Domestic service and class relations in Britain 1900-1950

Past and Present

Volumn 203, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 181-204

  Todd, Selina ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 67650172205     PISSN: 00312746     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtp014     Document Type: Article

References (136)

1. Work Foundation, Domestics: UK Domestic Workers and their Reluctant Employers (London, 2004), 2.
2. Domestic service is not mentioned in David Cannadine, Class in Britain (London, 1998)
3. its decline is mentioned in passing in Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918-1951 (Oxford, 1998), 109.
4. Leonora Davidoff, 'Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England', Jl Social Hist., vii (1974)
5. Pamela Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant (Dublin, 1975)
6. P. Taylor, 'Daughters and Mothers - Maids and Mistresses: Domestic Service between the Wars', in J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds.), Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (London, 1979).
7. Howard Newby, 'The Deferential Dialectic', Comparative Studies in Society and History, xvii (1975).
8. This approach has influenced international research on, and representations of, workers who are not engaged in industrial commodity production: See, for example, James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985).
9. See, for example, Theresa M. McBride, The Domestic Revolution: The Modernisation of Household Service in England and France, 1820-1920 (London, 1976).
10. Lucy Delap, 'Patsy Pancake to Mrs Mopp: Domestic Service Humour in Britain', unpubd research paper given to the Annual Conference of the Social History Society, University of Exeter, 30 Mar. 2007
11. Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Oxford, 2004), 79-83.
12. Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (Cambridge, 2007)
13. Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants (London, 2007).
14. Census 1951, England and Wales: Occupation Tables (London, 1956), table 3
15. Census 1951, Scotland, iv, Occupations and Industries (Edinburgh, 1956), table 1.
16. Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Hardmondsworth, 1973), 222.
17. I have documented the experiences of shop assistants, factory hands and clerks in Selina Todd, Young Women, Work, and Family in England, 1918-1950 (Oxford, 2005).
18. Report of the War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry, Parliamentary Papers, 1919 (Cmd 135), xxxi, pp. 99-100
19. Ministry of Labour, 'Average Hours and Earnings Enquiry', Oct. 1938, July 1943, July 1945, Oct. 1948,
20. Ministry of Labour Gazette (1939, 1944, 1946, 1948)
21. The Social Survey of Merseyside, ed. D. Caradog Jones, 3 vols. (Liverpool, 1934), ii, 316.
22. Census of England and Wales, 1901: Occupation Tables (London, 1903)
23. Census of England and Wales, 1921: Occupations (London, 1924), table 4
24. Eleventh Decennial Census of the Population of Scotland, 1901, ii (London, 1903)
25. Census of Scotland, 1921, iii, Occupations and Industries (Edinburgh, 1924), table 2.
26. National Archives, London, Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), ED 124/ 49.
27. Tameside Local Studies Library, Ashton-under-Lyne (hereafter TLSL), Manchester Studies Tapes Collection (hereafter MSTC), no. 9.
28. Parliamentary question asked on 17 Oct. 1934, noted in PRO, LAB 98/29, unpubd, untitled memorandum, n.d., c.1934-8.
29. Ministry of Labour, Standard Time Rates of Wages and Hours of Labour in Great Britain and Northern Ireland at 31st August 1929 (London, 1929).
30. On wages and earnings more generally, see Todd, Young Women, Work, and Family in England, 27-9.
31. Census of England and Wales, 1921: Occupations, table 4
32. Census of England and Wales, 1931: Occupations (London, 1934), table 3
33. Census of Scotland, 1921, iii, Occupations and Industries, table 2
