Domestic Service and Gender, 1660-1750: Life and Work in the London Household & Domestique et servante. Des vies sous condition: Essai sur le travail domestique en Belgique au 19e siecle. (Reviews).

Domestic Service and Gender, 1660-1750: Life and Work in the London Household. By Tim Meldrum (Harlow and London: Longman, 2000. ix plus 220pp. $39.00/paperback).

Domestique et servante. Des vies sous condition: Essai sur le travail domestique en Belgique au 19e siecle. By Valerie Piette (Louvain-la-Neuve: Academie royale de Belgique, 2000, 521pp. paperback).

The history of domestic service has attracted increasing attention in the past 20 years, and now encompasses a significant literature of both local and national studies on the experience of the thousands of people, both women and men, who spent all or part of their lives in this occupation. Many historians of urbanization and family history make reference to domestic servants and some integrate more extensive discussion of the work and social condition of servants, but few studies of the working classes recognize the significance of this occupation which by the last decade of the nineteenth century was the largest single sector in the British labor market. The current relevance of the question was emphasized in Servicing the Middle Classes: Class, Gender and Waged Domestic Labour in Contemporary Britain (London, 1994) by two sociologists, N. Gregson and M. Lowe. There has been a rise in waged domestic labor in Britain as more women return to work after childbirth and rely upon domestic help to allow them to d o so. Tim Meldrum prefers what he asserts is a less anachronistic perspective, locating the 21st century pattern of waged domestic labor within the long history of such work and its meaning for the experience of both the working and middle classes.

Meldrum points out that servants haunted the streets and houses of early modem London, their presence felt, if not heard, and widely documented in the theatre, in visual representations and in criminal records. The institution of service was a cornerstone of early modem English life, when as much as three-quarters of those in the 15-24 age cohort may have been servants. London was the center of domestic service in Britain with the growth of a servant population that more than kept pace with the expansion of the middle class, and is estimated at one-thirteenth of London's entire population by the beginning of the 18th century.

This paperback book is based on Meldrum's 1996 doctoral dissertation at the University of London, but it is published as part of the series on Women and Men in History intended for students and the general reader as well as scholars.

The goal of the series is admirable, but Meldrum's volume seems unlikely to attract a general audience, being too mired at times in the critique of previous historical work on the topic.

Pinpointing domestic service in the early modem period presents a challenge which Meldrum handles well by delineating the relationship between slavery and service and the confounding of categories of service in agricultural households, and concluding with a well-accepted definition of "domestic servant" as a fulltime, live-in servant dwelling in a household and performing domestic tasks for wages. It was the middling class who employed them, and the employment of a servant marked a significant level of social status, and has been considered by historians as a defining characteristic of the middle class. Meldrum cautions the reader that there are numerous cases in which it is difficult to distinguish a domestic servant from relatives and female lodgers who performed domestic work in the households in which they lived.

One of Meldrum's theses, advanced in an earlier article ("Domestic Service, Privacy and the Eighteenth-Century Metropolitan Household," Urban History, 26:1999), is a critique of the argument by well-known historian Lawrence Stone that the middle classes were searching to increase their privacy by removing servants' rooms to a separate floor in the 18th century. Meldrum argues that this evolution in private life did not occur within this time frame and he disputes that this spatial change was a crucial factor in creating private space for the employer and his family. Meldrum disagrees with Stone over the meaning of the reallocation of domestic space in the distancing of relations between employers and their servants, but he does not offer an alternative thesis. Instead, Meldrum insists on the "possible existence of multiple realms of activity within the spaces created by life and work in 18th century metropolitan households." [p. 83] Meldrum does use court records to good effect in challenging the historical w isdom on the theme of privacy and social distance, as well as on the issues of sexual relations between members of the household.

Historians who have dealt with domestic service have tended to be more absorbed by the implications of domestic service for social relations than by the nature of their work, and Meldrum seeks to fill the gap. Meldrum holds that "a monolithic transition from household work to factory work at some point in the late 18th or early 19th century" is a widely-held but flawed notion. [p. 135] Again, the historical experience is more mixed and hardly linear. His analysis of gender in this context provides an appreciation of the way in which female domestic servants' experience provides a better understanding of the sexual division of labor. Meldrum repeatedly reminds the reader of the distinction between the smaller households which employed only female servants and the larger households which employed men as well, sometimes in larger numbers than women.

