Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain

This book tells the story of lives and labour within twentieth-century British homes. From great houses to suburbs and slums, it charts the interactions of servants and employers and the intense controversies and emotions they inspired. Historians have seen domestic service as an obsolete or redundant sector from the middle of the twentieth century. The book challenges this by linking the early-twentieth-century employment of maids and cooks to later practices of employing au pairs, mothers helps, and cleaners. Domestic service was a persistent and widespread institution, in which working-class as well as middle- and upper-class households might employ a ‘char’ or childminder. Rather than the century in which ‘housewife’ became a universal aspiration, the twentieth century was one in which ‘the servantless home’ was always an unstable and often unpopular experiment. Middle-class individuals retained their expectations of ‘help’ within the home, and though some features of the relationships of domestic service changed, many structural elements remained constant. In this book, the employment of men and migrant workers is examined, as well as the role of laughter and erotic desire in shaping domestic service. Finally, the memory of domestic service and the role of the past in shaping and mediating the present is examined through heritage and televisual sources, from Upstairs, Downstairs to The 1900 House. It points to new directions in cultural history through its engagement in innovative areas such as the history of emotions and cultural memory. Through its attention to the contemporary rise in the employment of domestic workers, the book sets ‘modern’ Britain in a new and compelling historical context.