has done something interesting here: it has multiplied the number of relationships that have the structure of servitude while giving them names that obscure this. Platform work, gig work, creator-monetization schemes — these are all constructions in which the worker is economically subject to an audience or a platform, their income determined by a specific party's satisfaction, replaceable when that satisfaction drops. They're not employees; they're something closer to what Bellamy would call the private-economy labor of his nineteenth century, dressed in the rhetoric of entrepreneurship.

Edith's incomprehension is the interesting thing. She doesn't know the word because she's never experienced the relationship it describes. You can't menialize someone who isn't personally dependent on you. The concept requires the dependency to even make sense.

In a world without that dependency, what would we even call the work that Edith thinks of as just work? She doesn't have a word for it either. She just calls it service. That seems right.