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This chapter analyzes the first successful unionization of home care as part of the civil rights surge among black women domestics. Central to this process were the reorganization of domestic work and feminist efforts to improve the job through the National Committee on Household Employment and the Household Technicians of America. The legal status of home care and domestic service diverged in 1975 when the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) classified home care workers as elder companions outside the law. But, as invisible as home care workers appeared, they proved more traceable than domestics laboring for individual families. So when service sector unions sought to organize domestics, they found home attendants instead by untangling the administrative maze and money trail of federal and local programs. Their strategies reflected the prior contracting of home care by the state, with community organizers in California, notably the United Domestic Workers of America in San Diego, pressuring county supervisors and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in New York City bargaining with individual agencies. By the early 1980s, SEIU formally acknowledged that these workers were caregivers more than cleaners, part of health care unionism.

The Introduction summarizes the content of the book, and sets out the background labour market situation. Drawing on census figures and examples of local and regional employment patterns, it charts the changes across the twentieth century for the employment of domestic workers. The methodology of the book is outlined, with particular attention to cultural history, oral history, and the history of emotions. The British context is contrasted with comparable trends in other countries, and the work of migrants in domestic service is discussed. Male servants are discussed, and the challenges of the source material are explored.

To a degree unusual among social institutions, WVS was the creation of a single individual — Lady Reading. For this reason, this chapter explores her belief in the importance of ‘character’, the highly-charged, mystical language with which she inspired her followers, and her autocratic and hierarchical style of leadership. It also deals with her dismissive attitude to the claims of domesticity on women's time — ‘put nation before husband!’ — and contemporary discussion of the relationship between the supply of domestic servants and volunteering by middle-class women.

This chapter describes the varying circumstances in which young people became servants, and their experiences as servants. It explores the relationship between servants and their parents, the influence of mothers, and the significance of wages. The work of cleaners and chars is foregrounded, and the existing historiography is criticized. The persistent tendency to see servants only as victims is rejected through attention to the very diverse narratives that emerge from oral histories and memoirs. Finally, social class is explored within these narratives, and held to be an insufficient framework for capturing the subjectivities of domestic service

This chapter investigates the late-twentieth-century popular memory of domestic service, and suggests the multiple ways in which service mediates the past for British audiences. It illustrates both past certainties of belonging and exploitation and inequality. It asks how we come to remember service at particular moments. Two major areas of memory are explored; first, the televisual depictions of service within situation comedies, dramas, feature films, and reality television, and second, the heritage performances within British ‘great house’ properties. Drawing on interviews with curators and interpreters of these settings, as well as the popular responses to television and cinema, the chapter argues for the positive role that the re-enactments of service can make to popular audiences, while remaining critical of its perceived lack of connection with late-twentieth-century employment of domestic workers, and its inability to represent the very widespread phenomenon of middle-class servant-keeping.

This chapter charts the laughter prompted by the everyday interactions of employers and servants that were widely represented in music hall, cinema, periodicals, newspapers, and other forms of mass leisure. It suggests that laughter is an intensely revealing emotion that structures relationships of inequality and offers both forms of resistance and support for the status quo. The use made by scholars of laughter is reviewed, and some new directions are suggested. The chapter assess the failed jokes, and shared jokes, of the century, and suggests that cultural representations of service, cleaning, and char work continued to be widely found funny during the period between World War II and the 1980s when the numbers employed in service were very low. Service continued to have cultural resonance, and has profoundly shaped traditions of British humour.

This chapter argues that most women in London were originally migrants from elsewhere in England, who arrived in the city around the age of eighteen to serve as maidservants. It presents quantitative data about the geographical origins of London women and compares their origins and ages at migration to the better‐known male apprentices. It also examines where maids settled, how they found employment, how long they remained in particular households, their mobility within the city, their status within the households in which they worked and their relationships with their masters and mistresses, how much they were paid, and the kinds of work that they did. The risks and benefits of migration are discussed, the greatest risk being the high levels of disease and the occasional epidemics of plague that swept the city.

This chapter examines the work of women who did not have husbands and did not participate in the household economy of the early modern era. Investigating primarily urban women from labouring, craft, trade, and mercantile families, it explores the range of work performed by singlewomen. It also examines the obstacles faced by never-married women in towns that did not grant such women the status of independent mistresses, and the women who overcame the odds to break into shopkeeping and the new luxury trades emerging in the late 17th and 18th centuries.

The conclusion summarizes the arguments made by the book, and offers vignettes of domestic service relationships that illustrate the contradictory emotions often felt about it. Change over time is summarized, and the powerful links between domestic service and forms of modernity or ‘modern living’ are emphasized. The ambivalence middle-class women felt for housework is re-emphasized.

This chapter shows how high the stakes were for middle-class women in the public debate over domestic service. Unless and until female employers confronted the labor problem festering in their kitchens, experts and public observers agreed, they had no business committing themselves to other benevolent reform missions. Inez Godman, a muckraking journalist who disguised herself as a domestic for a series of investigative magazine articles, pointed to the hypocrisy of a National Consumers' League member signing petitions demanding chairs for store clerks “when her own maid is on her feet for at least 11 hours a day out of a working day of 14.” Home economist and social worker Jane Seymour Klink sympathetically described the suffering of one domestic who was never allowed to go to church, although her “employer subscribes liberally to foreign missions.”

Stymied by the refusal of “new” immigrant women from Eastern and Southern Europe to pursue work as domestic laborers, at the turn of the century middle-class employers reevaluated the fundamental utility of hired labor to the production of domesticity. Chapter 6 brings the book’s different narrative arcs together by engaging public and expert debates about whether domestic service could best be reformed and made modern through changes to labor relations in the home or whether Chinese and black workers’ alleged predisposition to servitude meant that looking for racialized sources of labor continued to be the best solution for “fixing” the occupation. Examining the start of the Great Migration, the 1917 Immigration Act, and the eventual passage of numerical restrictions on European immigration that the 1924 Immigration Act instituted, this chapter argues that the various exceptions built into immigration laws, which had exempted domestic servants from restrictions since the passage of the 1885 Foran Act, finally gave way to the conclusion that white women could no longer be counted on to do this work.

This chapter discusses the lecture given by I. M. Rubinow regarding domestic service. Rubinow was a medical doctor and Ph.D. in economics who would later contribute to the intellectual framework of New Deal social insurance programs. He gave his lecture as one in a series in a course, “Domestic Administration,” at Columbia University's Teacher's College. During his talk, Rubinow accused middle-class women of mistreating their domestic employees by, among other things, working them too many hours for not enough pay. His take on the issue was not the one anticipated by the New York housewives in his audience, who maybe assumed he would argue the part of the dissatisfied middle-class domestic employer, many of whom complained that household workers were variously lazy, dishonest, drunk, or sexually promiscuous.