The work of domestic servants in London ranged from the hard labor of cleaning and childcare to the "idle luxury" which embellished and affirmed the employer's social status, as Meldrum describes it. This period also encompassed the downgrading of domestic work in which more tasks of "housewifery" fell to domestic servants, being abandoned by the mistress of the household who was expected to adopt a more managerial role. Meldrum has attempted to classify such long term changes in the nature of domestic work and of household relations, while at the same time maintaining some sense of the diversity of servants' lives and experiences. Meldrum's approach offers an antidote to a historical view based on the perspective of servants' employers.

A work with a different purpose and audience is a new study of 19th century domestic servants in Belgium by Valerie Piette. Piette's study is clearly intended for specialists and it will interest historians of France as well Belgium. Based upon the varied marterials of family documents and court records, personal correspondence and statistical sources, Piette's study includes a very useful bibliography of French sources.

Like Meldrum, Piette is very familiar with previous work on domestic servants and she situates the Belgian case within that literature. As other historians have emphasized, the feminization of domestic service occurred early in the 19th century, and the history of the occupation is interwoven with the urban migration of women seeking work. As in the case in France, the capital city exercised the greatest attraction for women seeking domestic positions, and domestic service was the second most important occupation for women in Brussels by 1850. In 1910, 87% of domestic servants in Brussels were female. Piette is able to utilize fiscal records for the study of the extent of domestic service because, even after reform legislation in 1883, the employment of domestic servants remained the "building block" of the tax system with taxes based upon the number and kind of servants employed.

In spite of the voluminous literature published in the 19th century about domesticity, it is difficult to describe precisely the working conditions of domestic servants, as Piette well knows. These prescriptive texts portray an "ideal to be attained," rather than a reality achieved. [p. 166] To supplement the prescriptive literature, Piette examined family papers to suggest some cases which might provide a realistic portrait of the basic patterns of domestic life as it changed over the course of the 19th century. Pierre argues that there are some overall conclusions that one can draw from the evidence about domestic servants' work including the fact that in Brussels the "standard" for a wealthy bourgeois family was to employ two to four servants (this is similar to Paris, although Piette concludes differently); that the servant working alone in a household as a maid-of-all-work was common earlier in the century, not the product of the "servant crisis" of the end of the century; and that the families served by a single maid-of-all-work were most often young or in the class of small shopkeepers and comfortable artisans. Wages for domestic labor remained very stable over the century, although gifts and tips may have increased significantly within households in which the servant hierarchy was highly delineated. [pp. 162-3] Piette details some of the different categories of household tasks, including childcare, service at table, and personal service, and concludes with a discussion about the evolution of domestic tasks over time.

Piette also weighs in on some major issues raised by critics and commentators on live-in domestic service, including the question of the high number of children born outside of marriage by female domestic servants and the charges of infanticide that were levelled against servant-mothers. A very high percentage of the babies born to female domestic servants (83.2%) were illegitimate in 1840, but an even higher percentage of the babies born to women in the garment trades (over 97%) were registered as illegitimate births. [p 308]

The third part of Piette's book analyzes whether the so-called "servant crisis" was more indicative of a society in crisis. During the period in which the demand for domestic servants was at its peak, migration to the city from the countryside was slowing as agriculture experienced a slight reprise, restricting the flood of servant-candidates to the city. Alarmist comments about the unavailability of good servants, however, overstated the decline in available servants. The number of domestic servants in Brussels remained practically constant between the censuses of 1866 and 1889, and their proportion of the population in Brussels increased from 27 per thousand inhabitants in 1866 to 53 per 1000 in 1889. [p. 341] Piette argues that in a society so dominated by small businesses and the middling ranks of society, the employment of a domestic servant acquired heightened symbolic value as an assertion of social status. Employing a live-in servant was particularly important to distinguish the white-collar group, in cluding civil servants, from that of the working class in Belgium. Another meaning of the "servant crisis," involving laments about the poor behavior, immorality or even criminality of domestic servants, were actually a criticism of the mistress of the household who, it was said, no longer managed the household well. Converging with the end of the century image of the New Woman who evaded her domestic role and marriage to enter the working world, the "servant crisis" seemed to express a generalized anxiety about social change, the politicization of the working classes, and the impact of feminism. Paradoxically, as Piette notes in her conclusion, it was thanks to their servants that many feminists could assert their role in male society, finding a solution to women's "double work day." [p. 459] Both a detailed history of domestic servants in 19th century Belgium and an analysis of the larger social and economic factors, Piette's study of the "servant crisis is revealing of the cultural shift at the turn of the twentieth century with its nostalgia for a time of "good servants," large and happy families, extended households, and quiescent workers.