34. Census of Scotland, 1931, iii, Occupations and Industries (Edinburgh, 1934), table 1.
35. TLSL, MSTC, no. 36.
36. Elizabeth Roberts, A Woman's Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890-1940 (Oxford, 1984), 64-5.
37. Ministry of Labour: Report for the Year 1938, Parliamentary Papers, 1938-9 (Cmd 6016), xii.
38. Taylor, 'Daughters and Mothers - Maids and Mistresses'.
39. Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, 281, 299.
40. TLSL, MSTC, no. 9.
41. Lancashire Record Office, Preston (hereafter LRO), North West Sound Archive (hereafter NWSA), 1988.0060.
42. Winifred Foley, A Child in the Forest (London, 1974), 141.
43. Ibid., 150.
44. TLSL, MSTC, no. 9.
45. Winifred Foley, Back to the Forest (London, 1981), 6.
46. John H. Goldthorpe et al., The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure (Cambridge, 1969), 98, 129.
47. Pearl Jephcott, Rising Twenty: Notes on Some Ordinary Girls (London, 1948), 129
48. Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London revised edn (Harmondsworth, 1962), 177-9.
49. Daily Mirror, 3 Jan. 1950, 7.
50. Steedman, Master and Servant, 29-43.
51. On the difficulties of organizing such workers, see Todd, Young Women, Work, and Family in England, ch. 6.
52. Ministry of Reconstruction, Domestic Service (Reconstruction Pamphlet 22, London, 1919), 14.
53. Ministry of Labour, Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Present Conditions as to the Supply of Female Domestic Servants (London, 1923), 13.
54. Davidoff, 'Mastered for Life'
55. Taylor, 'Daughters and Mothers - Maids and Mistresses'.
56. Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, ch. 4
57. Delap, 'Patsy Pancake to Mrs Mopp'.
58. Muriel Beckwith, When I Remember (London, 1936), 68.
59. See, for example, Scottish Oral History Archive, Stirling Women's Oral History Archive, U3.
60. ESDS Qualidata Archive, University of Essex, Colchester (hereafter Qualidata), Family Life and Work Experience collection (hereafter FLWE), no. 129.
61. TLSL, MSTC, no. 36.
62. Qualidata, FLWE, no. 42.
63. TLSL, MSTC, no. 28.
64. LRO, NWSA, 1999.0088.
65. David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (London, 1990), 341-4, 697-709.
66. Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, 3rd edn, 9 vols. (London, 1892-7), viii, 214
67. H. Llewellyn Smith, New Survey of London Life and Labour, 9 vols. (London, 1930-5), viii, 315
68. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 44-5.
69. Qualidata, FLWE, no. 42.
70. Qualidata, FLWE, no. 17.
71. Winifred Foley, The Forest Trilogy (Oxford, 1992), 219.
72. TLSL, MSTC, no. 28.
73. Pat Ayers, 'The Hidden Economy of Dockland Families: Liverpool in the 1930s', in Pat Hudson and W. R. Lee (eds.), Women's Work and the Family Economy in Historical Perspective (Manchester, 1990).
74. Giles, Parlour and Suburb, 72-82
75. Alison Light, Forever England: Feminism, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London, 1991), 120, 219.
76. Delap, 'Patsy Pancake to Mrs Mopp'.
77. Giles, Parlour and Suburb, 70-2
78. Judy Giles, '"A Little Strain with Servants": Gender, Modernity and Domesticity in Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca and Celia Fremlin's The Seven Chars of Chelsea', Literature and History, xii (2003)
79. Delap, 'Patsy Pancake to Mrs Mopp'.
80. Ministry of Reconstruction, Domestic Service, 2.
81. Celia Fremlin, The Seven Chars of Chelsea (London, 1940), 23-4.
82. Light, Forever England, 219.
83. Giles, Parlour and Suburb, 68.
84. Sue Bowden and Avner Offer, 'Household Appliances and the Use of Time: The United States and Britain since the 1920s', Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xlvii (1994), 745
85. T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1700-2000 (Harmondsworth, 2000), 243-5.
86. Women's Leader, 5 Mar. 1924, 6
87. Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford, 2004), 68-9.
88. PRO, ED 11/278.
89. Foley, Forest Trilogy, 140.
