Knowing Their Place

Delap, Lucy

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199572946.001.0001

Cited by 94 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…20 Horn, Delap and especially Aiken highlight the role of the 'coercive nature of the unemployment benefits system' in working-class women's employment in domestic service between the wars. 21 Domestic servants, while controversially included in the National Health Insurance (Part 1) aspect of the National Insurance Act 1911, were excluded from the much more restrictive Unemployment Insurance (Part 2). 22 Under the Act, those employed in the male-dominated occupations of engineering, shipbuilding, and construction and building at the time were entitled to a maximum of 15 weeks' unemployment pay per year for involuntary unemployment.…”

Section: State Coercion and Domestic Servicementioning

confidence: 99%

‘I Don’t Want Anything Like That’: The Coercion of British Women and Girls into Domestic Service, 1918–1928

Whyte¹

2020

LFHJ

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Despite the First World War (WWI) challenging women's traditional sphere of work (the home) as well as Britain's class structure, domestic service remained the largest employer of women and girls until the end of the Second World War. Why, given the reluctance of working-class women to return to domestic service after WWI, did so many take up 'hated domestic service' in the decade following the war? 1 WWI increased working-class households' reliance on women's income-whether obtained through employment or unemployment benefits. While others have shown the role of state coercion in women's employment in domestic service in the aftermath of WWI, this article highlights the extent to which working-class families were complicit in that coercion. As many British families were deprived of male breadwinners as a result of the war, some pushed their daughters to work as servants as it was one job 'that any girl could get'. 2 Others turned to the occupation as a means of protecting the 'moral health' of a daughter, where they considered it to be in danger. 3 Drawing upon a range of oral history testimonies, this article examines the role of working-class families in ensuring that domestic service remained an important feature of working-class women's and girls' lives throughout the 1920s.

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Section: State Coercion and Domestic Servicementioning

confidence: 99%

‘I Don’t Want Anything Like That’: The Coercion of British Women and Girls into Domestic Service, 1918–1928

Whyte¹

2020

LFHJ

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“…Domestic servants, therefore, had 'a compelling presence' in French and British economic, social and cultural life. 13 While domestic service was an important sector of employment and a key cultural institution in France and Britain, the occupation was shaped distinctly by their respective national economies. The industrialisation of Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth century meant that the model of the family economy, in which all family members and household residents played a role in the survival of the family as an economic and social unit, disappeared.…”

Section: Home and Work: The Nature Of Domestic Service In France And mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Servants' testimonies, nevertheless, highlight that in many cases, these women worked for free for the first months of their employment as the money they earned barely covered their travel and clothing expenses. 59 In 1904, Kate Taylor, a general maid who was paid 15d per week, took six months to repay 'the necessary print for dresses and hessian for aprons'. 60 By the interwar period, buying the uniform was still an important financial hurdle.…”

Section: Domestic Servants and Their Dress: A Feather In Their Cap?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond the Black and White: Female Domestic Servants, Dress and Identity in France and Britain, 1900-1939

Louvier

2019

Cultural and Social History

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Far from being a trivial detail, clothes fundamentally define who we are and how we are perceived by others. Drawing on a large sample of French and British servants' memoirs, this article explores how dress served a crucial but contrasting role in the way French and British servants articulated their identities within and outside the home between 1900 and 1939. It argues that servants' dress was deeply linked to the nature of the occupation in each country and the structure of their respective female labour markets.

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“…''Throughout the twentieth century, domestic service had a compelling presence in British economic, social, and cultural life'', Lucy Delap recently argued, moving away from previous interpretations of the history of domestic service in twentieth-century Britain, which considered it to be a declining phenomenon. 115 However we view her interpretation (praising or criticizing it), it constitutes an interesting example of changing paradigms.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Historians, Social Scientists, Servants, and Domestic Workers: Fifty Years of Research on Domestic and Care Work

Sarti

2014

Int Rev of Soc His

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Historical research on domestic servants has a long tradition. Research, however, has become more systematic from the 1960s onwards thanks to social historians, historians focusing on the family, historical demographers and (particularly from the 1970s) women's and gender historians. For a long time, scholars assumed that domestic service (especially by live-in workers) would decline, or even disappear, because of household modernization, social progress, and development of the welfare state. The (largely unexpected) ''revival'' of paid domestic and care work in the past three decades has prompted sociologists and other social scientists to focus on the theme, opening new opportunities for exchange between historians and social scientists. This article provides a review of the research on these issues at a global level, though with a focus on Europe and the (former) European colonies, over the past fifty years, illustrating the different approaches and their results.

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Knowing Their Place

Cited by 94 publications

References 0 publications

‘I Don’t Want Anything Like That’: The Coercion of British Women and Girls into Domestic Service, 1918–1928

‘I Don’t Want Anything Like That’: The Coercion of British Women and Girls into Domestic Service, 1918–1928

Beyond the Black and White: Female Domestic Servants, Dress and Identity in France and Britain, 1900-1939

Historians, Social Scientists, Servants, and Domestic Workers: Fifty Years of Research on Domestic and Care Work

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