Suited for Service: Racialized Rationalizations for the Ideal Domestic Servant from the Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century

From the early 1800s through the 1920s the image of the ideal domestic servant varied dramatically—native white women, European immigrant women, and black women. However, at all times the racial/ethnic identity of the domestic servant played a critical role. The transition from the casualness of “help” to the formality of the “domestic servant” relationship marked the historical moment in which a subordinate racial identity became a precondition of servanthood. The semantic change from help or hired girl to domestic servant reflected a more fundamental change in the nature, organization, and expectation of the work role. Using a comparative-historical approach, we provide a sociological analysis of how shifting labor patterns and societal demands led to the decline of help, the rise of domestic service, and the centrality of a racialized identity to the performance of household work during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.