Read complete books and articles on: Domestic Servants

Domestic Service - work performed in a household by someone who is not a member of the family. It was performed by slaves in many early civilizations, e.g., in Greece and Rome. Under the feudal system the work was done by serfs. The guild system required indentured apprentices to perform household duties while learning a trade. With the disappearance of feudalism and guilds, servants were recruited from free wage earners. Domestic service came to be regarded as an unattractive occupation because of the long hours, low wages, poor living conditions, low social status, and dependence on the personal habits of the employer. In the colonies of North America, domestic service was performed by transported convicts, bond servants who sold themselves into service for stated periods to pay their passage, Native Americans, and black slaves. After the American Revolution indentured servants were largely replaced, except in the South, by free labor. Growing numbers of upper middle-class families in the late 19th and early 20th cent. increased the demand for domestic servants, which was largely met by immigrants. Immigration quotas established in 1921 cut down this supply, and the demand for servants was subsequently reduced by the use of labor-saving devices. As the growing number of working women has created an increased need for child-care workers, many families have turned to professionals for such services. The number of domestics has declined from a peak of 2.4 million in 1940 to 795,000 in 1997. In 1950 the old-age insurance system was expanded to include household employees who were regularly employed, and in the social security amendments of 1954 old-age and survivors' insurance were extended to domestic servants regardless of work regularity. In Great Britain domestic workers are covered by national health and unemployment insurance schemes.

See D. Katzman, Seven Days a Week (1981); L. Martin, The Servant Problem (1985); P. Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt (1989).

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13 of the Best Books and Articles on: Domestic Servants

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945 » Read Now
by Phyllis Palmer. 214 pgs.

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...and Dirt Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945...and Dirt Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945...Domesticity and...
2.

Gender, Migration and Domestic Service » Read Now
by Janet Henshall Momsen. 314 pgs.

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Featuring case studies from around the world, this book examines a wide range of migration patterns which have arisen, and exposes the tensions and difficulties which include legal and empowerment issues, and cultural and language barriers.
3.

A History of European Women's Work: 1700 to the Present (Chap. 5 "Domesticity, the Invention of Housework, and Domestic Service") » Read Now
by Deborah Simonton. 338 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

In A History of European Women's Work , Deborah Simonton takes an overview of trends in women's work across Europe and including Russia, Britain, Germany and France, from the pre-industrial period to the present.Focusing on the role of gender and class as it defines women's labour, this book...
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In A History of European Women's Work , Deborah Simonton takes an overview of trends in women's work across Europe and including Russia, Britain, Germany and France, from the pre-industrial period to the present.Focusing on the role of gender and class as it defines women's labour, this book examines:* a wide range of occupations such as teaching and farming* contrasting rates of change in different European countries* the definition of work within and outside patriarchal families* local versus Europe-wide developments* demographic and economic changes.
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4.

Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (Chap. 2 "Work or Worse: Desexualized Space, Domestic Service, and Class") » Read Now
by Sarah Deutsch. 390 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

In the 70 years between the Civil War and World War II, the women of Boston changed the city dramatically. From anti-spitting campaigns and demands for police mothers to patrol local parks, to calls for a decent wage and living quarters, women rich and poor, white and black, immigrant and...
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In the 70 years between the Civil War and World War II, the women of Boston changed the city dramatically. From anti-spitting campaigns and demands for police mothers to patrol local parks, to calls for a decent wage and living quarters, women rich and poor, white and black, immigrant and native-born struggled to make a place for themselves in the city. Now, in Women and the City historian Sarah Deutsch tells this story for the first time, revealing how they changed not only the manners but also the physical layout of the modern city. Deutsch shows how the women of Boston turned the city from a place with no respectable public space for women, to a city where women sat on the City Council and met their beaux on the street corners. The book follows the efforts of working-class, middle-class, and elite matrons, working girls and "new women" as they struggled to shape the city in their own interests. And in fact they succeeded in breathtaking fashion, rearranging and redefining the moral geography of the city, and in so doing broadening the scope of their own opportunities. But Deutsch reveals that not all women shared equally in this new access to public space, and even those who did walk the streets with relative impunity and protested their wrongs in public, did so only through strategic and limited alliances with other women and with men. A penetrating new work by a brilliant young historian, Women and the City is the first book to analyze women's role in shaping the modern city. It casts new light not only on urban history, but also on women's domestic lives, women's organizations, labor organizing, and city politics, and on the crucial connections between gender, space, and power.
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5.

Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century » Read Now
by Bridget Hill. 282 pgs.