90. Cited in Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press, 68-9.
91. Claire Langhamer, Women's Leisure in England, 1920-60 (Manchester, 2000), 53-4.
92. Adrian Bingham, '"Stop the Flapper Vote Folly": Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail, and the Equalization of the Franchise, 1927-28', Twentieth Century Brit. Hist., xiii (2002).
93. TLSL, MSTC, no. 28.
94. Ibid.
95. LRO, NWSA, 1999.0088. For similar examples, see Nottingham Local Studies Library (hereafter NLSL), Making Ends Meet oral history collection, A78/ a-c/1
96. '9 Hour Day for Servants in City's Charter', Cardiff Morning Post, 7 May 1937, 3.
97. Paul Johnson, 'Class Law in Victorian England', Past and Present, no. 141 (Nov. 1993), 155.
98. Qualidata, FLWE, no. 226.
99. TLSL, MSTC, no. 36.
100. See also LRO, NWSA, 1999.0060.
101. Qualidata, FLWE, no. 226.
102. Qualidata, FLWE, nos. 96, 156.
103. Johnson, 'Class Law in Victorian England', 154-6.
104. Andy Wood, 'Fear, Hatred and the Hidden Injuries of Class in Early Modern England', Jl Social Hist., xxxix (2006)
105. Andy Wood, 'Subordination, Solidarity and the Limits of Popular Agency in a Yorkshire Valley, c. 1596-1615', Past and Present, no. 193 (Nov. 2006). Although Wood's brilliant analysis is concerned with early modern England, his insights are extremely valuable for historians of twentieth-century Britain.
106. This does not undermine or challenge Wood's formidable interpretation of early modern society. My contention is that injury is overemphasized at the expense of agency in Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York, 1972), an otherwise outstanding study of social relations in America upon which Wood draws.
107. Ministry of Labour, Second Interim Report of the Central Committee on Women's Training and Employment for the Period Ending Dec. 31st 1922 (London, 1923)
108. Ministry of Labour, Report... into the Present Conditions as to the Supply of Female Domestic Servants, 8.
109. Eileen Balderson with Douglas Goodlad, Backstairs Life in a Country House (Newton Abbot, 1982), 13.
110. LRO, NWSA, 1988.0060.
111. See also Foley, Forest Trilogy, 126.
112. Goldthorpe et al., Affluent Worker in the Class Structure
113. Mike Savage, 'Sociology, Class and Male Manual Work Cultures', in John McIlroy, Nina Fishman and Alan Campbell (eds.), British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, ii, The High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964-79 (London, 1999), 37.
114. Work Foundation, Domestics, 19.
115. Foley, Child in the Forest, 182
116. LRO, NWSA, 1999.0088
117. TLSL, MSTC, no. 28.
118. For similar examples, see NLSL, Making Ends Meet oral history collection, A78/a-c/1.
119. '9 Hour Day for Servants in City's Charter', 3.
120. Violet Markham and Florence Hancock, Report on the Postwar Organisation of Private Domestic Employment (London, 1944), 4, 6.
121. Giles, Parlour and Suburb, 75.
122. Peter M. Lewis, 'Mummy, Matron and the Maids: Feminine Presence and Absence in Male Institutions, 1934-1963', in Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds.), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London, 1991), 173.
123. Julia Filet-Abreu de Souza, 'Paid Domestic Service in Brazil', Latin American Perspectives, vii (1980), 54.
124. Qualidata, FLWE, Mrs Bairnson.
125. M. C. Scott Moncrieff, Yes, Ma'am! Glimpses of Domestic Service, 1901-51 (Edinburgh, 1984), 74.
126. LRO, NWSA, 1999.0088.
127. Lewis, 'Mummy, Matron and the Maids', 174.
128. Filet-Abreu de Souza, 'Paid Domestic Service in Brazil', 52.
129. Qualidata, FLWE, 15.
130. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, intro. Mark Bostridge (London, 2004), 500.
131. Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (London, 1935).
132. Ibid., 428.
133. Ibid., 429, 426.
134. Light, Forever England, 219.
135. Filet-Abreu de Souza, 'Paid Domestic Service in Brazil', 52.
136. Debra Ollivier, 'Jealous Love', Guardian, 1 June 2005, sect. 2, p. 8.