Rediscovering the Workplace

'Servants', a growing body of historical scholarship now tells us, 'are good to think with.'¹ Domestic service is increasingly used as a lens through which to reinterpret some of the central themes of modern history: class relations, the changing role of women, modernity's constructions of the public and the private, and the very nature of 'work' itself. These two books, which firmly secure a place for domestic service in the history of twentieth-century Britain and the United States, also provide illuminating examples of how such themes - especially class and gender - are being reconfigured within social and cultural history today.

Twenty-first century readers may need reminding just how pervasive domestic service was in the first half of the twentieth century. As Lucy Delap notes, the majority of women were either served by servants or were servants themselves (a few were both), with more women employed in domestic service than in any other form of waged work. Yet Delap goes further than this, arguing persuasively that even after the exodus of women from domestic work following the Second World War, Britons remained culturally preoccupied with servants who continue to haunt our domestic spaces and social memory. Delap's stated aim is to write a history of domestic service which looks beyond wages and conditions to explore its 'cultural and emotional dimension', through chapters on laughter, pornography, and the heritage industry. She wants to liberate the history of service from a narrative of 'exploitation', generated in part by an over-emphasis on the particularities of the nineteenth-century servant. By focusing on the twentieth century she is able to show that there was a far broader range of domestic services than suggested by the archetypal image of the Victorian 'skivvy'.

Vanessa May's book, which focuses on household workers in New York, connects early twentieth-century debates on the 'servant problem' with contemporaneous developments in labour regulation and working-class struggles. Unprotected Labour positions the household as 'a site of the rising tension between labour and capital'. 'We often think of domestics as trapped in middle-class homes unable to resist the conditions of domestic labour except through individual acts of insurrection', writes May, when in fact, 'domestics built successful networks of collective support' both inside and outside traditional trade union structures (p. 44). By no means a narrow labour history, this book exemplifies the possibilities for scholars to reinvent social history by opening up categories such as 'class' and 'labour' and expanding our definitions of 'workplace organizing'. May does not simply argue that the home was a workplace but also shows how it came to be constructed as something other than this by both middle-class employers and progressive reformers anxious to make sense of women's rapidly changing relationship with work and the shifting boundaries between public and private spheres.

The expanding historiography of domestic service has recently brought to our attention how, in the words of Carolyn Steedman, 'histories of the working class, and accounts of modern social structure based on these histories, miss out the waged domestic workers who comprised a majority of working people'.² Or, as Alison Light puts it, 'Working. . . behind closed doors, deferring to their employers, and perhaps aping them, the figure of the servant seems the opposite of the articulate, organized or collectively minded "worker".'³ But this erasure of servants from social and labour histories looks less surprising when we see how much was done in the early twentieth century to exclude them from the 'working class'. Unprotected Labour traces in detail how domestic workers came to be shut out from successive waves of labour legislation and, to a lesser degree, from the organized labour movement in the United States. Early twentieth-century reformers based many of their arguments for limiting the hours of female factory and shop workers on...