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For the first time since 1956, here is a book about eighteenth-century servants, male and female, in large and small households, in town and country, seen not only through the diaries and journals of the masters, but also through the eyes of the few domestic servants who recorded their own...
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For the first time since 1956, here is a book about eighteenth-century servants, male and female, in large and small households, in town and country, seen not only through the diaries and journals of the masters, but also through the eyes of the few domestic servants who recorded their own experiences. Offering new material on the sexuality of servants, on kin as servants and on pauper servants, Bridget Hill's fascinating and detailed essays provide a new perspective on an important facet of English domestic life in the eighteenth century.
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6.

The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century England » Read Now
by J. Jean Hecht. 242 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...into cocks. 2 But such servants remained primarily domestics whereas the farmers maid...elevated levels from which servants were drawn. Domestics, says a newspaper...
7.

Continental and Colonial Servants in Eighteenth Century England » Read Now
by J. Jean Hecht, Vera Brown Holmes, Sidney R. Packard. 64 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...well-being of English servants. The complaints...against French domestics thus ranged in...French Catholics as domestics. The Protestants among German servants probably...
8.

Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987 ("Servants and Masters" begins on p. 211 and "Servants in Court" begins on p. 220) » Read Now
by Lawrence Stone. 460 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Lawrence Stone is one of the world's foremost historians. In such widely acclaimed volumes as The Crisis of the Aristocracy, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England and The Open Society, he has shown himself to be a provocative and engaging writer as well as a master chronicler of English family...
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Lawrence Stone is one of the world's foremost historians. In such widely acclaimed volumes as The Crisis of the Aristocracy, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England and The Open Society, he has shown himself to be a provocative and engaging writer as well as a master chronicler of English family life. Now, with Road to Divorce, Stone examines the complex ways in which English men and women have used, twisted, and defied the law to deal with marital breakdown. Despite the infamous divorce of Henry VIII in 1529, Britons before the 20th century were predominantly, in Stone's words, "a non-divorcing and non-separating society." In fact, before divorce was legalized in 1857, England was the only Protestant country with virtually no avenue for divorce on the grounds of adultery, desertion, or cruelty. Yet marriages did fail, and in Road to Divorce, Stone examines a goldmine of court records--in which witnesses speak freely about love, sex, adultery, and marriage--memoirs, correspondence, and popular imaginative works to reveal how lawyers and the laity coped with marital discord. Equally important, in tracing the history of divorce, Stone has discovered a way to recapture the slow, irregular, and tentative evolution of moral values concerning relations between the sexes as well as the consequent shift from concepts of patriarchy to those of sexual equality. He thus offers a privileged, indeed almost unique, insight into the interaction of the public spheres of morality, religion, and the law. Written by the foremost historian of family life, Road to Divorce provides the first full study of a topic rich in historical interest and contemporary importance, one that offers astonishingly frank and intimate insights into our ancestors' changing views about what makes and breaks a marriage.
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9.

Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers » Read Now
by Nicole Constable. 230 pgs.

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10.

Servants, Shophands and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan » Read Now
by Gary P. Leupp. 237 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

In this analysis of lower-class life in Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868), Gary Leupp vividly portrays the emergence of an urban proletariat during a time of extraordinary economic change. With the rapid increase in commercial activity, products previously restricted to use by the elite became commodities...
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In this analysis of lower-class life in Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868), Gary Leupp vividly portrays the emergence of an urban proletariat during a time of extraordinary economic change. With the rapid increase in commercial activity, products previously restricted to use by the elite became commodities for mass consumption. Likewise, labor power became a commodity as hired laborers replaced traditional corvee workers in the commercial realm and contracted servants supplanted lifetime, hereditary workers in households. Focusing on a class system mediated increasingly by money, Leupp explores the ways employers and employees dealt with each other and the steps taken by government officials to control rising hostilities.
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11.

Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service » Read Now
by Evelyn Nakano Glenn. 294 pgs.

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...advent of World War II, domestic service was the most...daughters. Live-in servants, laundresses, and day...and orchard, or as domestic servants and housecleaners...
12.

Uprooted Women: Migrant Domestics in the Caribbean » Read Now
by Paula L. Aymer. 178 pgs.

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An explanation of the migration culture of the Caribbean that injects gender into existing labor migration theories. It views labor migration from the female migrant women's perspective as a major entrepreneurial activity for those who refuse to be fazed by foreign nation-state boundaries. Aruba...
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An explanation of the migration culture of the Caribbean that injects gender into existing labor migration theories. It views labor migration from the female migrant women's perspective as a major entrepreneurial activity for those who refuse to be fazed by foreign nation-state boundaries. Aruba, the site of a giant U.S.-owned oil refinery, became a major participant in supplying Western Europe's and North America's insatiable needs during the decade of the 1940s and World War II. Therefore, the island is presented as the prototype of a 20th-century industrial worksite that attracted the female migrant labor flow.
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13.

Of Servanthood and Self-Employment: Changing Patterns of Domestic Service in Southern Mexico, in Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development » Read Now
by Jayne Howell. 33 pgs.

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