Domestic servants, professionalisation and the women's emancipation movement, 1870-1914

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

My project will provide the first direct exploration of the centrality of domestic servants to the mass movement of middle-class women into professional work in the anglophone world between 1870 and 1914.My research will focus on six key questions:How did domestic servants facilitate the move of their female employers into formal higher education and work?How can we more adequately illuminate the agency of domestic servants in their own right?How did women navigate their evolving dual-roles as both mistresses of households and as professional workers?How did these relationships influence cross-class relations in modern Britain?How did servants and employers navigate the home as a shared space and how did this shape ideals of privacy at home?To what extent did working abroad alter servant and employer relationships and the work these individuals performed?Despite the size of the servant workforce, this occupational group occupies a background position in histories of women's work. Although they are briefly acknowledged, domestic servants are rarely discussed in conjunction with women's professionalisation (McCarthy, 2020). Schwartz discusses the reliance of the suffrage movement on service (Schwartz, 2019). Microhistories, such as the study of Virginia Woolf and her servants, have provided insight into the lives of specific individuals (Light, 2007). My project, which considers fifteen different relationships, shifts the focus to the late nineteenth century, the critical moment when there was an influx of middle-class women into work and education. Studies ofwork during this era have prioritised institutional workplaces: this project instead foregrounds the home as a key site of work, and interrogates fields in which such work flourished, such as social reform, writing and charitable endeavours. I will argue that although servants rarely acted as a formal collective, they were still in a position to exert agency in society.My project will draw heavily from personal writing and correspondence, enriched by sources such as advice literature, memoirs, periodicals, fiction and visual culture. It will also draw from the little-tapped Autograph Letters Collection and records of the Girls' Friendly Society at the Women's Library, alongside collections in relation to the alumnae of some of the earliest women at universities. The records of the British Women's Emigration Association will be of particular interest: one main point of discussion in the association's correspondence was the necessity of good servants for middle-class women on the international stage.This research will centralise the seismic impact servants had on the expansion of the workforce in historiographical debates. This project addresses questions still relevant today: although domestic service is commonly described as declining following the First World War, domestic cleaning is still a field of work occupied by working-class women, and employing cleaners remains a societal status symbol for many households.